Dream Trips
For the first time in the eight days since we've
returned from our lovely junket to Hong Kong, I was able to sleep more or less
normally last night. As you and Otto (the dog) know from my frequent nocturnal
mumblings, trips to the bathroom, and shufflings around the bedroom, the jet
lag of the past week has been miserable. Every night, a roiling marathon of
travel dreams has played inside my head. You know the genre: I'm in a Chinese
airport, with too much luggage, trying to catch a plane home and/or use a pay
phone with improper currency. But today I made it until dawn before having a
single, ugly airport dream. The dream: Friends (the Goldbergs!) convinced us to
use their tickets home from Asia on a different airline from the one on which
we already were booked. The horrible part about this wasn't the Anxiety of
Uncertainty (would the airline honor the tickets?), it was how reality impinged
upon the dream: Shortly after our plane took off, it began a slow-motion plunge
into the drink. The icy Atlantic. Near Nantucket, where we vacation every
summer. Yes, somewhere over Long Island, doomed EgyptAir Flight 990 collided
with my jet-lag dreams, and as I sit here this morning, the nightmare of air
travel permeates my waking.
This should be no surprise since the EgyptAir crash
permeated my waking yesterday. What a bizarre day. The children getting into
their ghoulish costumes to celebrate Halloween, the neighborhood teeming with
kids dressed up as Death ... and everywhere around us the ghoulish news of 217
people perished at sea.
Still, I am surprised at the degree to which it's truly
unsettling old hard-bitten cynical me. I am not someone who fears flying
(that's your department, right?), but I'm am definitely starting to have second
thoughts. I've always been something of a sucker for technology and have
typically enjoyed an unreasonable trust in all machinery except pay phones. In
fact, when TWA 800 crashed into the ocean not far from where we slept, I was
sure it couldn't have been mechanical error. I figured it had to be terrorists.
We even talked about cranking out another lesser thriller, remember? Prologue:
A case of five Stingers disappears from the back of a U.S. military transport.
Chapter 1: We watch as terrorists, sitting on their trawler off the coast of
New York, sight in on a jumbo jet, ready, aim, and fire one of those Stingers,
blowing the silver tube of humans out of the sky. Chapter 2: Troubled, maverick
National Transportation Safety Board Agent Johnny Manhattan's beeper goes off
assigning him and, later, gorgeous, straight-arrow, divorcee FBI Agent Delores
Dunray, to the case ...
But TWA 800 appears to have suffered from a design
flaw, a fatal crack in its technology. Was it a technical glitch that caused
the jet crash of Payne Stewart and friends last week? Too soon to say. Will it
also be the culprit in the EgyptAir crash? I much prefer the
terrorists-taking-out-an-airplane scenario to human error or Bad Technology.
Don't you?
