Taking Off

(Editor's note: I wrote this about 9 days ago on my flight out to Ireland. I'm posting it now because it's my blog and not yours and I make the rules and you should just shut up. There'll be something else coming later this week)

The first thought I had taking off was, “Wow, I haven’t been on a plane in a while.”

The second, somewhat more morbid thought, was, “Wow, we could all crash into the ocean and die. Oh shit.”

The third was, “How am I gonna sleep now?”

Welcome to my brain for the first twenty minutes of our flight to Ireland.

My brother is studying abroad in Norwich, England, and my mother used this as a good excuse to finally take a family vacation to Europe. It was me, my mother and grandmother, all crammed into coach on my first ever cross-continental flight.

I’ve never been to Europe. Never been outside North America, either. Hell, aside from a two-day portion of a family road trip that took us to Canada’s side of Niagra Falls when I was 12, I have yet to set foot outside the land of the free and the home of the 70-ounce slurpee. My exposure to foreign culture essentially boils down to the “Foods of the World” part of Epcot and the part of the South Park movie where Cartman sings about Kyle’s mom in different languages.

I had a couple chances. In high school, I was slated to travel to Germany for American Music Abroad with the school symphonic band (TUBAS ON TOUR, BITCH). But the fund my mom and I had to get me there instead went towards the repair of my mother’s friend’s new car, which I smacked into while whipping out of my parking spot on the way to a basketball game. I also had a chance to study aboard in Ireland my final semester of college, but passed so I could be the sports editor of my college newspaper instead. I figured this would be a better choice in my pursuit of a journalism career and would aid me in my job search after college. As you may know, that’s going pretty well so far.

 So when my mom suggested we visit my brother, I decided I couldn’t push it off any more. Everyone who has more maturity and life experience keeps telling me to travel while I’m young, because it only gets more difficult and more expensive. Therefore, before I decide to settle down, start a family, and breed a dozen children like a good Catholic, I had to go.

I’m not afraid of flying. I’ve been on short flights between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and longer flights from Atlanta to Vegas. The mere act of going through security, boarding the giant, metal bird and watching us rise off the ground from a window seat usually doesn’t bother me.

But for some reason, I got spooked this time. Maybe it was because it’s been a few years since I’ve had to fly. I travel by car most of the time now. Renting a car and driving where I need to go is usually the same price or cheaper than taking the skies, and it gives me more freedom when I get to my destination. My friends don’t have to taxi me around, and I’m not a slave to public transportation, which I find to be unreliable, uncomfortable, and usually far more expensive than something unreliable and uncomfortable should be. (Otherwise, I have no thoughts on public transportation)

Maybe it was the delay. One of the runways was closed for construction, so our takeoff time was pushed back about an hour and a half, enough time for me to watch nearly three-quarters of the movie “In a World…” from my seat. Enough time to realize how fucking spoiled rotten I am to be watching a move in an airplane while I also have a laptop, iPod and books with me to keep me entertained. This is why the terrorists hate us.

But I’m going with the third option – we’re flying over an ocean holy crap oh my God.

Subliminally, the missing Malaysian Airlines flight and the images of Captain Sullenberger’s downed aircraft could have been tugging at my psyche, but even still, there’s something downright eerie about flying over the ocean at night. Where do we land in case of an emergency? Are we gonna have time to whip around and hit the Caribbean or Greenland or Iceland or an aircraft carrier the back of a whale or something? What if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is our captain? Has he learned since last time?

At moments like this, my mind doesn’t consider that transatlantic flights happen every day without a hitch, the same way my mind didn’t consider that thousands of people stand on the reinforced glass ledge out over the edge of the Willis Tower in Chicago the day I staggered out onto it, swearing like a sailor in fear around a couple dozen kids and their parents.

And I have to sleep now? With the time change, our flight’s going to land at 7 AM, at which point I need to be awake and relatively alert to help navigate to our inn. I have about three hours until then. At most, I’ll probably sleep for 45 minutes. I can’t sleep on planes or moving vehicles. I’ve tried several times. It doesn’t work. My back tightens and clenches like an angry man’s fist while sitting upright, and I can’t get comfortable enough, so my best bet is to at least get something productive done.

Of course, now I’m complaining about not being able to sleep on our state-of-the-art aircraft where I’m about to be offered dinner and a drink while watching “American Hustle” out of the corner of my eye and tapping away at my laptop. So it goes.

I saw a video recently of two elderly Dutch women flying for the first time in their lives. For one reason or another, they’d never had any reason to board a plane until a pair of online filmmakers taped them on a first-class flight to Madrid. The women marveled at the takeoff, the turbulence, and the amazing view. When they landed, one called her husband and began sobbing in joy as she recounted the experience.

