Panic!

I’m heading back east again – same thing we do every other week, Pinky, try to rule the world – and the airport here in Seattle is quiet.  No surprise, really; frankly I was more surprised last Thursday when I was on two completely packed flights, Atlanta to Chicago, Chicago to Seattle.  I fly enough that normally I get upgraded without a second glance, and the pilot will come out during the flight and thank me for my continuing custom.  No chance last week: I had two middle seats and kept them.

But tonight, I counted the seats on my flight, and there were 126 empty out of 182.  I’ve been upgraded but I’m considering just going to the back of the plane and getting one of the many, many empty rows to myself and camping out – I’ll get a lie-flat seat and can even stretch my legs into the aisle and no one will care.  The only other time this happened was after the World Trade Center bombings.  Back then, I had a thought that I really didn’t want to express, but I think I will now.

I’m just old enough to remember the days before security, when my mom would take my sister and me to the boarding area at the Portland International Jetport whenever my father would come back from a business trip, and we’d run up and give him a hug at the gate.  We’d had to pass through a metal detector, which I don’t remember registering and my guess is was so low-powered that it was more for show than anything, but we – and lots of other families, sweethearts, and somewhat reluctant ride-givers – would all be right there, at the gate, greeting people coming off.  Presumably we could have snuck down the jetway at some point and hid in a lavatory and gotten a free flight somewhere; it’s not like many people were checking.

People were also smoking heavily despite the fact that planes are just metal tubes mostly filled with A1 jet fuel.  They were wearing bell-bottoms, and very wide brown ties.  My father had thick, rich sideburns, and a penchant for light blue suits.  It was the late 70s.  There were plenty of bad choices.

But a not so bad choice was the idea that flying was normal.  Keep in mind that this continued well into the 80s and 90s – you could go through security without a boarding pass just so you could see your girlfriend come off the plane from San Francisco and kiss her endlessly in the B terminal at Logan until the plane started boarding for the return flight again.  You could have said girlfriend accompany you to Gate 81 at SFO as you flew back to Boston, getting last kisses in to the disgust of passersby (or envy, more likely).  You could, even, just go to SFO after the girlfriend had dumped you and you were broke and wondering if you were ever going to get a job, just to watch the last of the L-1011s take off on their way to Japan, watch the last of the 727s rocket off down the runway to shuttle people to LAX.  The security guards would watch you and come up and talk to you, and you’d explain why you loved airports, and they’d nod.  It was okay.

Then something happened.  It wasn’t, really, 9/11 – although that’s when the really draconian stuff started – but something happened in the 90s that made us start to quiver. I note that it was the 90s because as I was spending time with my son this weekend, we got into a Wikipedia rabbit hole about 1970s air travel – basically, he was asking a lot about tri-jet configurations and we needed to figure out why they disappeared; we’re an oddly- but well-matched pair – and it amazed me just how many hijackings and bombings and criminal shit happened in the 1970s in the air.  I mean, literally dozens of planes blown up; dozens of planes where security forces “eliminated a terrorist threat” with moderate to extreme collateral damage; what must have been hundreds of “diverted” flights to Cuba or Syria or Libya or Thailand.  I was trying to casually count up the incidents – which you can find by Wikipedia’ing “Boeing 727” or something similar – and couldn’t do it.

But that was the 1970s.  By the time Reagan came along, I could count – and still can – on my hands the number of hijackings or terrorist incidents that happened in the early to mid 80s.  On a certain level I lived for them: they made the evening news interesting.  I can remember the TWA 727 hijacking that ended up in Beruit with the captain waving his hankerchief to signal “all’s well”; I can remember the occasional bombing (Lockerbie, Swissair over Long Island Sound) as punctuations in the life of a budding frequent flier.  And never, ever, did the idea of flying lose any appeal.  I would someday be one of them, the global airborne chorus, a part of the world and therefore fearlessly boarding planes that would, could, very likely be blown up, shredded, impact on landing, impact wherever.  I remember reading a statistic saying that if you flew three million miles – 3,000,000 miles – you’d have the same likelihood of having an accident if you drove a car the usual distance for a year.  I wanted to fly 3,000,000 miles, dammit.

For the record, I’m at 1,733,304 miles on United (and its predecessor airlines, including Continental), and 534,250 miles on British Airways, and slightly more than 220,000 miles on Alaska as of today.  I’m getting there.

But then “something” happened and it wasn’t 9/11.  At some point, we got scared.  I don’t attribute this entirely to travel, but since air travel is so central to my life, I guess I’ve noticed it there more than elsewhere.  It’s not that in the 90s the security posts prevented you from going to the gate; it was that people didn’t go past the security gates as often.  I can remember a flight where I was leaving San Francisco in call it 1997, and was giving my then-girlfriend a tight embrace, and realized not so much that people were viewing us distastefully for a public display of affection, as that there was no one else giving their loved one a good bye at the gate.  It was a 9:30pm redeye flight to Newark, and there were businesspeople, and grandparents, and even some divorce kids with the embarrassing tags around their necks indicating they were unaccompanied: but no one was there to say good bye.

It made the post-9/11 security crackdown that much easier, I think.  Even the paltry malfunctioning X-ray systems of pre-9/11 yore had put up enough of a psychological barrier that we now viewed travel as existing somehow in a cordon sanitaire as opposed to being an extension of normalcy, albeit normalcy at 10,000 meters and just short of the speed of sound.  We started to view travel with a kind of fear – at least, that was the normal reaction – as opposed to it being a kind of siren call of joy, of the new, of the good.

