There was a time when I was flying on one aircraft or another to some job or other, some family emergency or other, some event or other that required flight.
I remember sitting in one economy seat thinking that the title of my autobiography could be PLANE SPEAKING! PLANE SPEAKING…seemed so clever at the time….especially since i hated flying so much i had to gird my psychological loins every time i even got near an airport.
But every so often, the wonder of it all soothed my jangled nerves and i marveled at the sheer miracle that air plane flight afforded us all in this modern age.
I put myself in the place of my little dachshunds Claudio and Isabelle …how mysterious it must have been for them to be put into a little cage, given a sedative to put them into a restful slumber and then to be carried onto a large metal container that rose thousands of feet up into the air, only to wake up later in a place totally unfamiliar and exciting to explore. Where had all the familiar sights and smells disappeared to?
(I recall a journey to Denver where I was about to start rehearsals for QUILTERS, a new musical about pioneer women…Claudio and Isabelle were sleeping peacefully tucked against me, covered in my spacious coat, and by the time i was met at the Denver airport by a gracious hostess, they had pee-ed all over me…i was all warm and wet….but the gracious hostess understood and laughed along with me….i’ll never forget the warm wet loving sensation of those two trusting dogs…asleep and peeing on someone they knew loved them unconditionally)….
It is a miracle that we put ourselves into the trusted metal cage that is an airplane.
We give up any control we have over our lives, as brief as those lives are, and we trust….sheer trust…only trust…that the people who seem to know how to fly such a contraption will be able to get us to where we want to go without splattering our bodily pieces all over the terrain so very far below us.
And I would wake up , again miraculously, in an entire other city, an absolutely foreign country thousands of miles from home, wake up in another world entirely separate from the world i lived my daily life in….hoping i had packed everything i needed for my new, though temporary , life……it amazed me always how easy it was to live my entire daily life out of a small suitcase filed with only the barest essentials..,…all that other stuff at home, with closets so stuffed with items i rarely used that i wondered every time i travelled why i simply did not get rid of it all!
Travel is a bother.
As my dear husband and I are about to embark on a cross country drive from SF to Michigan to see his family, his 101 year old grandmother, etc, with all our reservations booked at every spa resort along the way that we could find (not many in Cheyenne, trust me), i marvel at how i worry about what i should pack, how much of it i should pack and if i should pack much at all.
After all, there are drugstores all along RTE 80 EAST, as well as Walmart’s, and every other blighted retail outlet our sad country has to offer….no danger of lacking any essentials or even every possible indulgence along the long way…..
We leave tomorrow morning….first stop: Truckee, at the New Moon Organic Store and Café, en route to Elko, and then TA-DA!!! Salt Lake City….the Grand American Resort…
And …POOF!!!…. i shall wake up in another stranger place….
without having to get nauseated miles up in the air! Or getting sick to my stomach nearing yet another ugly modern airport terminal .
To awaken somewhere else? i am excited t the prospect.
I hear the scenery is awesome along the way.
Bonneville Salt Flats, here we come!