Phobic

(Beautiful photo by Jordan McClements)

I listened to Garrison Keillor's voice as it looped through the speakers in my car last week, reading a poem by Barbara Bloom. It was about a plane ride from Vancouver to Edmonton: "But outside, it's like we're in heaven," the poet says, "with the puffy white clouds,/sun playing along the surface/ so bright it's almost impossible to look,/ but I look anyway." I was struck by a sense of envy. Does Bloom fully appreciate, I wondered to myself, what a gift it is to be able to wax so poetic about flight?

I am afraid to fly. This is an embarrassing and hard confession. I pride myself on being a reasonable person, someone who can look the hard, cold truth of the world in the eyes and deal with it head on. I prefer scientific facts to the blind faith of religion. I tell my kids all the time that they need to just buck up and do the hard thing, the thing that scares them.

And yet.

There's something about my problem with flying that goes beyond mere fear and enters the more dubious realm of phobia. It is so far beyond anything resembling rational thought that when I am deep in the trenches of it, I am barely recognizable to myself. Go ahead, just try to tell me that I have a greater chance of dying while I drive to the grocery store. Just attempt to go over the physics behind flight, the maintenance level of the planes, the statistics about crashes. I know all this, and then some. It's a knowledge that does nothing for me when I make my way through that tubular gateway onto the plane, my heart racing as though I am walking a plank that will end with a free fall into a bottomless blue sea. It's a knowledge that does nothing for me in the final months before a planned trip, when every few hours I have to close my eyes against visions of a flaming jet barrelling landward, of my children left motherless, of some FAA investigator shaking his head when he finds one of my shoes where it landed precariously in some bush, entering it into his evidence log.

The truth is, I would love to enjoy flying. It has all the hallmarks of something wonderful. The ethereal view as you soar above the earth. The buildings and roads in miniature, like playthings: a writer's storyboard. The hours when you are forced to sit, just sit, and do things I'd give anything to have hours at a time to do: read, write, knit. Sleep, even. And my double dose of Xanax, while it usually succeeds in getting me on the plane, doesn't even come close to allowing me to enjoy the experience the way I know I should be able to.

And so here I am, scheduled to board a plane in nine days. The week after my father died, my mom asked if I'd like to join her on a quick weekend visit to my younger brother in Southern California. I thought to myself: short flight, no layover, new Xanax prescription. I hesitated. And then this thought: my dad, in the ground, where we're all going to end up anyway, whether we take risks or not. And I told her to book the flight. I've spent the last week trying to come up with any excuse not to go. It would be awesome, for example, if I came down with the stomach flu and couldn't make the trip. Or if Chris had to work all weekend and couldn't watch the kids after all. But I know I'll get on the plane, and it will be hell, and then we'll land and I will feel what I always do: nothing but sheer joy that I've done what seemed impossible, and bliss that I defied all odds, that I have come through tremendous peril unscathed.

Once I flew anxiety free. Only once. It was the first year of my marriage. I had spent four days at the bedside of my dying grandfather, and watched him take his last breaths. Eight hours later, I was on a plane heading back to Arizona in order to teach my evening class. I was so overwhelmed by sadness that it completely upstaged my old phobia. That was my first taste of real grief: the visceral ache in my chest, the breathless shock of loss. Given the choice, I would have traded that pain in for the panic I normally felt. In the sky somewhere above California, we passed through a cloud. I looked out the window, and thought that no matter how high that plane ascended, we wouldn't reach my grandfather.

Heaven has nothing to do with the sky.