Every time I fly, I feel two competing emotions as the airplane lumbers down the runway at take-off: elation over impending flight and dread that, as we rise into the sky, we will not make it. Something will happen to punish us for our foolish conceits, for our failure to stay firmly rooted on the earth. I think, sometimes, of Icarus, who took to the atmosphere too boldly. I think, always, of my father.
It was a clear day in June when he took his last flight, an easy assignment after what I imagine were countless challenges in the sky during the Second World War. But the war was long past. He was a civilian. He had taken a post as a professor of journalism at a state college in West Texas. As the main photojournalist on campus, he was picked to accompany the president of the college on an aerial tour of the school.
I expect my father was looking forward to the opportunity. He hadn’t flown on any kind of aircraft in years. He must have felt a sense of nostalgia for his days in the sky. Not that he missed the war per se, just that there is nothing comparable to flight. Even those of us terrified by it have a wary respect for the accomplishment.
But the pilot of the small plane he was on had miscalculated the weight and fuel requirements somehow, and the plane stalled just after takeoff and crashed a few miles past the end of the runway. My father died a week later from the internal injuries he sustained.
So now you can understand the reason for my dread. I was 12 years old at the time of my father’s death, and my younger sister was 8. She and I have talked about the effect of this tragedy on our lives—namely, that we are always prepared for disaster, even during the most placid of events.
September 11 only compounded the feeling. A beautiful day in September. Blue skies, pleasant temperatures. I can still recall the light illuminating the upper limbs of the trees punctuating the wetlands along the Turnpike as I drove to my office in northern New Jersey. I marveled, as I always did, at the beauty of the contrast between the dark wood and the golden sea of grasses. And sparkling in the distance, across a glittering harbor, the Manhattan skyline. And then, not two hours later, the worst disaster I could imagine. Worse, actually, than any nightmare I could have concocted.
Now it is 2010, and my daughter is driving me to Kennedy Airport to catch a flight south to visit a friend. It is early November, cool and clear. The trees along our street have reached the height of their autumn color, and the sea along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn is calm, the sunlight illuminating its million ripples. A beautiful day, my daughter and I agree, and I immediately recognize the dread creeping in along the edges of my appreciation.
But today I am equipped for the terror; I have drugs. Klonopin, to be exact. A benzodiazepine derivative that has anticonvulsant, muscle relaxant, and “very potent” anti-anxiety properties. I slip one into my mouth as we drive through Brooklyn, in preparation. The last time I flew—before the Klonopin—I experienced a sustained panic attack that was so traumatic, it took me several hours after landing to calm down. Not this time, I say to myself. I’ve had enough.
We pull into the departures lane at JFK, and I retrieve my bags from the trunk of the car and hug my daughter goodbye. Another legacy of my father’s sudden death: I am always wondering if this will be the last hug, the last car ride, the last anything. Not that I walk around in a constant state of dread, just that the question lingers in the margins of things, punctuated by any kind of departure.
I watch my daughter drive down the ramp and disappear around a curve. Then I check my bag and head to the gate.
* * *
When the Klonopin kicks in, it’s a subtle effect. The same fears and questions pass through my mind at takeoff, but my distress level is considerably lower. What I mean is, the fears are tolerable; I can allow them transit through my brain without latching onto them and emoting. I am also able to relax a bit more fully into the experience of flight. We lumber down the runway, and the plane feels so heavy and awkward I wonder how it will ever make it off the ground. But then the engines thrust, the nose lifts, and I feel the last contact with earth slip away. Somehow we are doing it. We are flying, rising inexorably through the air toward the clouds and above.
Once we reach our “cruising altitude”—more than 5 miles high—and the flight attendants begin to move about the cabin on their refreshment rounds, I lean back in my seat and gaze out the window. Did I mention that I always sit beside the window? Before Klonopin, in fact, I could not tolerate flight at all unless I had a window seat. Otherwise, claustrophobia overtook me as well as a fear of flying.
On this morning, as the plane maneuvers through the third dimension—the air—I begin to see flight as a metaphor for life in general. Or, more precisely, I begin to see one’s response to flight as a metaphor for one’s response to the vicissitudes of life. If you try to maintain a static reference point once you are flying, you are doomed to distress every time the plane banks and turns. The clouds, like reality, are continually shifting, drifting, metamorphosing, parting and reconfiguring themselves. Only if you trust in the craft and the pilot—no, more than that, you must identify with the plane—does the transit through the atmosphere become a sort of liberation. It is even more than that—you must trust in general. Trust that, whatever happens, you will adapt and come to accept it.
Perhaps my father learned this during the war. I can’t imagine that it would have been possible to fly in a flimsy glider, without the capability of steering, on a daily basis, without making peace, to some degree, with the possibility of death. It necessitates a letting go of the impulse to control everything. It requires trust (and, in some cases, medication), an acceptance that we are finite beings—at least in this existence—who have managed, somehow, the impossible task of flight.
