As I stepped on the 1 o’clock Chicago-Auckland express, I could feel the cold bite of the Windy City’s gales leeching in from around the jetway’s hood. The stewardess smiled and started to ask if this was my first flight. Looking at my already travel-wearied face she stopped herself. “We’ll make this quickâ€, she said. I offered a brief chuckle in return and found my seat. The cabin was not very deep but a nearly twenty seats wide. Those by the windows were reserved for those with enough interest to pay extra. It was worth it, but it was also a perk that could curdle the stomach.
A short, elderly woman slowly crept in from the jetway, and the stewardess turned serious. Although this mode of transportation wasn’t reserved exclusively for the young, it could have more serious effect on the very old. Arrhythmia, hyper and hypo-tension, impaired equilibrium or lung function were all disqualifiers for the purchase of tickets. Evidently grandma had passed, I mused to myself, though it would be interesting to see her reaction as we burned a trail through the mesosphere.
Takeoff came soon enough, with the familiar whine of turbine engines straining to haul our vehicle up to a smooth launch altitude. Flight procedures: I strapped on my three-point harness and attempted to hide a little slack but the stewardess caught me and cruelly tugged the excess out. Sometimes my gut appreciated the little bit of leeway, and sometimes I just enjoyed the sensation of floating up out of my seat. Next, the oxygen tubes. A clip on my ear measured my blood oxygen and would mercifully dump O2 through the tubes if it dipped too low. Grandma’s tube was checked twice. Personally, I never needed them and hated how much they tickled. But a ticket was a contract, and the tubes stayed or I didn’t fly.
Every flight was different – but they all started the same way: separation. A brief moment of stomach-inverting freefall and then silence as the whine of the turbines disappeared. The broad, swept-winged launch jet veered out of sight through the glass at the end of the row. It would head back to Chicago, ready to lift the next Express up to altitude. A small countdown timer ticked down on the seat back in front of me. The pilot gave us a cheerful but slightly ominous “best wishes†before the countdown reached zero. Then, the rockets ignited.
They were staged for gentle acceleration growth, but a scant minute later we were pushing maximum g-force. A ticket on the Express, the joke went, was a ticket for two: you and the elephant that came to sit on your chest. The countdown timer had morphed into a relaxing breathing-exercise animation. Useful for newcomers, I was sure. I let my head loll to the right to look out at the blue drain from the window. Royal blue, dark blue, navy. Then the stars came out early.
Only two passengers this flight got sick; one had obviously had a large breakfast in spite of explicit instructions to the contrary. The other had drunk too much coffee. Grandma, on the other hand, was solid as a rock. I let my arms drift up, zombie style, trying to picture the talk I would give in Auckland. Stars drifted by the portal, distracting me. How far had we come? I wondered. The Earth must have been unimaginably immense to the earliest humans. Two-hundred years ago, a voyage to the other side of the Earth would have been measured in months, not minutes.
The Earth as I saw it, lolling my head back to the left, was vast – but my scale was still human. Fiji was the length of a finger, the Solomon Islands no larger than the goosebumped pores on my arm. I could almost see the limb of it now, the curving of the Earth off in the distance. I imagined how large the planet would be if it were visible through the seat, through the floor, and stretching out behind me. Oddly enough, it struck me as smaller than it ought; maybe the size of a stadium as you stood at the gate.
Such a small world presented us with a dizzying variety of problems. Virus transmission was the all the rage these days: West Nile in Sydney, Mongolian bird-flu in Brazil. An epidemiological free-for-all. Another was the melting away of geographic borders. I’d heard of those who live in Los Angeles and work in Paris, commuting daily. Chou Rouge à l'Alsacienne for lunch and a Big Mac for dinner. Which country received the income tax? Which country the property tax? The ship started descending more rapidly.
The aluminum skin started creaking and popping, heated by friction with the thickening atmosphere and blistering speed. What would be next? I mused. I had heard about recent experiments in quantum-teleportation; quarks being instantly pulled though the ether to appear far away. Next were atoms, the cells whole. Maybe by the time I was as old as grandma we would be walking though one end of the jetway and out the other already at our destination. So much for jets. So much, then, for nation-states and cultures as we knew them. Imagine an army instantly appearing at your doorstep, or a terrorist arriving with a bomb in the Oval Office.
As we stepped off the ramp into a bright afternoon in New Zealand, a young woman and her daughter brushed past me excitedly. The girl couldn’t have been more than 3, and she smiled broadly as she looked expectantly at the ramp. The mother pointed at someone and ushered her forward. “Gran-ma!†she called out, rushing past a few more beleaguered travelers and up to greet the old woman who had boarded after me. The grandmother, unfazed by our hour-and-a-half ordeal, quickened her pace. Crouching down and hugging the young child, she looked up at her own daughter and whispered breathlessly, “She looks so much like you!â€
The pungent smelled of avgas greeted me as I turned back towards the terminal. A board displayed recent Express arrivals: Chicago, London, Helsinki and Praugue. On the bus ride from the airport I smiled at the glimmering harbor on the horizon. If we could survive from 90 days to 90 minutes, I figured, we could survive whatever else human ingenuity had in store.