That kind of amazement still exists. And it’s moments like that I try to remember when I get perturbed by minor inconveniences. Yeah, maybe I can’t sleep well, but I can’t sleep well on this enormous steel contraption that’s going to get me from the east coast of the United States to the west coast of Ireland in a hundredth of the time it took a few hundred years ago. And if I’m tired, it will be a minor hiccup on the trip of a lifetime.

I Don't Want to Change the World, I Don't Want the World to Change Me

“So, why are we here? What do you guys think?”

We were about an hour away from Delaware when my esteemed co-blogger, from her perch in the backseat, whipped out the unanswerable question that has flummoxed philosophers and potheads alike since the beginning of time. It was Monday night, and the three of us (me, Rebecca and my girlfriend Jenna) were over the 1500-mile mark near the conclusion of our five-day trek through New England.

In five days, we’d spent at least 25 hours in the car, sweeping through the Northeast in search of some deep story or coming-of-age tale, something that would fulfill every liberal arts major’s insatiable desire to write a Big Important Story that Has An Affecting Message, all while Seeing the World and Meeting People. It was frankly surprising it took until the final leg of our journey for our conversations to take a turn for the metaphysical.

Jenna and I were silent for a few seconds. I repeated the question, then the two of us made some cracks about how “lighthearted” and “frivolous” the question was, then we all chuckled, and then we set to work solving the world’s problems.

Our trip was hatched when Rebecca texted me a few months ago suggesting we go on a Bill Bryson-esque trip through New England. We talked about it a little more, discussing how we drive around the woods and the harbors, sleep in our car, interview complete strangers about their life stories and write a book or an essay or a blog post or a This American Life segment. It was the quintessential “Stuff White People Like” entry.

I filed it away under “One of Those Plans You Talk About All the Time, But Never See to Fruition for Practicality’s Sake.” (My filing system sucks) After all, there was the time, and the money, and the method of transportation, and the company we’d keep, and the lodging (or lack thereof), and the fact that, let’s be honest, talking to random strangers sucks.

Hey, you! Sorry to bother you and keep you from doing your job or getting to where you’re trying to go. You’ve never met me and have no possible reason to trust me. Can you please speak into this iPhone for three minutes while I ask you intensely personal questions and write down your every word? Did I mention we don’t know what we’re going to use this for and it has just as much a chance of winding up in an actual publication as I do of owning a Rolls-Royce ever? Hello? Hey, where’re you going?...

A long, brutal winter will set your imagination running, though, and in the midst of a half-dozen snowstorms that kept me bottled up inside for even more of the season than usual, I needed something to look forward to. I started plotting out some cities and sites on the map, one thing led to another, and long story short, I’m now the premier of Newfoundland as we prepare for unsanctioned naval combat with Greenland.

Ah wait…hold on, I’m mixing up my “memoir” notes and my “science fiction” notes. Give me a second. Okay, we’re good now.

I sent a planned route to Rebecca, who approved. I asked Jenna if she was interested in taking off of work to join two idealistic liberal arts students looking to play roving novelist for a few days (and see a few sights). She agreed. Finding a fourth person, preferably a dude, to come along for the trip, balance out the testosterone-to-estrogen ratio and keep Rebecca from a half-week-long stay in the Third Wheel Suite, proved fruitless, but we were already too deep in the process to turn back.

We planned copious amounts of sightseeing on our trip, from the 9/11 memorial to Yale’s campus, from the Athenaeum Library to the House of Seven Gables, from Boston Common to a storm-deluged wharf in Maine, from the Rockwell Museum to ESPN and the Basketball Hall of Fame. All the way, we read magazines, traded stories, listened to hours of music (my personal favorite was the streak of classic metal we hit as we drove through the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire), and consumed enough sodium to keep our bodies from producing it for months on end.

We employed a multitude of time-killing devices on our way, from games straight out of the family vacation playbook (pointing out every single Prius we saw on the road – had to have been at least a hundred) to the stuff of more stir-crazy individuals (saying the word “snacks” in a rising and falling voice mostly reserved for “ooohing” at a kindergartener’s macaroni diorama, and laughing like goddamn idiots every time we did). We chatted up tour guides and hotel employees and gas station attendants, including one particularly bubbly convenience store fellow in Maine who originally thought I said I was from New York ("I've got a cousin that lives out in Buffalo!"), then realized I'd said "Newark" instead ("Hey, my brother lives down there! Works in construction!").

The whole time, though, there was always the nagging voice in my head reminding me, “Hey, dumbass, get to work on this book or pamphlet or sonnet or whatever the hell it is.”

