I’ve never liked air travel. I know that statistically it’s the safest way to travel but I feel completely out of control when I fly.
The first flight I ever made was from Paris, Texas, to Kingsport, Tennessee. It was a two-day trip on a job interview for a newspaper. Those were the days when an editor would pay an applicant to fly in for a job that only paid $136 a week. I left on a Sunday morning on a plane that was so small it followed the highway down to Love Field in Dallas. From there I took a flight to Nashville, transferred to another really small plane to Tri-Cities Airport between Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson City.
I took a taxi to a hotel in Kingsport where the editor picked me up, showed me the newspaper office which was a dump, drove past the new newspaper building’s construction site and then took me to dinner at the Holiday Inn.
The tricky part was that I had to be back at work in Paris by 1 p.m. Monday. So I woke up early, took the taxi back to the airport and began the game of hopscotch in the air again. I can’t remember why but they almost didn’t let me on the airplane in Nashville until someone took pity on me because I looked like a scared fifteen year old. (Actually I was 22 but I was still scared.) I made it back to the newspaper by 1 p.m., and no one knew what a hectic weekend I had.
Incidentally I got the job and that’s when I met my wife Janet a couple of months later and we married the next spring. That was when I truly became scared of flying.
Janet was used to it. She had flown out of Tri-Cities Airport to her college in Richmond, Virginia, many times. It didn’t bother her. Nothing ever bothered her much for the next 44 years until she died of cancer after a year of chemotherapy torture—I mean, treatment.
What troubled me most in all those years was not so much the dying in a plane crash. Dying means you don’t have to put up with all the crap of living anymore. Pain, in the long run, is temporary. You either survive it or you don’t. But what I did not want to endure was looking over at Janet as the plane went down and seeing the tears in her eyes and knowing just a hug and a kiss would not make them go away.
I have suffered through watching her cry and not be able to make it all better with a hug and a kiss. I endured it and survived it. And if I am on an airplane going down, I won’t have to see Janet’s tears again and know I can’t do anything about it.
I’ve accepted being out of control.