May day.
I have to fly sometimes, and others, like this place’s co-author, fly quite a bit. Until recently I’d reached an uneasy truce with flying. I’d watch something on my laptop and order a drink, usually wine or a bloody mary. It’s weak, but, if I go down in flames, flailing at an oxygen mask, I’d like to have one last drink first.
I’ve been doing a bit of jet-setting, nothing like Employee One, but still more than I’m used to. And on my last flight I almost died.
I thought NWA had been had. I collected a $300 voucher, stayed with my parents and extra night and flew back to Brooklyn the next day. But about half an hour into the flight we hit a bump.
A bump?
Air is supposed to be smooth, it doesn’t have bumps.
Ah, turbulence. But not matter, we’ve alll been through it before. But then we hit another, larger invisible bump, the place lurched down at an angle, only to be buffeted right back from where it came, and then started tilting and swaying left and ride. Another bump knoced it up, just before something hit it down to the diagnol.
This was it. I put down the stack of papers my palms had sweat through, clutched my armrests and started talking to my neighbor while saying “Hail Mary’s” in my head. The pilot announced that we would seek a higher altitude.
Terrifying minutes later, the plane ricocheting, heads snapping around on necks like palm trees in Katrina, the pilot grunted,
“We can’t go any higher.”
And that was that. We just rode it out. I checked to see the wings were still there, we were lurching up and down. I watched one women hold her daughter’s head in her lap and listened to the carts in the plane colliding and tipping into each other and the galley.
Then after 10 or 15 minutes lasting eternity, it stopped.
And I didn’t die before 2007.