7:45 flight to La Guardia from Chicago, Spirit Airline
Blue haze and rotund clouds shield us from the turf…and the surf, below. Wild winds work in unity with the airplane’s system, encouraging us to our destination. We elevate as if on ladders and mythical bean stalks. We sit close to strange neighbors as we consume bottled water. and gain knowledge from tawdry novels. The aisle of the plane is empty, but narrow, so we still don’t want to take the uncoordinated walk to the bathroom. Even the small child that requires its usage chooses to remain in his seat and wet himself, because he doesn’t want to fall down on his way to the lavatory.
Some of us read the safety information every single time –as if conditions of safety will change swiftly and without warning. Every precaution is an active challenge against your life, and reading the material –knowing it –is the best way to guarantee that neither the plane nor the conditions will betray you. The animated stewardesses act as agents –actresses– for the airline, performing the “safety dance” in the head and mid-section of the plane. When, we are informed, and those women are exhausted in their rehearsed explanations, they depart, and it is insisted that we convert ourselves and our technology to “airplane mode.”
On the cashless flight everything costs more than two dollars and can only be acquired with the use of a debit or a credit card. Unless we were smart enough to bring food and beverage with us, we starve and we are parched until the plane is perched on the LaGuardia runway, Central Terminal C.
The plane ride is short, and even the brief layover in Detroit doesn’t wean us from the knowledge that in a short few hours, we will be in the outskirts of NYC, waiting to bus/shuttle toward a more active part of one of those bustling boroughs. When we fly over the city, just before we land, we do a mass crane toward the window, and for a second, we all belonged to New York City.