Halfway Across the Pacific
Photo by Teresa Moorleghen
One or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning – some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life
too much,” it said,
and vanished into the world.
From “One or Two Things”
— Mary Oliver
It was a cold and blustery January morning when our plane took off from Seattle. Rain drops slid diagonally across the oval windows as the plane lifted up above that beautiful green city of lakes and bridges. My belly sank as the plane pushed up against gravity, but my heart was happy. I was sitting next to a beloved new friend on my way to see an old friend that I had known since high school. A sense of comfort settled in my bones as I sat between these two friends in time—like bookends on the shelf of my favorite stories. I felt snug here. For more years than I would like to admit, I had suffered from a longing to be somewhere different from where I actually was but, on this winter day, that feeling was nowhere to be found. Eighteen months earlier, my mom had died from cancer and I had sat with her as she took her last breath. It felt like winter had lasted for three years and this trip was a gift to myself after a long stretch of withstanding…a trip to Hawaii, that green and rocky confetti of islands in the middle of the Pacific, created from fire.
We considered ourselves lucky to be seated in the emergency exit row. This meant my tall travel companion would have extra leg room—the second-class version of first class. Lucky us. Our seats were on the right side of the plane, about half way back, near the wing. All I had to do over the next six hours was to sit there. Oh my god. Sit, read, talk, even nap if I wanted. Stare at the water. The last time I had traveled to Hawaii was with a toddler and a six-month-old who didn’t sleep the entire time. The unwinding began. I grabbed his knee, put my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes.
We were headed west in the late morning which meant we were following the sun. Once we broke through the clouds engulfing the coast of Washington, the sun was high in the sky. Over the course of the flight, it would sink ever so slowly and then appear to remain in the same place above the horizon—hovering like a giant orange lantern over the Pacific Ocean, barely moving at all as the sky progressed towards dusk. For a while it seemed that we were just slightly faster than the Earth’s turn away from it.
About halfway through this do-nothing glide over the ocean, I was looking out the window and all I could see was blue. I felt spaciousness and an inkling of calm. And then suddenly I felt the plane lurch and noticeably drop in elevation. My stomach sank and, in the same instant, all of the lights went out. The blood of Irish stoics runs deep in my veins, but this was a moment to take pause. I looked out the window—blue in all directions. Blue, blue, blue. No land, anywhere. Not a single solid thing in sight except for this plane. Just water and air. The blue that soothed just seconds ago now became the watery place of our imminent demise. No solid ground to offer an emergency landing, anywhere. We were three hours into a six-hour flight.
I looked at my friend with wide eyes. “They train for this,” he said, completely calm. “They train to pilot a plane with one engine. It will be fine.” I looked out the window at the blue world around me. Ironically, even within this new situation, there was nothing that could be done but to sit and to continue to do nothing. But still, a mind can wander.
What does a plane do when it hits the water? Would it break into pieces? Would it stay in tact but then take a nose dive into the deep like a submarine going nowhere? Could the pilot land on the water like they did on the Hudson River? When do I use my seat as a flotation device like they depict in the glossy diagrams in the seat pocket in front of me? What happened to that plane they searched for recently in the South Pacific but never found?
A few minutes later, a voice came across the loudspeaker and said, “Good afternoon, passengers. You may have noticed some movement in the plane. The pilots are looking into it and will notify us shortly.” About ten minutes later (or ten hours?) the pilot made an announcement. Using the cool-as-cucumber voice training that I am sure they receive, he explained, “Well, folks, we have lost the use of one of the engines of the plane. But, there is no need to worry, we have another working engine that should get us to Hawaii without any issues. We will be rerouted to Honolulu where there is a longer runway. Again, there is no need to worry. Please sit back and enjoy the rest of the flight.” By then the lights were back on and it was apparent that we were not plummeting to our deaths in the ocean, but continuing to glide in our tiny metal container 30,000 feet above the ocean. I didn’t even hear anyone crying. Why is no one freaking out? They quickly rolled out the refreshment tray.
After the announcement, it was eerily quiet in the cabin. Am I surrounded by zombies or is there really nothing to worry about? What really is there to do in such a moment but hope and believe that the precious metal of this incredible human invention will continue to process the ancient juice of fossils and turn it into enough the energy to keeps this tube full of humans aloft and barreling through the air? And wrecking the atmosphere as we travel to far off places. I looked out at the beautiful blue sky with the orange lantern sun as a vodka tonic warmed my throat. I held his leg, that miracle that is a human’s quadriceps. It is an amazing part of the human anatomy, where the leg muscles come together and then branch apart to attach around the knee and into the calf muscles. I thought of the rock faces these muscles had ascended, glaciers traversed, the rough skin of his hands. I thought of the things I have done, of sleeping in a field in Spain, hitchhiking across California and Ireland, and somehow this soothed me. I had seen this place called Earth; I had done so many things. When I thought of my kids my head extended sideways in pressurized panic, so I tried not to think about what their lives would be like if I was no longer there to take care of them. There was nothing to be done about it in this moment.
