Fear of Flying
In 1973, in the middle of my college years, Erica Jong wrote a groundbreaking novel about a professional woman who wanted to not be pigeonholed by male-dominated standards and especially wanted to be free to explore and express her own version of female sexuality. All I really remember about the book from the reading Fear of Flying as I did when we were all reading that sort of thing, was something she called “The Zipless Fuck”. As I have refreshed my awareness and knowledge of her book for purposes of this story, I notice that I more or less remember that term correctly. By zipless, she means that there are no ulterior motives or emotional ties that connect the physical act to any long-term (meaning more than in the moment) feelings. It is the quintessential sentiment that if it feels good, do it, and then move on without any cares. It is the pinnacle of the one-night stand phenomenon and has at its core nothing more than the feel-good. It is the attribute that had historically been the domain of the careless and profligate young buck who roams the landscape looking to do what nature presumably intended him to do, cast his seed in whatever direction he could. Nature is the ultimate honey badger, it don’t care, certainly not about cultural convention or societal guardrails and norms. Well, Erica Jong saw no reason why this freedom of expression should not apply to women as well as men, so hence the zipless fuck. I’m extrapolating a bit here, but the zipless part of the equation could be a metaphor for not allowing the un-packing of any baggage from the encounter, but more likely, its more feminist interpretation might have been that many women don’t really need what’s behind the zipper to reach fulfillment. I’m guessing that being the ultra-feminist that she was, Jong intended to mean all of that.
I thought about that tag line and therefore that book because we are taking our first flight in eighteen months on Sunday when we head back to New York City for a week. I think I am still a Jet Blue Mosaic member, which means I get priority boarding, but who knows how that all works now. I know we are flying in Mint Class, which are the Jet Blue lie-flat seats that would have been called First Class in a less egalitarian-minded time. We do not fly that way for haughty reasons and, in fact, try hard not to make eye contact with economy class passengers walking by because we always feel a little guilty about it all. It’s just that we are both big people and air travel in little cramped seats is simply not comfortable and would tend to discourage us from traveling at all. In this era of Pandemic, we certainly do not need any reason to discourage us from traveling. As it is, wearing an N-95 mask for the entirety of the five-hour flight will not be a pleasure, no matter how comfortable the seat may be. But we do feel its time to get on a plane again, lest we find ourselves immobilized by a runaway fear of flying that forces us to go East only when we have an extra few weeks for the road trip back and forth.
My first flying experience that I recall was on Mohawk Airlines, flying into Ithaca, New York on a Fairchild 24. I remember there were maroon velvet curtains on the windows and it all seemed very exciting and elegant. Ithaca has a meaningful piece of aviation history and much of it centers around Robinson and Mohawk Airlines and their first feeder or regional air carrier after WWII. I don’t recall our transcontinental air travel to and from California, but I do remember flying on Pan American to Costa Rica in 1958. I had an image of this new place as a tropical island (I was probably thinking about Puerto Rico) and I remember the plethora of tin roofs as I looked down from the DC-9 windows when we landed in San Jose. I also remember stopping in Havana in 1959 just after Castro took over the airport and we got the pleasure of seeing our first AK-47’s in the hands of some bearded rebels. Despite that incident, I do not remember ever being either scared or particularly thrilled by flying. Flying from an early age just seemed to be a part of my reality and it was a way to get from here to there.
During my pre-teen years I think we mostly drove around the country when we needed to go somewhere. I suspect it was an economic limitation for a young family of five with a grad school mother. Even when we moved to Rome in 1968 we happened to go by ocean liner, so flying across the ocean didn’t happen until we boarded one of the brand-spanking new TWA 747’s at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome to fly back to the states for home leave. By the time college ended for me, I had been an occasional air passenger when family trips either back to Rome or out West occurred. But once I moved to New York City and got into harness in banking, I became a regular air traveler. I think that all peaked about thirty or so years ago when I was running several bigger and bigger global businesses from 1985 – 2001. I remember one week in 1988 flying twice to Brazil for some crazy reason. I also remember flying around the world in a private jet selling some Emerging Markets Fund and all around the border of Mexico to look for properties to buy with our otherwise sterilized Mexican debt. Flying across the Pacific was always a long haul as was going over the pole from Europe to the West Coast of the U.S.. It was all good and all very ho-hum routine. First Class, Business Class, Concorde, private planes, sea planes, puddle jumpers, it was all just a part of the getting from here to there.
I have watched with interest as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk have lived out their space flight fantasies in public, throwing their billionaire wallets at their youthful dreams, but I look at those flights the way that passenger to the Moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey treated his flight up from earth. It was just another business trip. I’m not sure why they felt it was such a big deal. They weren’t exactly taking Chuck Yeager, Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn or Neil Armstrong risk, were they? I don’t even think in all those years I have ever had a close call on a plane. Plane travel has always struck me as extremely safe and reliable and I believe the record shows that to be a proper sense of it all.
But now I am older and while not really feeble, at least more cautious. My caution runs to not wanting to catch COVID or be a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution. I will pay close attention to how the whole flying experience feels and whether its the same old same old or something entirely new. Unlike other aspects of life that I want to return to normal, I have to admit that my penchant for air travel is definitely less enthusiastic than it used to be. This is not a case of gender-based identity or either chauvinism or feminism. It is about ageism I imagine. We’ll see if this trip changes that or if I am just going to let my fear of flying turn into my preference to stay at home.