Joanne Sherman’s column: Fear of flying
Flying isn’t for the weak, frail, easily bored, young, old, stiff-kneed or small bladdered, and I fall head-first into six of those seven categories. Last month I survived two 10-plus hour flights and six two-hour flights. Long story short, I lived. But only barely.
I remember when flying was a wonderful way to travel with spacious seats, plenty of elbow room and ashtrays built into our armrests. Ashtrays not quite large enough to hold the cigarette butts we stuffed into them along with Juicy Fruit gum wrappers that smouldered for hours.
Those were the days.
Non-smokers were accommodated in the last five rows of seats in that haze-filled tube, a.k.a., the no-smoking section. Later, when people recognized the danger of second-hand smoke, the airlines reversed the situation, and the last five rows were designated for smokers who knew enough to blow the smoke over their shoulders and out the back of the plane. There! Problem solved.
Mid-flight we’d be given hot meals served on gold-rimmed china embossed with the airline logo, and heavy silverware. Back then we were so well-behaved the airlines actually handed out knives to every passenger.
It was that silverware that got me flagged the first time as a “problem” traveler. I sat beside the window over the wing, concentrating on my beef stroganoff, when I glimpsed from the corner of my eye, a spark. Then two. It was dark outside, but I could make out the shape of the wing. I froze and stared out the window. Nothing. So, I turned back to my meal and saw it again, in my peripheral vision, flashes of sparks.
I pressed the button for the stewardess, because flight attendants hadn’t been invented yet, and explained that the engine was on fire. She said, “Really!” Squinted out the window, then asked, “Did you happen to watch the Twilight Zone on Thursday night? Where William Shatner saw someone on the wing of the plane?”
Yes, I had. Everyone in America watched the Twilight Zone on Thursday nights. “The difference is,” I told her, “William Shatner was crazy and I’m not.” I think she said, “Of course you’re not, dear,” which was exactly what William Shatner’s wife said to him before that man on the wing jumped up and down and it broke off.
Upon further investigation, what I thought were sparks coming out of the engine, was the overhead light reflecting off my silverware on the window. It turned out that I was not crazy. Just stupid.
As airline comfort level declined and the perks disappeared, I became ambivalent about flying. Didn’t like it, didn’t hate it. Until I got myself boosted higher on the suspicious-person list because of “incidents” that weren’t my fault, and that’s when I developed my fear of flying.
More specifically, a fear of prison; of being wrongly accused of a crime I swear to God I did not mean to commit and ending up in some women’s detention center. (In addition to the Twilight Zone, I’m the sad victim of old B-movie plots.)
Who knew it was a red flag to transport coffee in luggage? On my way to the airport for a trip to Florida, I bought a bag of freshly ground coffee and stuck it in my suitcase. Later, I arrived in Key West. My luggage, however, did not.
Two days into my three-day vacation, it showed up, minus the coffee bag. The coffee was there, though. A full two pounds of fine grind, sprinkled liberally throughout my no-longer neatly folded clothing.
I learned two things from that experience. The first is that smugglers hide their contraband in fresh-ground coffee so the dogs can’t sniff it out. Secondly, though Folgers might smell great in the cup, it’s not so great wafting from your clothes under the Key West sun. It took several washings to get the aroma out. And for months, on humid days, I’d get an occasional caffeine whiff.
Worse than that, though, was when I found myself “officially detained” at the New Orleans airport on account of a container of Cajun pure vanilla cinnamon sugar. I was questioned and searched by uniformed TSA agents, then passed on to the higher ups — men in suits with walkie talkies.
“That could be cinnamon sugar, but it could also be something else,” one of the suits said, and I wasn’t free to go. I could feel the eyes of the other flyers on me and I knew they were thinking: “Bless her heart. She sure doesn’t look like she’ll do well in the women’s prison.”
They confiscated the cinnamon sugar and I did not go to the women’s prison, but now I do know what could be worse: Two 10-plus hour flights and four two-hour flights in two weeks.
