This is a story from memory and a few scant journal entries. I can only attest to what I saw and what I know happened to me. It’s going to sound wild, but this very real night happened to me in 2003.
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, 2003. I am 21 years old.
I’m preparing myself for a red-eye flight from Seattle to Chicago. It’s late enough on this August night that the sun has long slipped under its Pacific horizon. I need to pee.
I’m still new to flying and the nerves of impending take-offs and landings rattle my bladder into the nearest restroom. I know the relief is only temporary, but I am momentarily content in my stall. I pause in my solitude, take a deep breath, and I exit out into the sounds of a panic attack coming from along the short line of sinks.
There are two women, one hovering over a porcelain basin, shaking and heaving, while the other comforts her. The woman over the sink is proclaiming between shortened breaths, “I just know something bad is going to happen tonight! I know something bad is going to happen!” She repeats this over and over as the second woman tells her everything will be OK in a less than assuring tone. But the panicked woman cannot be calmed, repeating with a stern and definitive voice, “Something bad is going to happen tonight! I just know it!”
I try not to linger too long as I wash my hands, but I am becoming reasonably alarmed myself as I watch this scene from the corner of my eye. I spot something surprising and strain my side-eyed view. That can’t be right. I turn enough to take in a full view of the panic-attacked woman and her navy-blue jacket with the gold lines ringing the cuffs. Oh no, no, no….
Yup, she’s a pilot.
She’s a pilot, and she is having a panic attack before boarding a plane.
She’s a pilot having a mental health crisis in this very public bathroom, and I think to myself I hope she’s not my pilot.
I finish washing and drying my hands and I consider how expensive it would be to cancel my ticket right now and hitchhike back to the East Coast.
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I don’t like takeoffs. I feel like passing out as the plane thrusts up into the sky and above the clouds. Those early banking maneuvers are just unsettling. High in the air and the ground shifts from under you to beside you and then back under you again. Unnatural. My internal gyroscope spins unbalanced, disoriented. My nausea undulates between my belly and my nostrils.
I read during takeoffs in a weak attempt to distract my brain from the forces otherwise pressing my head into my seat. I can only focus on the words after the plane has leveled off at its cruising altitude. For this trip I packed my movie tie-in paperback edition of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The cover boasts a picture of Orlando Bloom as Legolas, decked out in shiny armor and even shinier smugness. He smolders in his frosty blond extensions.
I pull the open paperback up to my nose, full sensory immersion reading. An older woman sitting beside me asks if I’m nervous. I guess covering your face completely with a book is a telling behavior. She tells me she flies all the time and got over her nervousness decades ago. Today she is flying to a convention for her church on the East Coast. We start chatting, but the mild G-forces of commercial flight quickly lull her to sleep, leaving me alone with Legolas and his fake hair.
While The Two Towers is a classic of adventure literature, and probably the strongest entry in the trilogy, even it can’t escape J.R.R. Tolkien’s tendencies to become trapped in language. The first half of this book includes epic scenes like the Battle of Helm’s Deep and the Ent vs. Orc throwdown at Isengard. And if I were up to either of those chapters, The Two Towers would properly keep my attention on this flight. But no, I open to the chapter that introduces Treebeard and the Ents, where we get to hear very long passages about how the Ents lost track of where their wives went and how it takes a very, very long time to speak their names. And, because this is Lord of the Rings, there are random Elvish songs peppered throughout to repeat all these fact, but now in droning prose!
Notice how you thought you were getting an action-packed story about a wild flight across the country, but now I’ve entrapped you in a diversion about talking trees? Exactly.
Now, sure, there is something poetic about trees, deep-rooted and stoic, watching silently over the world through thousands of our lifetimes. They are almost as ancient as creation itself. But when my flight hits turbulence over Montana, and that turbulence holds on to us for the full length of Montana, the Ents just don’t work for me as a proper distraction.
Beside me, the older church lady sleeps.
