Thoughts in Flight

I got on the plane like I normally would. Just boarded behind everyone, falling into line then looking for my assigned seat. When I’m going on a long trip I tend to fall into a zone. Faces become mostly indistinguishable. Something like leaves passing each other in wind.
I took my seat. I almost always fly next to the window. I clipped my seat belt and immediately pulled out a book. I don’t sleep on planes. Or in cars. Or any other mode of transportation for that matter. A dark-skinned girl with tight corn-rowed braids sat in the aisle. She looked oddly familiar. Odd because I felt like I had known her briefly at some point in life. Maybe we had a conversation once.
An older white woman sat in the middle and seconds after I had sat down she asked someone in the row ahead of us if she wanted to switch seats so that she could seat with her friend, who turned out to be my familiar stranger. She also looked familiar. But not like we knew each other but familiar in the kind of way that people in New York City look familiar. Like she surely resided in one of the five boroughs and because on first glance, in my estimation, she was either Dominican or Puerto Rican, she was either from the Bronx or somewhere in uptown Manhattan.
In truth, it didn’t matter to me. I’m mostly anti-social. Especially when I’m traveling. So cracked open my book, “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. Something about the completely white cover had always drawn my attention but even the foreword grabbed me. I hadn’t finished one page before my familiar stranger leaned over her friend and made a joke I barely remember. Something about what I was going to do to keep my seat since that friendly white lady had given up hers. I smiled and chuckled to be nice, even though I had barely heard her.
I kept reading but I couldn’t shake this feeling. I just knew that these girls were going to talk to me at some point during this flight. And since it was nearly six hours from JFK airport to Phoenix (I was on my way to Portland), I was hoping that they would strike conversation later rather than sooner. I only have so much stamina for small talk. I could tell they were good friends. The kind that laugh at nothing together because their presence makes each other happy. I buried myself in my book. My familiar stranger promptly sunk in her chair and dropped asleep and her rotund Latina friend in the middle plugged her ears with her Ipod. A couple silent hours passed.
“Whatcha reading?”
I knew it was coming. The rotund Latina with the Ipod eyeballed my book in a way that said she wasn’t really interested in my choice of literature but that she felt like talking and her friend was sleeping and that I never do a good enough job of seeming unapproachable.
“This book called “Blink.”
“What’s it about?”
“I just started but so far it’s about how we make snap decisions. It sort of about how we process things unconsciously before you can even think about them. Or something like that. So far he’s just talking about how some people brought this thing called a kouros, which is statue of a boy standing with his left foot forward and his arms to his sides, to a new museum and they had all these experts and historians look at it to make sure it was legit. They ran all these tests and decide was real. Then some other people came in and peeped that it was fake on first glance. And it turned out that the status was fake – some hybrid of a bunch of variations of the same type of statue. I’m not sure where it’s going but it’s interesting so far.”
It was a long-winded answer, which made me laugh at myself but it only made it seem like maybe I really did feel like talking. I told her it’s not the kind of book that I’d typically read.
“What kind of books do you read?”
I walked into that one.
“Eh, I’ll read anything I can get my hands on mostly. I don’t really know. I secretly want to be a nerd so I’ll read just about anything. Like the last book I read was The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, the guy that wrote Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.”
I knew it was the end of the reading time. She wanted to talk and it was a long flight and it was be polite and hopefully interesting to indulge her. Turned out she was from the Bronx and works across the street from my in Washington Heights. So I was right on both accounts of her Latina-ness. She went to school in Plattsburgh, where I was two weeks earlier, but dropped out because there’s nothing to do in Plattsburgh except find trouble. So she came home.
She was into photography and took a few pictures across my lap and out the side window of the mountains and that were somewhere on our way to Arizona. She was on her way to Vegas for her birthday. Just decided to up and go with her friend two weeks ago. Found a cheap flight. She was the type that would probably do almost anything for the thrill, including hurling her probably-275-pound self out of a plane at 16,000 feet because her white friends in Plattsburgh thought it would be cool to burn some weed, get sauced and go sky-diving. She gained my respect right there.
We talked a little more. I got tired and started thumbing through pages of my book which signaled to her that I needed a break from talking to strangers. Even if this one was particularly interesting. We landed. She gave me a weak handshake and said that since we worked across the street we would probably bump into each other. She paused as thought she was waiting for my to ask for her contact information. I didn’t. She told me her name. I promptly forgot.
I often say I hate to talk to people. Although that’s what I do for a living. I told her I was a reporter so I write for a living. She said that made me a nerd. I took the compliment. I told her to behave herself. She was going to Vegas. She said she wouldn’t. She was right. Vegas is for misbehaving. I was going to Oregon for work. Behaving was my only option. That was fine with me. Sometimes I’m content to be a leaf blowing in the wind.


Occasionally when I’m covering a race out of state (I’m a track and field reporter), I see a team that I cover. I usually pretend that I don’t see them. I’m sure they do the same. I think I spend enough time invading their personal space when they’re panting and holding down vomit and wiping spit off their faces after a race. So I try to stand clear if I see them in the airport or anywhere else that’s not a track or a cross country course. So when I saw Burnt Hills in the terminal in Phoenix, I tugged my hat a little lower and tucked my chin to my chest and lost myself in my Blackberry.
Then next time I looked up I saw Bernard Lagat, one of the best distance runners in the world waiting outside a Starbucks in the terminal with Abdi Abdiramhnan. They both competed at the University of Arizona and I knew that Lagat lived in Arizona and was sponsored by Nike, which told me they were both headed to Portland as well for the meet as Nike representatives. Not long after, I saw Brian Grant walk by. I only remembered that he played for the Miami Heat but later learned that he was from Oregon and the people out there remembered him as a Portland Trailblazer. They were all on my flight. You’d think I had chartered a Nike jet or something.
But Lagat and Abdi definitely walked into coach with me while Grant lounged in first-class. Being the best in the world in track and field doesn’t always mean you’re rich.
I walked on the plane after everyone else. Everyone but Abdi and Lagat. Somehow I ended up between them as we handed our tickets to the gate clerk and entered the vestibule that takes you from the gate to the plane. I asked Abdi if he wanted to wait for Lagat (I called him Bernard for some reason) and he just nod as if I had known them both and let me go ahead.
“Where’d you get that bag from?” he said behind me.
I was wearing an USA Olympic Trials backpack I’d bought in Eugene, Oregon when I covered the 2008 Trials. I casually told him that I went out there for work, that I wrote about track and that it’d be a long time since I’d raced. I had to throw in that part so that he knew that at least I used to run. He seemed genuinely disappointed, like somehow he was no longer allowed to speak to me. By then Lagat had joined us and we chatted a bit about the fact that they were making us check our bags. Some nonsense about there not being any room in the overhead bins, which seemed strange to me since the people telling us that didn’t have on headsets or walkie-talkies and were outside of the plane just like us.
Either way, I spoke to a couple Olympians, saw an NBA player and chatted with a overweight girl who happened to work across the street from me and wasn’t afraid to plunge to out of a plane to potential demise soon after rolling up an L.
The plane landed and I picked up my rental and headed toward the hotel. My phone rang.
“How was the flight?” a friend asked.
It was cool I guess.