Into the Air, Junior Birdman

If you’d rather listen to this post than read it, tap the Play button on the track above to hear my voice.

Sitting on a cold plastic seat at 5:30 am watching the sun rise outside the window of JFK Terminal 4, eating a mediocre breakfast sandwich and popping three ibuprofen so in 20 minutes my womb will stop feeling like it’s being wrung out, listening to the tinny sounds of someone’s child’s video game, and thinking…well. I’m alive.

So began my most recent airplane journey, one week ago.

Giant bottle of Evian: check.

Plenty of pills for my exceedingly ill-timed cramps: check.

Stash of snacks brought from home so I don’t have to buy any at the airport: check.

K95 mask so I don’t catch anything from the 27 coughing people on the plane: check.

I was ready to fly.

It was my third plane trip of the year, and the shortest one I’ve made in a while—a mere puddle-jump really, to the middle of the Midwest. As usual, I got through security in five minutes flat: that $77 TSA Pre-check fee was the best money I’ve spent in years, and I recently gave in to the ubiquity of facial recognition tech and registered for Touchless as well, which always has the absolute shortest line. Superstitiously, I still arrive at the airport the recommended two hours before my flight, which means I always have about 1.9 hours to kill in the terminal. JFK, despite its multimillion-dollar renovations, remains one of the lamest airports I’ve ever traipsed through.

Dublin Airport is nicer at 5:30 am. At least you can get a decent cup of tea. Aer Lingus also has the freshest plane food I’ve ever eaten.

But I digress.

I’ve never particularly liked flying. (Does anyone?) The seats seem to get smaller every year, and I’m a fairly small person, so I can only imagine how uncomfortable they are for larger folks. The airlines keep making you pay more for things that used to be free, and flight time estimates are now so sloppy, a plane can claim to have landed “early” even when it took off an hour late. Of course, there often isn’t a gate available when you land early, so you’re still on the damn plane for the whole stretch of time they said you would be. “Please keep your seatbelts securely fastened while we taxi ceaselessly at five miles per hour.” Thanks, Delta.

And the turbulence factor? Oy. My flight to Minneapolis last Saturday practically fell out of the sky, so hard was the landing, while my return flight to New York lurched so violently during its descent, I might actually have emitted a small scream. I once experienced a flight in which the plane bumped and jolted for three straight hours, moving with a storm system all the way up the eastern seaboard. In such cases, I close my eyes and imagine I’m a passenger in a car on a bumpy road.

Sometimes it works.

I typically fly about three or four times a year, which is seldom enough that air travel still seems miraculous to me. In the space of six hours, I can watch the sun set over New York and rise over London. In the same interval, I can erase time and end up on the West Coast a mere three hours after leaving the East. In the space of a movie, one-third of a book, a meal and a half, and a nap, I can travel to a place where people speak a different language, eat different sorts of food, have different ways of showing love and scorn. Journeys that used to take weeks by water or months by land—trips that were once altogether impossible—can now be undertaken overnight.

If the price is a crick in the neck, a cramp in the leg, a subpar meal, or a touch of sleep deprivation…I suppose it’s worth it.

A few decades ago, when all my flying was done in the company of my parents, my dad had a liftoff ritual. Just as the plane reached its fastest ground speed, the moment before it soared into the sky, he’d break into a sotto voce song:

Into the air, Junior Birdman
Into the air, upside down

I think that’s how it goes, anyway. This is one of several songs whose actual melody I still don’t know because I only ever heard my nearly-tone-deaf dad attempt to sing them. It was only recently that I learned its provenance: the Junior Birdmen of America, founded in 1934, was a national organization for children interested in aviation and model planes. Like any proper members-only group, it had a theme song.

I still think of that on every flight I take.

Liftoff ritual: check.

Here I go again.