High Flying

Posted on September 15, 2009 in Travel

The ascending roar of the jet engines signals the commencement of my favorite part of flying: take off. For a few minutes, [[inertia]] presses you to the back of your seat. It’s the opposite of weightlessness — a heaviness that pulls you into it and cradles you. Slowly it gives way until you find yourself in the boring transit between points. Then there’s naught to do except to read, nap, watch the in-flight movie, and press back at the jackass-in-front-of-you who thinks his comfort is more important than yours.

Landings are another exciting part, but I don’t like them nearly as much. If you’re flying in during the day, you get to see fields and housing tracts, the latter looking like the mosaics of engraver beetles. There’s an anxious wait for the wheels to feel the ground, then a series of shocks and the sighing reversals of the engines. I don’t care much for the meeting of plane and earth.

If you are in transit, as we were the other day, you find yourself coming out of a tunnel into a strange place filled with crowds of people who don’t live in the vicinity. Atlanta, with its hundreds of planes, underground subway, and thronging terminals, is famous for this. If you’ve come to the end, the tunnel sends you off to the baggage claim area. Then it’s off to your hotel via an expensive cab ride or back home — after discovering that someone has stripped the Obama-Biden sticker from your car while it was standing in Long Term Parking.

Bastard.