Some person in Salem loves her knick knacks...er, chotchkies...er...whatever they are

I’ve tried to illustrate many times before on this blog my desire to go back into writing or broadcasting, though a combination of my own life choices and job scarcity have held such desires at bay. This was my big chance. Maybe we’d meet some extraordinary street musician, or an old shop owner with stories as long as his beard, or a woman who treated her menial work like a daily challenge to improve the world. Maybe, in the process, we’d find some single, unifying theme tethering them all together, and maybe we’d learn a little bit about ourselves…and the world. (Pause here to look up at the sky wistfully and observe a shooting star)

In fact, we met each one of those people on our trip. We talked to each one. And we gleaned next to nothing from them.

Rebecca talked to a hotel breakfast server in Coventry named Rose about the happiest moment in her life; Rose responded with stories about nearly everything that ever happened to her ever. We tried to pry a story out of the aging owner of a going-out-of-business bookstore in Salem, who made it clear from the outset that the happiest moment of his life would be whenever the three of us would shut up, buy something (“75 percent off,” he’d advise each patron on their way through the door) and get the hell out of his store. We asked a rainbow-clad Boston Common street musician about his five-drum, dozen-whistle…thing on wheels that he played, but he seemed preoccupied by a few aspiring documentarians who apparently had the same idea we did, only they had cameras and a boom mic and we had an iPhone and a bag of souvenirs from Quincy Market.

Three strikes, you’re out. Thanks for playing. That doesn't event count the sole visible employee of a Salem "witch/wizard" souvenir shop who insisted that Salem was not, in fact, a "town," as I'd so erroneously considered it before - which I guess means that the handful of potted plants we have sitting on our kitchen windowsill constitutes a "garden," too.

This all could be viewed as a slight against the people we “interviewed,” but it truly isn’t. As my old journalism professor Dr. Dillon reminded us regularly, “Write the story you found, not the story you set out to write.” We simply set out with round holes and only found square pegs to put in them. 

Or, more likely, it may be interpreted as a slight against us. We set out with the intention to write another tome in the long line of travel memoirs and testimonials and instead put more effort into seeking out the world’s largest chocolate moose (no, that’s the right spelling, jerk), or places to use the bathroom.  Great enterprising journalism there, losers.

So, at least in my mind, we were returning to base camp with plenty of stories, but no story. Nothing I’d turn in to a publisher or editor with any intention of even an inch of their publication being devoted to it, at least.

Still, I felt fully accomplished, like I’d achieved some sort of secret goal.  I couldn’t quite articulate why, though, until the drive home. It started with some comment Jenna made about Chris Christie, and continued into a discussion ranging from student loans to Obamacare to the housing market.

Then, Rebecca’s voice abruptly replaced our political discussion with a more philosophical one.

“So, why are we here?”

Cue the pause. Cue the mood-lightening jokes and the chuckles. Cue the “deep” discussion.

We bounced ideas off each other for an hour trying to solve the question we, like most other humans, are woefully unqualified to answer (particularly given the amount of aspartame we…okay, I, had ingested in the past five days). I thought that people often see their purpose in life as some sort of massive undertaking, a macro objective that will somehow outlive their relatively small amount of time on earth, which isn’t right for everyone – at least not right away. I proposed we were all little specks, bouncing off all the other specks in life, and, depending on when or at what trajectory we hit each other, we sent each other spinning in some other direction, pinging our way to some cosmic finish line. Then I pantomimed smoking a joint, because I can't make any remotely serious point without making a dumb joke.

“Maybe everyone should be looking at things in more of a micro way,” Rebecca suggested. “Make the lives of their friends and family and loved ones better, make a difference that way.”

Then, I got it. I think we all got it.

When I was 20, I was sure I knew everything about life based on a few economics classes and the fact I could book a flight by myself without borrowing my mom’s credit card. At 24, I’ve never been more aware of how little I know. We may all have the potential to change the world, but we only elect one president every eight years, which doesn’t leave a whole lot of chances for everyone to get a turn. More than likely, most folks’ innate desire to make a lasting impact in the world is going to be somewhere in the realm of “home and school board member” or “guy responsible for bringing the doughnuts into the office on Fridays.” This isn’t demeaning, it’s simply realistic, and it’s not a bad thing.

There’s still some small chance I’ll solve world hunger or cure cancer or become Pope. I’m not ruling it out – I look good in white. For the time being, I’m happy to start with my little microsphere, by spending five days traveling the east coast with my girlfriend and one of my best friends, seeing some of the most notable landmarks and natural beauties with two people I love and growing closer together as a group each day – for reasons that range from deep to dumb (snaaAAAAAAcks). We chatted with a few strangers who weren't pleased to see us, but a few people, like Rose or the gas station store clerk, were. We may not have changed the world or inspired a generation, but we made our own little world, the little balls we bounced off of, a little bit happier.

I’ve got the rest of my life to figure out the “change the world” thing. At the very least, I can always just get a Prius.