If
you crammed four live kittens into a plastic carrier, cut windows into
the sides, loaded it into a giant catapult and sent it careening
through the sky, those kittens would probably know what it feels like
to fly on one of the major airlines. All they’d need is a pretzel and a
dog-eared copy of Skymall.
Just don’t say “dog-eared” around them. They hate that.
Or
hey, here’s a better idea: Don’t load kittens into a catapult. Chances
are they’ve got nowhere to be. They’re not like we humans, with
our burning need to travel long distances quickly. Of all the
differences between people and other species, one of the strangest is
our tendency to gather in large groups and sit facing in a certain
direction. We do it at concerts, we do it at the movie theater,
and we do it on airplanes, even though the most scenic thing in front
of us on the plane is a shock of brown hair tied back in a ponytail.
They should put a window on the bottom of the aircraft and have all the
seats facing downward. Bet the crowds at the
jetport would thin out in a hurry.
Air
travel is an experience like no other. Somehow it manages to be quick,
convenient, and a complicated pain
in
the butt, all at the same time. Sure, you can start a day in Maine and
end it in California, but by the time you walk out of the terminal it
feels as if you’ve spent nine hours under interrogation from a
pinstriped mobster named Johnny Big Hands. And boy,
what he does with those hands.
You
know it’s going to be an ordeal as soon as the TSA asks you to remove
your belt and shoes. The shoes I can understand -- people have
used their shoes to smuggle bombs, and bombs are bad. (Just ask Pauly
Shore. Zing!) Requiring us to remove our belts seems a bit excessive.
Most of us don’t wear full-fledged utility belts, so they don’t seem
like prime transporters of contraband, unless someone’s
stupid enough to sheath a hunting knife and a couple of grenades. What
are we, Batman? Yeah, I know, terrorism and safety and yadda yadda
yadda. It just doesn’t inspire a great travel mood when your pants are
one misstep away from falling down around your
ankles. Next person who laughs at my Salvador Dali underwear gets a
stern talking-to.
That’s
nothing compared to the waiting, though. You’re advised to get to the
airport an hour and a half before your flight, which seems prudent,
but once you get your tickets and go through the TSA screening, you
mostly just sit. And sit. And then you sit some more. Travel veterans
use this odd dead-time as an opportunity to wander the terminal and
check out some of the shops, knowing that hours of
additional sitting await them on the aircraft. But that can be a trap.
If you’re apt to make purchases as a form of entertainment, you can find
yourself walking to the gate with 12 extra books in your carry-on and
an $8 bagel causing havoc in your gastrointestinal
system. Plus, admit it: You weren’t even hungry for that bagel. Richard
Simmons weeps for you. And by you I mean me.
Once
you’ve settled in on the plane, the quality of the flight can vary
wildly depending on your seating assignment. On a recent jaunt to
Chicago I was stuck in the middle seat, which is fine if you’re the
size of a Keebler Elf. I hover around 6’4” and have the wingspan of a
pterodactyl, so assuming the role of sandwich meat isn’t what you’d call
an ideal situation. For me, being bookended by
two dudes is like squeezing into an old pair of jeans after a week of
eating nothing but Cadbury Eggs and cake. All you can do is draw in your
shoulders, keep as still as possible, and hope against hope that
neither of your aisle mates decides to cut a righteous
fart.
Sometimes
you get lucky and there’s a video screen installed on the back of each
seat. With a complimentary set of headphones you can settle
in for a three-hour marathon of “The Big Bang Theory,” which
coincidentally is one of the torture techniques formerly employed by
federal interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. These screens are a great idea
in theory, but in practice they’re a pipeline to some
pretty questionable content, considering all the reality shows now in
production that revolve around eating or just being weird. You can get
access to higher-quality shows and movies, but for a price -- which
means it’s possible to pay theater prices to see
“The Peanuts Movie” yet still watch it on a screen the size of a
spatula.
And
of course there’s the disembarking process, which is far from a model
of efficiency. Passengers typically grab their belongings and file
out row by row, so if you’ve got a seat near the back of the aircraft
there’s just enough time to plow through “War and Peace” before your
number’s called. If you’re on a jumbo jet, you can teach yourself a new
language and read Tolstoy’s tome in the original
Russian. In a world run by Willie Wonka, the bottom of the craft would
simply open up like a trap door and everyone would fall from their seats
into a giant kiddie pool filled with foam. Oompa-Loompas would hand
over your carry-on bags and shepherd you to
the gate with cattle prods. It’d be a ruder process, but at least you’d
make it down to baggage claim before your family files a missing
persons report.
But
here I am grousing about the miracle of human flight. Even a couple
hundred years ago, such a thing would have been inconceivable; put
James Madison in the window seat on a nonstop to Philly and he’d
probably go insane. As comedian Louis C.K. pointed out, “You’re sitting
in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now.”
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