Read an Excerpt
Airplane Reading
By Christopher Schaberg, Mark Yakich John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Christopher Schaberg & Mark Yakich
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-962-7
CHAPTER 1
The Work of Gravity
Roxane Gay
When I was a child, the people who smoked at the back of the airplane were so sophisticated. They sat in the last four or five or six rows, lounging in a gray cloud of smoke that always drifted toward the front of the plane. Every section on the airplane in those days was, really, a smoking section. My mother has a strong aversion to cigarette smoke and anytime we were on a plane, which was often, she would frown and grumble about the rudeness of smokers. She'd cough, loudly, and sigh.
Me, I loved to turn around and watch the smokers — men in suits, sitting with their long legs in the aisle, women with their lipstick staining the filter tip. I studied the different ways the smokers exhaled — through the nose in twin streams of gray, in a firm line from the lips, in carefully measured circles, sloppy bursts of air. I especially enjoyed how the smokers ashed their cigarettes into the little ashtray in the armrest, such a smart invention. I've always been fond of things that are more complicated than they first seem.
There is a moment when the airplane first leaves the ground and gravity starts to do its work. It presses down on you and your body is pulled to the back of your seat and you nearly can't move. That moment, terrifying and exhilarating, is one of the purest reminders that there is so much beyond our understanding.
I went to boarding school at thirteen years old. My parents moved around a lot because of my father's job. I mostly enjoyed always getting to know a new place, and I loved my family, but I wanted to go to the same high school for four years. I had seen enough movies to know high school would be the most important time of my life. I also wanted to run away. Junior high had been rough in ways I did not think were possible. I wanted to run away from the boy across the street, the boy I loved, the boy I thought was my friend only to learn he was anything but, the boy who took my love and tore it up and shared it with other boys he had no business sharing it with. When you run away, you always think you're running toward something better. We need to believe we're running toward something better to give us the courage to leave. I needed to believe I was running toward something better, a place where no one knew anything about me. I got on a plane, alone, and a flight attendant handed me a plastic set of wings. I held them in my hand and told her, "I am not a child." She patted my shoulder and escorted me to my seat. After the plane took off, I exhaled and smiled. I turned around to look at the smokers, sophisticated and cool, inhaling and exhaling, making it hard for anyone to breathe from within their shroud of smoke. It was a small price to pay. Of course I thought I was free.
When I flew home on breaks, I generally traveled on Eastern Air lines. They had the prettiest planes — a shiny chrome tube with a line of sky blue and a line of darker blue stretched along the fuselage. On my way home, I'd wait for my flight, my stomach knotted with all my worries. On the way back to school from wherever, I'd wait for my flight, my stomach knotted with all my worries. Throughout my teens, I was a mass of raw nerves. On the plane, though, particularly during the late flights, with the cabin dark save for a few beams of overhead light, I always felt perfectly calm, surrounded by strangers and the loud silence of a quiet airplane.
I started smoking when I was fifteen — picked up the habit at summer camp where the counselors amused themselves by corrupting the older campers once they put the younger campers to bed. I always felt cool when I smoked, and it relaxed me, the ritual of it. The knots in my stomach slowly unraveled when I lit a fresh cigarette. I smoked a lot.
I was only able to smoke on airplanes for less than a year before the government banned smoking on all domestic flights shorter than six hours. Once the plane took off, after that terrifying, exhilarating moment when gravity pressed down on me, I'd stare at the console overhead, tapping my fingers against the armrest, waiting, waiting, waiting for the NO SMOKING light to disappear. When it did, everyone in the smoking section worked in concert, alone but together, cigarettes at the ready, the flick of the lighter, the deep inhale, holding the sweet smoke in our chests, the collective exhale.
CHAPTER 2
Frequent Flight
Ian Bogost
I will fly more than 200,000 miles this year. It routinizes, like an extended commute. The suburbanite knows every moment of the drive: on-ramp, lane-change, morning- show, cup-holder. I'm like that, but on a global vector: freeway, parking lot, door S-3, South security checkpoint, wallet, shoes, laptop, zip-lock, escalator, train, SkyClub, jetway, seat, jacket, bourbon, nap, tarmac, sky, sky, sky.
We frequent flyers are the wizened, aged elders to the leisure-traveler cherubim. Our vacant glances tousle your collective heads. We are the aviary aristocracy. Coach is a curious memory, a favela from a forgotten youth. An Atlantis that sank into the fuselage.
We can go ten days in the 18" roll-aboard. With three suits. With an umbrella. We know the order of the fare classes. We know how to Q-UP. We do not complain about delays or IROPs. We were going to be on a plane anyway, or a hotel, or a conference center. We are unfazed, save by the fazed whose perturbedness perturbs us. We have broken the wild stallion whose nostrils flare with the steam of tarmac. We have resisted the siren whose bright blueness stares us down through oval portals.
