The Day I Thought The Plane Was Crashing
Christmas 2001
Cast your memory back to those last few months of that year when everything ended. We’d been struck by the unthinkable, which makes it terribly easy to think unthinkable things can happen at any time.
After the World Trade Center was felled, a plane crashed into New York neighborhood, and then there was something about some guy on a plane with a bomb in his shoe.
Given the zeitgeist, I can’t tell you what inspired me to fly to LA and spend Christmas with my best girl Mary. Boarded with my knitting and a fierce determination not to be freaked out by being in an airplane.
Where were we, west Texas?
All at once the plane was flying at a level that seemed far, far too close to the ground. It’s a wrinkled, glacier-folded landscape of lovely grey-brown emptiness. I don’t really need to be able to count all the wrinkles; I can count wrinkles perfectly fine at home in my bathroom mirror.
Crew members were hurrying back and forth through the cabin. ALL the crew members, including the ones who were supposedly flying the damn plane. Then there was the er-er-er-er-er buzzer that usually means a plane is seriously way too close to the ground.
Still, we cruised along. Low to the ground, crew in a hurry, the buzzer of imminent death.
Looking back it was kind of great, because I never once thought of God or a prayer or anything remotely like that. I feel I earned my Atheist identity that day. All I was thinking about were my kids and I hoped a plane crash didn't hurt much.
It seems we spent about twenty minutes that way, cruising along, too close to the ground. I tried to knit and be friendly to the kid sitting next to me. I thought of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” perhaps because at the time I was kind of seeing someone who I hoped would save me from my stupid life. (Cf. any place where I have referenced “The Antichrist.”)
It is very weird to spend that long in a modern jet aircraft wondering What the fucking hell is fucking happening here? without starting to cry or scream. But we all managed it somehow.