I close my eyes and imagine not Fangorn Forest, but the inside of a fast-moving train. Turbulence feels remarkably similar to being tossed around in a train car going over 50 mph. Just pretend it’s a train. And then this train hits a car parked on the tracks and continues without stopping for a few hundred miles.
The church lady continues to sleep.
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The shaking stops somewhere over Iowa, I think. We’re flying in near darkness, sunrise still a few hours ahead of us.
Overhead televisions play old episodes of Friends followed by a documentary about the Kellogg Sanitarium of Battle Creek, Michigan. I’m too broke to buy headphones from the flight attendants, so I watch the glowing screens in silence. Did Joey just ask a beautiful woman, “How you doin’?” And now Chandler shouts, “Oh. My. God!” I think I’m following the plot.
I’ve long given up on the Ents and their talk of their missing Entwives and their probing questions for the hobbits, who they suspect might really be Orcs. I just want to land.
Approaching Chicago’s Midway airport, everyone is buckled into their seats. The wheels grind loose from somewhere under the plane. The flight path brings us over the tops of homes, and I wonder how those people are sleeping right now as we buzz their roofs.
We approach the runway, seconds from touching down. Landings, like takeoffs, have those steep amusement park dips and rises. Those jolts, and sharp turns, and wobbly movements that convince you the plane can drop from the sky at any moment. We lower ourselves, lower, and now the plane is a moment from touchdown.
Just another moment …
Deep breath, body relaxing into my seat, waiting for the controlled skid, and the plane abruptly rockets straight into the air!
Unprepared, my muscles attempt to tense after they are pressed back into my seat. Every light goes out except for the small trail that lines the center aisle. The fuselage brutally vibrates as the plane stretches to a near-vertical climb. We are shaking apart as the engines growl and snarl outside my window. We plummet upwards, back above the clouds.
The church lady is awake, gripping her arm rests, eyes wide and not saying a word.
I have no idea what’s happening, I’m not even thinking about death or survival. I’m definitely not thinking of the Ents, because trees have the common sense to remain rooted to the earth! The plane flips to the side and Chicago is beside me, no longer below me, and now I’m certain that Death may have booked a seat on this flight.
I do not want to die at Midway Airport.
As sharply as it began, the shaking stops, the weight of gravity reverses, and the plane flattens in the air, horizontal again. The lights come back on, and we take our place in the queue of inbound flights, circle back down to the runway, and land without incident.
No one says a word, not one passenger, no flight attendants, and not the pilots. We land in complete silence. I can’t speak for the other passengers, but my silence arises from a boiling internal brew of disbelief and a strangling fear. Not a metaphor, as all the muscles and tendons have constricted into a vice grip around my throat. My heart hurts
and my lungs are leaden. To speak now would likely prompt unconsciousness.
We taxi to our terminal and the pilot breaks the hush with an announcement that the bridge for our gate is broken. A stairway needs to be wheeled out to our plane, and we are left waiting in our seats for twenty minutes of uneasy stillness. The church lady whispers to me that she has never had a flight like that before.
The stairs arrive and the anxious and exhausted passengers depart in an orderly line. None of us know the details about what just occurred yet, but a man ahead of me near the door begs a flight attendant for the particulars. She obliges his pleas and explains that a truck drove directly in front of the plane as we were landing. The pilots aborted the touchdown attempt at the last possible moment. In my dazed brain I drift away from their conversation and imagine the scenario where the plane clips the truck, somersaults sideways, and skids down the runway engulphed in flames. All those souvenirs I bought at Mt. St. Helens would have met an ironic end.
Out the door, down the stairs, and into the terminal, I seek out the nearest bathrooms. My bladder has once again been rattled to almost bursting. The bathroom is not a far walk, but many my fellow passengers have already gathered ahead of me in a long line.
After a wait, I again find relief in the bathroom stall of an airport. At the sink, I look up in the mirror and remember the pilot from that bathroom in Seattle. I wish I could go back and ask her to clarify her “bad feeling.” Did it involve turbulence over Montana followed by a truck on a runway? It was probably something less specific, but I wish I could tell her she was right.
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