Not Brave Enough

The utter smoothness of the air and the opaque blackness of the sky were so absolute that it severed us from the world to which we belonged, a world that was now probably asleep, unaware of our anonymous passage several miles above. We were peacefully suspended somewhere between the sparse lights of Upstate New York far beneath us and the faint stars incomprehensibly far above, attached to neither. Our secluded realm was bathed in the calming soft light from a hundred instruments and panels. Too loud, but somehow not painfully so, the steady whoosh of transonic wind and faint whine of the jet engines was comforting in its familiar ceaselessness. I was back in my element, savoring every moment, at peace, on the dark side of the planet. I had survived my first airline furlough, and I was back in the cockpit with a renewed appreciation for the good thing I had. I was having too much fun to be bitter that the coolest job in the world had been briefly taken away from me. I was enjoying the flying, certainly just as much as I ever had. The DC-9 is no Learjet, but it’s a fine machine. It’s comfortable, stable, built like a bridge, and even with its old-fashioned rigging of cables and control tabs, it obligingly responds to what my hands and feet ask of it. I was enjoying the camaraderie of exploring the country again with my colleagues, whom I respected and admired. I hadn’t yet lost the promise of youth, the naively optimistic feeling that everything would turn out okay. I was enjoying a new degree of contentment with my career, the feeling that I had arrived. This was the job I would retire from. Airline pilots often sarcastically quip “living the dream,” in the same breath with which they are voicing their grievances. I really was living the dream, in a way that I couldn’t truly have understood without having had it temporarily taken away.