There is a scene in one of my favorite movies, Until the End of the World (directed by Win Wenders), where the two main characters are flying over the Australian outback in a small plane and the engine dies. Everything goes quiet like when you turn off a boat motor and start to sail. In the movie, the K.D. Lang song, “Calling All Angels”, starts to play and they coast over the outback unsure of their fate, the shadow of the small plane traversing the red sandy soil below them. In this plane above the Pacific, I am reminded of the feeling of that scene, which is some strange combination of serenity and the possibility of impending doom. Which way will it go? In the movie they have the potential of solid ground to land on, but for us there is only water in all directions.
What would my life mean if it were to stop today?
After the Bloody Marys and vodka tonics were passed out, the flight attendant came to our row and gave us specific directions. She said, “It is your job to not let anyone try to use this exit door.” I gulped. My friend nodded.
As I sat there trying not to think of the worst possible outcome, I also knew that planes do disappear into the ocean. People you love die and bad shit happens out of the blue—right out of the beautiful blue skies. I no longer felt immune to this as I had when I was younger. I knew a mother in Seattle who lost her children in the plane that crashed into the ocean on its way back from Mexico many years ago. She never rearranged their rooms, and made 5 and 7-pointed stars every year (the ages that they were) to remember them. People get cancer and die, and kids get diagnosed with life-long diseases that have no cure. Being up above the ocean with no power over the situation, I felt no illusion that I was immune to tragedy, whether I believed and prayed to a god or not, but I also felt that there was no use in panicking over my death.
The flight proceeded as if nothing was strangely different. All of my fellow humans seemed to adjust to this uncertainty quietly or were very good at hiding their inner turmoil. The sun eventually beat us to sunset and the sky grew darker. A couple of hours later, the captain came back on and said, “Good evening, everyone. We will be arriving in Honolulu in about half an hour. I wanted to let you know that emergency vehicles will be meeting us on the runway as we make our arrival.” As we began to make our descent towards the island of Oahu, the captain came back on and said, “Well, folks, we are making our descent into the Honolulu airport. At this time, we are going to dim the lights so that your eyes can adjust to the darkness. Emergency vehicles will be meeting us on the runway. We ask that all passengers remove earbuds and turn off all devices, and that everyone remains present.” No captain has ever said this on a plane that I’ve been on. What does this mean? Is it code for we might crash on the runway? Remain present for what? Will we then need to open this emergency exit and slide like those cartoon figures down an inflatable ramp?
It is dark by the time we approach the airport and I am squeezing the quadriceps and practicing my breathing. Is it a good sign that we all appear to be calm, or a bad sign? I know there is nothing to be done but to stay present. The wheels hit the runway and the rear of the plane pulls to one side. This pull to one side is called a “yaw” in airplane speak. The plane lists strongly to the right and I hold my breath as we are still going very fast. No one screams and no fires ignite. Eventually, the plane slows…and we land. The plane straightens out in its path and the cabin erupts in applause.
We step out of the plane and the gravity of the Earth has never felt so good against my own leg muscles. My feet touch the exit hallway with joy in my heart and I run my fingers along the woven fabric of the walls. Not far from the gate is an open bar in the middle of the walkway, and I lay my head on the wood of the bar like an altar. I want to kiss it. Medical personnel are walking to the gate and they meet a passenger there who needs assistance. Was it heart trouble? A quiet panic attack? I feel for them. And then I have the best pint of beer of my life, shared with a new friend whom I have never known before. They, too, have just been half way over the Pacific with one engine and made it to Honolulu alive. The three of us talk like we have known each other forever.
The conundrum we then face is that to get to our planned destination we have to get on another plane in about an hour, and hope that this next plane functions and gets us there. What crazy species of ape are we that novelty and adventure are so important that we somewhat casually risk our lives to see new and different places? We finish our beers and say good-bye to the new best friend we will never see again, and get on another plane to the Big Island. The Kona runway is short, the descent is steep and dramatic, and we arrive again, alive. Amazing.
The following day we make it to our final destination along the black lava rocks of the Kona coast, and I am reunited with my old dear friend, my cosmic twin, whom I have known since high school art class. There, gathered with a small group of others, we shake our heads over the fact that the experience my friend and I had had the night before came only one day after the false nuclear attack, when panicked parents thrust their children into storm drains and people feared that Kim Jong-un may have finally lost it. Some agreed that flying over the ocean with one engine seemed scarier than the false nuclear attack had been. As the warm air blew in from the open walls of the lanai, another woman, perhaps slightly stoned, looked out at the blue, blue water where humpbacks can regularly be seen swimming, sighed and said, “Well, maybe we’ve all died and gone to Paradise.”
And, at that moment in time, it did not feel completely improbable.
Photography by S. Martin unless otherwise stated