I am twelve-hundred miles from home, in a month-long training program to learn a new airplane. Which means I live in a hotel. It’s a nice a hotel, but it is still a hotel and not home. It is strange because even when the world is normal and I am flying all the time, the longest I am gone for, at any one time, is four days. It’s enough time to miss your own home and your wife but not enough time so that the concept of “wife” and “own home” become abstract concepts. After a month though, your former life becomes a legend you tell yourself when the walls of the hotel room become a little too small, “Once upon a time, I lived in a place where there was a room just for sleeping.”
“You’re full of lies old man! No such place exists.”
“I tell you the truth! There were even separate rooms for eating, studying, watching TV, and going to the bathroom!”
“Wow. Wait, you still have a separate room to go to the bathroom. We’ve talked about this…”
The truth is that you go a little crazy living in a hotel for too long. So, when I had a break halfway through my training to be able to go home for a couple of days and see my old life in person, I jumped at the chance. The problem was the break was short: only two full days. So, unless I wanted to drive 20 hours to get home one day and drive 20 hours to get back the next, I was going to have to fly.
As someone who works in the airline industry, I fully encourage you to go out and buy plane tickets and travel. It would help the industry out and probably me on a personal level: if the industry is doing well, I will still have a job. Plus, traveling on a plane with 150 other people, with constant airflow, HEPA filters and all the other wonderful precautions they are taking, is still safer then driving a car (let’s be honest, driving with a 150 people in a car was never safe, even for clowns). On a personal level though, after a year inside avoiding all outside contact with other people, it was difficult not to fear that every one of my fellow mankind could be a plague-mule.
So, the idea of getting on a confined metal tube with 150 of my closest disease-harboring mammals, seemed out-right terrifying and presented a quandary for me. The need to be home, sleep in my own bed, and see the woman I married overrode my fears. I did it. I rode in the back of an airplane for two and a half hours and risked the exposure to the thing we’re all afraid of and you know what? It wasn’t that bad. You know why? Because everyone on board, was on board. On board with the mask wearing and taking precautions. You could see it in everyone’s eyes (and only their eyes, of course, because the rest of their faces were covered), a sense of mutual mistrust. As I walked down the aisle, the standard face of, “Is this guy going to sit next to me and take up this middle seat” fear was replaced with, “Is this guy going to turn this thing into a super-spreader event?”
As I sat down, the woman sitting next to me was just finishing up her sterilization of her entire seating area with Clorox wipes. While buckling in, I could feel her examining me, and seeing if my mask was up to standards. I suddenly realized that she feared me as much as I feared her. She wasn’t the only one. On the full-flight, I saw enough hand-sanitizer to fill a backyard swimming pool and the only people being reminded to wear masks were young children. Even those reminders were from the kids’ own parents, who seemed to recognize the dual purpose of preventing the spread of the virus and muffling their children’s whines.
Dare I say that the flight seemed more civil than others? There were no outbursts or conflicts between passengers or conflicts between passengers and flight attendants. Maybe it was because people understood the more talking and conflict there was, the more mouths would be open, and the more germs would be transmitted. I’d like to think though, that it was because everyone recognized the general miserable state everyone was in and no one wanted to make it worse. It gave me hope, that if everyone keeps working together, we’re going to beat this thing. Someday, in the near-future, we will be able to fly on an airplane without fear and masks and sanitizer, and go back to being the loud, selfish a-holes we used to be. Of course, not soon enough. I have to take another plane ride back to training in two days and am trying to find a shop that can make a custom-fitting HAZMAT suit on the quick.