When the terrorists hijacked the planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers and into the Pentagon and one unsuccessfully ended up in a field in eastern Pennsylvania, therefore, we were ready to shut the whole thing down.  Terrorists had done all of that in the 1970s already – except actually take out downtown office buildings, that was an innovation to be sure – and importantly, they’d done it in far more volume and with far greater loss of (onboard, not on-ground) life, but in the 1970s we still were smoking in the back of the plane, you know, close to the three engines consuming far more highly combustible fuel than the planes of the early 00’s.  We were dressing far worse back then but we still saw flying as what it is: extraordinarily strange for mammals such as ourselves to be doing, and therefore worthy of a bit of risk.

What I wanted to say after 9/11, and feel even more completely today, is that we as a species have lost the concept that what we do every day – our existential reality – is to live an experiment.  It is to try something new, every day, and that means we might face death, every day.  Our lives are risky, dammit – and it’s okay that that is so.  If I die from coronavirus, it’s not personally good, obviously, but then that’s a good thing for future generations by proving the relative unreliability of my immune system; others who survive are just the plus side of that particular experiment.  If I die in a plane crash, it’s not good, obviously, but it drives society towards better outcomes – the NTSB will figure out how to make the plane safer, or alternatively, we’ll realize that there are some folks who are really, really annoyed about our foreign policy et al and maybe we should pay attention – or maybe just work harder to shut down their evil networks.  In either case, though, my sacrifice is a good, and moreover, it’s part of the price of living the adventure that is life on this planet, as social beings, in an enormously complex but technologically fun and cool but also just a bit dangerous environment that we’re both responsible for and are part of changing.

But no.  We view all that as a sign we need to shut down the adventure.  The terrorists won – that was my unspoken muttered breath every time I boarded a plane in 2002 – because I could never again walk happily past security and greet a potential girlfriend as she walked off a plane.  I could never again walk past security and just watch the planes – now much more boring nacelled twin jets, but still sometime graceful and perfect 787s or even the lumbering but gorgeously bulbous A380s – from behind a plate glass window at the very edge of the 80s Gate pier at SFO.  Travel, airplanes, the experience of being at the crossroads of civilizations with subpar fast food and worse vending machines and duty free, was now cut off.

That did something more, though.  Because if you flew in the 1970s – with DB Cooper perhaps sitting next to you, or a comely West German Red Front terrorist disguised in her multicolored frock and beret, or an otherwise normal looking middle aged Middle East man who might have a million dollars in laundered money, or a bomb, or an assortment of toys for his family in his briefcase placed under the seat in front of him – you were also on the front lines of civilization.  By “front lines” I mean it: you could be killed, or you could enjoy another quiet day on the western front.  And you did it proudly, lighting up your cigarette, perhaps having a civilized $3 cocktail, and definitely enjoying a hot meal before you met your fate, either bloody or just on the ground trying to find your luggage.  Flying reminded you that you were doing something amazing, and you took the risk gladly because, let’s face it, it is amazing – not was amazing, but it still is amazing.

And yet we now, somehow, demand the amazing to be safe, distilled, sanitary, riskless.

I’m not saying that the coronavirus isn’t something worthy of concern; of course not.  I worry daily about the populations who are most at risk – which include my parents and many, many friends whom I love dearly – and am thankful that thoughtful public health officials are thinking carefully about quarantine measures and facemasks supplies and whatnot.  But most of those people taught me to view life – not just travel, not just travel in a metal tube at 35,000 feet and 575 miles per hour – but life itself as an adventure.  They taught me to try new things, and to not be afraid while trying.  They taught me to talk to strangers, not recklessly but also definitely to do it.  They taught me to smoke, and then they taught me to really think carefully about whether it’s a good idea (it’s not).  They taught me to wash my hands after using the toilet, but not to wash my hands after greeting a stranger who smiled at me, who asks to be my friend, who allows me to share their home, their food, their company, their friendship.

But that isn’t the world we’ve created in the last few decades.

I’m feeling hale and healthy after a few days in Seattle, which as current readers on March 10, 2020, know is Ground Zero in America’s battle with the fearsome coronavirus. I’ve gotten past security – but was only allowed to do so because I have a ticket on a flight today in the next few hours, and was only allowed to get through various personally invasive checks by paying $150 for a five year pass and subjecting myself to a background check that would have been considered unconstitutional in 1974 when I was born.  The United lounge is filled with the strange toxic funk of overapplied hand sanitizer.  I’m looking forward to seeing my dog tomorrow.

In everything I do – in everything, over the past five years, that I’ve done – I’ve tried to keep alive the flame of adventure that I remember from when I was a child of the 1970s.

But the terrorists won.  Not the ones who flew the planes into the buildings, but the ones who were always in terror, of life, of the adventure of living.  Those terrorists are everywhere, and they are more dangerous than the ones who used to blow up planes.  The adventure of living is essential to our existence: without it, we have no point.  Panic may be a natural response, but courageously facing tomorrow is the only real human way to live.

Doors closing.  Takeoff soon.  I’ll still get a little giddy as the pilots hit rotation.  Take off – and without fear.  Just a bit of joy and wonder and readiness to see what happens….