On Gratitude and Airplanes

TL;DR version: Sea Monkeys, I owe all of you tremendous thanks … all of you collectively, and so many of you individually.

I took a bus from Atlanta to Miami for the cruise. It was a nice bus. On the way there, I wrote my silly essay about “Mr. Fancy Pants” and posted it, and I watched some “Leverage” and listened to the audiobook of “The Areas of My Expertise.” It didn’t feel at all like I’d been on a bus for 13 hours.

I expected the return trip to be the same.

The reason I spent 13 hours on a bus rather than an hour or so on a plane is because, since 1997, I’ve been stuck with a crippling phobia of flying. The kind that comes with nightmares and makes you say things like, "No, you can pay for somebody else to go to E3. I'd have to fly."

It started out as an ordinary fear, which I decided to get over my senior year of college. I got a grant to present a paper at a conference in Austin. Forty of us, as a group, took a flight from Asheville to Atlanta, then on to Texas, and the reverse coming home.

I couldn’t have asked for a better trip out, and when we landed in Austin I gloated about how handily I’d conquered my fear of flying. I was badass and insufferable.

On the trip home we had a problem. It’s a story I’ve told so many times that it’s started to sound like a rehearsed fiction.  On the ship, I didn’t want to get into it because whoever I was talking to was almost sure to be boarding a plane in a few days to go home.

Yes, there was turbulence, with free fall that broke things in the cabin. When the flight had smoothed out and my adrenaline plummeted, I fell asleep for a while, and the pilot’s voice woke me up. He was telling us that they thought the fluid coming out of the engine for the last 45 minutes was coolant from the generator. I learned later that, while I was napping, the co-pilot had left the cockpit and looked out one of the rear windows to try to diagnose the problem. In the air.

Add to that the pilot saying, “There’s no reason we shouldn’t make it to Atlanta.” Add that we were given priority clearance to land, entirely skipping the two-hour holding pattern the pilot warned us of. Add that nobody announced our approach, so for a moment, two hours before we expected to land, we all thought we were crashing. Add that, since we were all honors students, we were smart enough to realize that something else must have been going on to keep everyone from having time to tell us we were on approach.

Then, to all that, add that on the plane were 40 honors students from my alma mater, most of us seniors, and 10 or so highly favored professors. We were all imagining headlines like “Graduating Class Decimated in Fiery Crash.” (My alma mater is fairly small, and “decimated” would have been technically accurate.)

Yeah, once we got back to Asheville I never got on a plane again. For more than a decade. Until Tuesday.  

When I first heard about the cruise, I thought I might conquer my phobia and fly to Fort Lauderdale as a reward. I stalled and stalled and stalled until a friend told me about a fancy bus called Red Coach. In my mind, the return trip would be easier than the trip south. I’d be relaxed and happy from my vacation, and I’d read a book in the airport until time to go, and then I’d sleep overnight, since the bus was leaving a little before 7 p.m. and arriving at about 7:30 a.m.

What really happened is that when I got to Miami Airport to catch the Red Coach home, I was exhausted and heartbroken and missed you all terribly. I couldn’t stop thinking about everyone I hadn’t managed to say goodbye to before disembarking from the Eurodam. (Why did you go to bed so early? Why did I? How did we miss each other? Do I have your e-mail? Your Twitter name? Something?)

I’m always sad at the end of conventions and whatnot, but not like this. The only thing I wanted more than to still be on the Eurodam with this amazing community of people was to be at home in my own bed.

Before I’d even reached Orlando, where I’d be spending a 6-hour layover on the way home, I started to see tweets from people who were home. Or, worse, waiting for a connecting flight at Hartsfield-Jackson, where I’d have flown if I’d had the balls to fly. I still had about 15 hours of travel ahead of me.

All the Sea Monkeys, save a few who booked a hotel a night after the cruise (and Chicazul, whose journey home seemed interminable, and maybe Angela, who was flying over an entire ocean, and John Roderick, who was in a Mustang exorcising his wanderlust or something) would be sleeping in their own beds that night.

Not only would I not be sleeping in my own bed, but I would be sleeping on a bus. Overnight.

That’s when I came to a very important conclusion, roughly paraphrased as, “This is some bullshit.”

So I decided to fly, for real this time. And you all came out of the woodwork. Sara started a hashtag on Twitter that led to a playlist of songs for the airplane (beginning with John Roderick singing “Sky is Open”). Maria and Taylor made a video (a video? seriously? an entire video? First you made me cry and then you made me laugh, so much). I got well-wishes when it was time to go and congratulations when I landed. I am floored and flabbergasted and so, so grateful. 

This isn’t at all to disparage or diminish my Atlanta friends, who kept checking up on me, or my work colleagues, three of whom nearly made me cry in the airport with their thoughtful e-mails, or my family. But you all – you were the tipping point. You prompted me to fly and then you – so many of you that I still can't quite get over it – stuck with me in spite of my angst while I did it.

So thank you.

I’ll see you at PAX East. Which I’ll get to on an airplane.