"Frequent flyer" is misleading. So frequent is the frequency that the ground becomes the figure, the sky the ground. We are the sometimes-grounded.
We have eaten all the meals they don't serve you. Domestic: check the flight number. Orders are taken from the front on even flights, back on odd; we choose seats early to avoid the wet sandwich. International: we've already eaten the filet of beef with demi-glace sauce, the curried chicken, even the pan-seared cod. Even the cold plate of roast beef and gravlax. We're considering the strozzapreti. Not from desperation nor vegetarianism, but just from ennui. Eventually we stop ordering anything. A flying problem is the opposite of a drinking problem: it starts when you lose interest in the free booze.
Like grandfathers or autistic people, we do not speak except to remark about those who violate the custom. Social rites develop only around circumstances of unpredictable exception. The window seat is a two-hour renewable contract not to use the lavatory. Or the primary ritual: on the 752 or the 763, will the jetway dock at the first or the second door? We stoop and crane to see, looking out the windows for the first time. Then we all turn accordingly, silently, like synchronized swimmers with iPhones. Like migrating birds with elite-status wing tags.
Eventually, the flights seep out from the planes, from the airports like mercury. Slowly they cover things. We do not own toiletries larger than 3.4oz. Every jacket pocket contains an old boarding pass. We long since gave up bringing home souvenirs in favor of airplane cookies. Our children hug us and ask, "Did you bring airplane cookies?" Of course we did. Every jacket pocket contains an old boarding pass and a Biscoff cookie. Sometimes we eat one, like a Proustian madeleine. The cinnamon sweetness tastes like cabin pressure and pale loneliness and turbofan hum.
There are amateurs and there are experts. Or better, there are initiates and there are the initiated. The flipside of strangeness is habituation. It's true in all things. The dentist for whom every day is a day at the dentist's. The pastry chef who pipes special occasions into indistinction. The wary schoolboy who becomes the weary schoolboy. The traveler who becomes the frequent flyer.
CHAPTER 3
Why I Love to Fly
Pam Houston
It is 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning in September, and I am down in the East Jesus section of the Denver International Airport where all the smallest United Express flights come and go. I have already flown once today — Casper to Denver, another puddle-jumper — and watched the sunrise over the western reaches of the Great Plains, the light glinting off dozens of potholes in southeastern Wyoming's moonscape topography.
They announce our flight, which, down in this modified trailer park of a terminal means a guy shouts "Durango?" in my general direction and waves his arm. I cross the tarmac and climb the stairs into the little Embraer 145, and take seat 1A. Even though this is an all-Economy aircraft, I am entitled to board first and sit in seat 1A because I fly more than a hundred-thousand miles on United each year. This last year, somewhere over Greenland on my way back from Athens, I crossed the million-mile mark (lifetime) with United, and it was everything I'd dreamed it would be. They announced my name over the loudspeaker, gave me a bottle of pretty good Australian Shiraz, and the pilot (who was not, unfortunately, Sam Elliott) came out of the cockpit, sat down with me and shook my hand.
As I get myself settled in seat 1A, Kool and the Gang's "Celebration" is cranking — and I mean cranking — over the PA system, and the young male flight attendant, whose name tag says Matt, is doing a modified version of the Swim in the tiny galley that on the Embraer is right across the aisle from seat 1A.
"We're going zip-lining when we get to Durango!" he shouts to me over the music with so much enthusiasm that for a second I think he means we are going zip-lining, me and him, or perhaps all 18 of us on the flight, but then the pilot leans out of the cockpit to slap Matt a high-five and I realize "we" in this case means the three-man crew.
"Cool," I say, as the end of "Celebration" bleeds into the first few notes of Tavares' "Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel."
"Can you imagine?" he says, "how it's gonna be up there this week with all of the trees flaming out?"
"This flight," I say, "ought to be pretty outrageous too."
It's the third week of September in Colorado and the giant Aspen groves (the world's largest living organism, thousands of acres of trees all connected by their roots) that cover the western half of the state will be lighting up in swathes of color the size of football fields; green to yellow, yellow to gold, gold to vermilion. Our flight, which must be one of the most spectacular commercial flights in all the world, will climb through Rocky Mountain National Park, cross Arapaho Basin, catch the north end of the Collegiate Range and Independence Pass just east of the town of Aspen. Then, most dramatically of all, we will traverse the high San Juans near the melting rum-raisin ice-cream cone of Uncompaghre Peak, before we begin our final descent into Durango.
