One good thing about 2017 is that apparently there were no commercial airline fatalities. I wish I could regard that fact as reassuring, rather than superstitiously thinking of it as jinx.
The last month or two involved a lot of traveling for our family, separately and together, some for work, but most for pleasure, though linking 'pleasure' to air travel is something of an odd concept these days. I counted a dozen flights in a six-week span involving one or more of my immediate family. I anxiously mentally ticked off each one completed. It's stupid. I know that the journeys to and from the airport are statistically more dangerous than the flights themselves, but as is so apparent in the world of today's politics, knowing is not the same as believing. I am a nervous flyer. I am even nervous when I am not the one flying. On Wednesday, elder son left Toronto to return to his university digs in Vancouver finishing our spate of flights. Sadness mixed with relief. Whew.
When we lived in the north of England, in Durham, and I had first one, then two, then three small children, I found myself once or twice or even thrice yearly making what I now see were marathon journeys, sometimes on my own, with the children. I didn't give the decision a second thought, just muddled through. It had to be done. The kindness of strangers benefited me more than I care to recall. (I now attempt to pay it forward.) Once, traveling solo with all three little ones, the youngest took a liking to the motherly woman seated across the aisle, and I allowed myself a brief nap while this complete stranger held the baby. I had been up half the night packing, and we left for the small local airport at 4:00 am to make our connection in Amsterdam (I became very familiar with Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. I could find my way half-asleep to the baby baths, the rocking chairs, the play area, and most importantly, the best espresso bar) and there were another twelve hours to go before we landed in Los Angeles and had to face immigration and baggage claim. The twenty minutes or so of shut-eye before one of the older kids woke me for a trip to the loo saw me through. I am eternally grateful.
The more flying I did, though, the more anxious I got. Perhaps as the children got older and more self-sufficient, the more time I had to consider how little I understood about aerodynamics, and how much trust was involved in making these trips. Why did I do it to myself, asked a friend who refrained from travel until her own children were old enough to make it easy. A good question. Sometimes I did it because I loved visiting new places and didn't want having children to get in the way of that. Mostly, though, I flew the longest routes because they took me home, to my childhood home. I wanted my children to know that place, that family, my parents, the aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom lived on the west coast of the US. It was worth the anxiety and exhaustion, especially before I recognized myself as suffering from them. The friend who asked me 'why' had made a decision I often envy: to raise her own family where she herself was born and grew up.
I did, though, get tired of the adrenaline soaking my system for ten or twelve hours, when we took off, landed, or experienced the slightest turbulence; it began to take a toll, to make me physically ill for the first day after arrival. I needed some sort of rubric, a mantra, a logic to why I should not be terrified on airplanes. I asked people who had gone from fearful or non- flyers to comfortable ones. My sister said, "A little turbulence isn't going do anything." A friend said, "There is nothing you can do about it, anyway." I tried murmuring these words to myself when we hit bumpy air, but they only increased my anxiety.
And then I had an epiphany: the only time I could do anything about the 'danger' I perceived was when I made the decision to buy an airlines ticket. If I couldn't know in advance whether a given journey would prove fatal, then it was every journey. It's not much of an epiphany, coming more under the heading of what my husband calls 'bleeding common sense,' but my possibly addled mind found it revelatory. Each journey is every journey. That's what I chant to myself these days when the plane bucks and rolls: "This is every flight. This is every flight."My decision was not about the wisdom or luck of being on this particular airplane; it was whether to live a life that encompassed air travel or one that didn't. And if I had chosen one that didn't, I would not have the husband I have or the children I have or even the career I have. It's like Sleeping Beauty's father, the king, banning all spinning wheels from his realm and banishing his own baby daughter to the deepest woods, for fear of her pricking her finger on a venomous spindle.
His scheme didn't work, after all. He missed his child growing up, and the stupid kid managed to stick herself with the damn needle after all. The malevolent sorceress got her vengeance. Then a handsome, charming pilot came along and saved her, along with the rest of the kingdom. At least, that's how I have rewritten the tale. (I'm not sure whether this metaphor actually worked out.)
Now I wish for a good fairy to ward off the dangers of cycling, walking on icy roads in dark evenings, and driving with maniacs about.
The moral of the story is that I can worry for England. And for Canada too.
