Taking flight

 

As a conversation starter recently someone asked when we had taken our first airplane flight. It was 1966, I was 6 years old and headed to my uncle's wedding on Long Island. My mother and I and my baby brother (number 5 in the family order) flew from O'Hare in Chicago to JFK — perhaps on TWA and to Eero Saarinen's terminal. 

It might have looked something like this photo from 2020, complete with VW van. I was fascinated at the time by the flight attendants briskly heading to their flights, and the boards with destinations I could only imagine going to. And to a young girl who lived in a tiny town, just a few thousand people, it was a memorable adventure.  

My next flight wasn't for a decade, I was 16 and flying solo to Mexico City to meet my grandfather and spend the summer in Oaxaca where he was living. The plane was delayed, but I had no way to let my grandfather know and remember worrying the whole way whether he'd know. The whole family — all six kids — visited the following Christmas, but we went by train from Nogales. 

It would be almost another decade before I'd get on a plane again, this time to Vancouver on my honeymoon. We flew past Mt. St. Helens about a year after the major volcanic eruption, it was still smoking. 

I didn't get a passport until I was in my thirties. 

For the first third of my life, my trip were mostly confined to the ground and to at most a few hundred miles. I camped in Wisconsin, hiked in the San Gabriel mountains, rode my bike to the library and to see friends who lived on nearby farms. Yet I never felt confined, books took me to Russia (Anna Karenina) and to Venus and Pluto and beyond (Podkayne of Mars and Have Space Suit Will Travel). I haven't been on a plane since last February (the photo of JFK notwithstanding), and rarely get more than a couple of miles from home and that mostly on foot or by bike. But I'm taking flight nonetheless. To worlds too real (How to be an Antiracist) and worlds that lean over the precipice of fantasy (Mexican Gothic).