When Gloria Gaynor starts singing "I Will Survive," and Matt turns it up one notch further and uses his demonstration seatbelt as a lip-syncing microphone, it proves too much for the older couple over my left shoulder in seats 3B and C. They start making faces and sounds of displeasure, which I watch Matt take note of and choose to ignore.
"Good morning ladies and gentleman!" his voice booms over the booming music. "It's Disco Sunday on United Airlines and we are so happy you are here to experience what may turn out to be the most beautiful airline flight in the history of the Universe."
I glance back at Mr. and Mrs. No Fun At All and see that they are deciding whether or not to relax into Matt's routine and for everyone's sake I encourage them with my eyes.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Matt says, "you are not going to believe this, but a couple of hours ago, before the sun had even started to rise, one of United's finest mechanics, John Baker, was lying under this airplane with oil and anti-freeze and a lot of other toxic fluids dripping right into his ear, and it is to him we owe our impending on-time departure, and because of him we WILL survive today, along with the delightful Ms. Gaynor."
We get only halfway through "Play That Funky Music, White Boy," before Matt has to turn down the music and play the safety-demonstration tape.
When we sail past Longs Peak the west wind is blowing the early snow off the top into a cloud shaped just like a spinnaker, and I spot three sapphire-blue glacial tarns on the mountain's various flanks. On the eastern approach to Independence Pass a herd of elk 200-strong is running across a high-mountain meadow, the tundra beneath their hooves a deep red and gold. And when we leave Crested Butte behind under the wing and make the big turn southward, Slumgullion Pass is on our right and Baldy Cinco is on our left and as we skate down the south side of Spring Creek Pass, I am all of a sudden looking at my very own valley.
"Matt!" I say. "Come here, come here, come here!" He crouches in the aisle so he can see out my window. "That's my house!"
"Really?"
"Yes, that one all by itself out there, down at the end of the valley."
"Near that little clump of pine trees?"
"Yes!"
"You live there?"
"YES!"
"What in the world," he asks, "do you do out here?"
And it's true, no matter which window we look out we see only vast pine and aspen forest, a few snow dusted 14,000-foot peaks, the broad snaking valley of the upper Rio Grande, a very occasional cluster of weathered buildings, and very little, it seems, to do.
"I write books," I say. "Novels."
"You're shitting me."
"No," I say, "in fact, the new one is called Contents May Have Shifted."
"It is not," he says.
"It is!" I say. "I named it after you ... you know ... in a way."
"Ladies and gentlemen," Matt says into his microphone, "you are never going to believe this ..."
As we hang a deep left over Beartown and follow the path of the Silverton railroad toward Durango, Matt makes an announcement over the PA system about my forthcoming novel.
It goes without saying that the enthusiasm is entirely his.
CHAPTER 4
Flying Au Naturale
Connie Porter
Reading the New York Times this past August, I was drawn to the headline, "With Hair Pat Downs, Complaints Of Racial Bias." Two African-American women, Timery Shante Nance and Laura Adele, were both stopped by TSA agents this summer.
Ms. Nance was stopped at the security checkpoint in the San Antonio airport, Ms. Adele in the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Though neither woman had set off any alarms, both were stopped and TSA agents felt they needed to pat down their hair — their natural hair.
One might argue that these are isolated incidents. Since we live in a post-9/11 world, for matters of security, we must allow the TSA and its employees to set up procedures that assure that we are all safe. If the TSA deems natural hair on black women as a potential threat to the nation, who is to say it isn't?
Being a black woman who wears her hair natural, I know that black women's natural hair can be big and thick, so wound in dark clouds of twists and braids that maybe it looks to an untrained eye as if we are hiding something in our hair. But after clearing metal detectors, what exactly is suspect? What could we be hiding in our hair?
Is the baby Moses asleep in our reedy dreads? Is there a smuggled lorikeet nesting in our braids?
Perhaps our hair itself is suspect. Terrifying. That hair. Unbent by curling irons, untouched by relaxers, straightening combs, or flat irons. Our natural hair has the profile of a potential terrorist and has made it onto the "Do Search" list.
The "Do Search" list isn't new. It existed pre-9/11. I know because I was on it when I began flying au naturale.
Two years before then, I was happy to be nappy, flying frequently to promote a novel and children's books I had published. If you were behind me, you wouldn't have noticed me, a small dark-skinned black woman with an Eddie Bauer briefcase, a bottle of water, and a head full of natural twists. You wouldn't have known that I was a one-woman delay. My stop would've seemed random to you. Except that it wasn't. Virtually every time I stepped a foot through security, I was pulled aside for additional screening. Like Ms. Nance and Ms. Adele, I passed through the metal detector, my bag made it through the x-ray — then I was pulled aside.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Airplane Reading by Christopher Schaberg, Mark Yakich. Copyright © 2015 Christopher Schaberg & Mark Yakich. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
