Never Again! | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Never Again! | Previous Challenge Entry
By Mariane Holbrook
07/09/21
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My reasons for resisting air travel can easily be boiled down to one: I'm claustrophobic.

The idea of being sealed up in an airborne, aluminum, Airstream motor home with wings at 30,000 feet scares me senseless. I'd rather cross the entire continent of Africa in a packed, windowless bus with 90 half-naked, spear-handling bush warriors with bones in their noses than ride a commercial flight from Minneapolis to St. Paul with its distance of 6.33 air miles.

I think airlines should provide all passengers with a list of instant, deplaning options. But that gets a bit dicey at 30,000 feet since there are no emergency landing strips in the sky. Until they invent one, I'm taking the bus.

My husband, a science teacher who was away directing a student tour that weekend, had tried in vain to explain the safety of airplanes to me, using terms like " lift, drag, thrust, gravity and Bernoulli's principle."

I politely listened but he might as well have been explaining the quantum theory of "What happens with two identical fermions, identically polarized, whose paths cross one another?" I didn't even pretend to have a clue.

I'm a woman of faith, so I made sure to be "prayed up" before the flight. I read all the verses I could find about God's protection, faith without fear, and anything else I deemed appropriate to my plight. But I still figured that if God had wanted me to fly, he would have created me with a pretty, pink propeller on my pretty little head.

Still, it was with major trepidation and endless panic attacks that I agreed to fly from my home in Alabama to a wedding in Chicago. I managed to get prescriptions for Valium from three different doctors before my flight, in case I became unglued and needed a handful.

I boarded the plane (with help from two air flight attendants) and was escorted to the very back of the plane to my seat between a giant Suma wrestler and a hefty member of Hell's Angels whose thick, black, unkempt beard could have hidden the Lindbergh baby. It was a coin-toss over which one would strangle me first.

My seatmates leaned across me in conversation about the best motorcycles, pinning me to the back of the seat where my lungs were beginning to deflate. The noise around me became deafening until I realized it was my heart beating its violent drums against my ribs.

I peered around the backs of my seatmates to see if others were as scared as I, but one woman was casually wiping her baby's nose while a man sat nonchalantly reading his newspaper. I couldn't believe my eyes! "Didn't they realize they were facing imminent death," I wondered?

Then my full-blown panic attack hit me. I crawled between my seatmates who were still sprawled across me, excused myself, and ran down the aisle searching for a flight attendant. She was busy flirting with a Navy captain in full-dress uniform but I pulled on her sleeve and yelled, "I need to get off! Now!"

"I'm sorry," she explained. "You can't leave now! We're ready for take-off."

"If you don't let me out, you'll be dealing with my corpse and I don't think my seatmates would welcome a dead woman sitting between them on this flight."

To my everlasting relief, the pilot overheard my desperation and said, "We'll let you out but your baggage is already loaded in the cargo hold and will be shipped back to you."

I knew my outfit for the wedding was packed away but I didn't care. I'd wear my jeans and a T-shirt if I could just get out of this death trap.

"Sir, you can send my bags to Phoenix for all I care. They would likely have been lost somewhere on this flight, anyway."

When he opened the door, I held my head high and walked unaided, with dignity and purpose, down the long flight of stairs, proud that I had held myself together in a magnificent face-off. (Actually, I had sobbed my way out the door, flung myself down the stairs, and raced barefoot across the tarmac to the safety of my car.)

I appealed to the airline for a refund but was denied on the basis that "Fear of Being Suffocated By Hell's Angels and Suma Wrestlers" is not a legitimate, approved illness.

Picky, picky.

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Non-fiction

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