Minor Tom.

I’ve been planning a trip to Charleston in October, partially to simply take a vacation from the bustle and partially because of a weeklong string of events like this. Whenever I travel, I look at every other option before resigning myself to flying, which in the past has included a rented car to the Grand Canyon and a trans-Atlantic freighter ship. I’ve had a problem with planes as long as they've been flying me. It’s not the infinitesimally small chances of a crash or the threat of dangerous men, because I like to think I’m more rational than that.

I’ve chalked it up and narrowed it down to the loss of the control that you’re forced to give up on an airplane. I’ve never been alright with giving up my control. I’m not talking about the kind of symbolic control one hopes to have at a business lunch or in an argument over a botched eBay deal. This is control over my own physical self. I need to know that I have the power to bring myself into and pull myself out of a situation. If driving, I could pull over. If on a bus or train, it’s (unlikely but) feasible that I could have the vehicle stopped. There is no stopping or pulling over a plane. I cannot pull myself out of it and put my feet on the ground.

It reminds me of the few (awkward, unpleasant, eternally remembered) moments as a young one dropping from the high diving board at the public pool. Spurred by the internal me-too I would climb the ladder, knowing that each rung would take me further from a root, put more and more in the hands of some force other than me. At the top, I’d look down at the trunked boys who didn’t care if I fell in water or on pavement and the girls in their vainly hopeful two pieces. Resigning myself to the fact that even if I lived to be eighty I’d probably never actually see a breast and thus had nothing to live for anyway, I would leave the board and watch its fiberglass arm waving goodbye as I fell the three miles into the water. For a moment it was all over; it was dark, it was quiet, I was held in place with a perfectly even balance. But young lungs would pull me towards the surface, back to the lights and sights and sounds, back to control, back to myself.