my sister's knees
The Palonegro airport lies on a flattened hill dwarfed by the scrabbles and vertebrae of the cordillera -- a death-trap, a speck of gray in a riddle of roads and greenery: the Bucaramanga airport. My home town.I don’t travel well.
I don’t travel well, nobody does. Some are better at it than others, but if you ask your friends, the people you’ve known long enough, they’ll tell you about their hell-ride, the bad flight, the turbulence, lost luggage, fights, dyspeptic flight attendants, or unexplainable heebie-jeebies, the last being the worst because no clear reason can be given, just the texture of terror without the text. Everyone, even seemingly fearless travelers, has a bad-flight story.
Here’s mine: landing in Bucaramanga, my home town, the plane shot up after the initial descent, and the pilot told us over the intercom that he had not seen the runway.
Not seeing the runway was a big deal, but what did it was the pilot informing the passengers, informing me, of this foible... Fear of flying, I’ve read, is mostly fear of not being in control. So? Two planes had crashed in Colombia that year, one belonging to an American airline, one crash a month after the other.
That wasn’t why I didn’t go back this summer.
I’ve been terrified of planes for four years. That hasn’t stopped me. It wouldn’t. I keep coming back. Colombian airlines are very liberal with their in-flight drinks.
My homesickness, however, is now tempered by relief at not having to fly, but of course that relief is soured by guilt about feeling even the least bit happy about not going home, which inextricably makes me wish I were back home, and then I remember I don’t have to fly, so I’m relieved. We could go on.
It has been a season of funerals and breakdowns, this summer, a heavy wave of unhappiness washing over the people I know in Orlando, maybe over the city in general. Brushfires have sprung up. Animals in a new theme park are dying, a reverse Noah’s ark. Convenience store hold-ups now require more hostages than ever. It hasn’t rained. Tele-evangelists crawl out of their radio stations and UHF crannies, into campuses and street-corners, and their gospel is shriller, more bitter, more urgent. One of these fellows hired a hitman to do away with another, his lover’s husband. Summer makes for impatient people in lines. Complaints departments are overwrought. Everyone has something to complain about.