Mystery of the Missing Airplane

                               Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth

                                 with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been,

                                       and there you will always long to return.

                                                   ~  Leonardo da Vinci  

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

                                                        ~  Henry David Thoreau

   

I read somewhere that flying is like throwing your soul

into the heavens and racing to catch it as it falls.

                                              ~  Linda Howard     

All journeys eventually end in the same place, home.

                                           ~ Chris Geiger

As I write this essay, the Malaysian airplane is still missing. It is as though some hand reached down and plucked it from the earth. Every day, like millions of other people around the world, I’ve followed the news of the search. How can a Boeing 777 simply disappear?

Seeing jet liners lowering or increasing their altitude near our international airport brings back memories of the first time I flew. I had recently finished grad school and had just gotten a good job. I never imagined my life could be so different from having been brought up to be a stay-at-home wife. Now I had a profession, a nice paycheck, and opportunities beyond my imagination - in addition to children and a loving husband. It was like having your cake and eating it too.

The job meant working one week every month in Denver or Montana during the academic year. It gave me the experience of flying off with colleagues and leaving my husband and children to fend for themselves.

I remember that first trip as though it was just yesterday. However, it wasn’t long before I lost the initial thrill. Flying became simply a means to travel large distances quickly.

I close my eyes and can feel the excitement of that first time. Entering the plane from the gate. Seeing seats stretched down its long fuselage. Finding my seat. Of course, I claimed a window seat – even though I wasn’t about to tell my colleagues that I’d never been in a plane before.

The plane waddled down the runway to position itself for takeoff. The pilot revved the engines and we lifted off. I felt my body pressed back into the seat. Watched the city become a child’s layout for model trains, a pretend miniature city with tiny cars moving down ribbons of freeways.

And then we were above the clouds. All I could see was their white fluff below me. Right there - my life changed forever in the miracle of this heavy jet plane that flew with the ease and grace of an eagle.

Before-planes, my travel had been limited to where we could drive our car. Now I was able to even escape the bounds of my country. Over the years, I flew to foreign destinations that only had been dream-places that I’d read about in books. Every time a plane delivered me, I learned new things about different geographies and different cultures. Like ever person who has flown, I have a memory-bank of experiences of flying. Like women who tell each other their stories of childbirth, people who fly on planes tell each other their flying stories.

My grandparents took buses and trains – and before them it was covered wagons heading west – or long weeks crossing the sea from the old country to a new one. My parents never traveled anywhere. I was determined my children would have a different set of stories to tell. And opportunities I never thought I could have.

Now all of us live in a rapidly changing world. One new unimaginable invention after another. Sometimes we so quickly become accustomed to changes that we forget what our lives were like before these advances. And perhaps assimilating changes so quickly that we can’t remember life without them is our way to not be overwhelmed by changes that come at us at a faster and faster pace.

This past month was the twenty-fifth birthday of the internet. Can any of us remember life before the internet? Or do we just sit down to a keyboard - or poke a few buttons, use a smart phone or iPad to instantly connect with the world beyond us?

Now texting is the latest thing (and Twitter and Skype and  . . .) and tomorrow it will be some new way to communicate. My grandchildren discretely tell me email is passé – while I still love my email. Without computers, my lovely car would not be able to leave its garage. I pay for dinner with a credit card, pay my bills online, and order books that are deposited on my front steps. And there is nothing worse than a computer that suddenly refuses to function properly.

I cannot imagine a world without airplanes. As much as I love being on the open seas in a ship, a plane connects the world for me as never before.

We grumble about too small seats in planes, TSA inspections, and all the other ways flying has changed since that day I walked down a ramp for my first plane trip. Remember the havoc this long winter over the thousands of cancelled flights due to weather conditions? Whole parts of the country literally shut down as planes were grounded. Flights people had taken for granted when they booked a trip somewhere.

Ought we be more resourceful and not so dependent on these “modern inventions” or on people in other countries? However, time only flows ahead – not backwards (except when we set our clocks back one hour every autumn). And we cross time zones when we fly somewhere – and days if we cross the international dateline – so quickly that often we don’t know what time it is and our bodies protest mightily.

The word global takes on new meanings everyday. Could we actually live without the Brits, the French, the Chinese, the Middle East, varied South American and African nations? And the Russians?

Why would we want to? Those sleek high-tech planes have shrunk our globe in ways the Wright brothers could never have thought possible.