Stolen from Death

1:00 P.M.  October 17, 1989 Traveling with two other board members from The Make-A-Wish Foundation, our trip began with a lengthy airport delay that seemed like an eternity.  The hold-up on our departure was waiting for the mechanics to figure out what was wrong with the plane.  The idea that a distraction from my circumstances would amuse me was failing so far.  Small community airports don’t have backup aircraft, so you have no choice but to wait for the airlines to fly in a replacement.  It was a short plane ride to catch the next flight, where I could finally settle into a good book and enjoy the rest of the trip to Phoenix.  We departed an hour and forty-five minutes late.  Passing in haste through the next airport so as not to miss our connection,  I noticed at each television screen that there was a quiet frenzy, groups of waiting passengers huddled closely without a word among them, staring at the television monitors.  I was thinking about how impressive it was that so many people were interested in baseball.  I stopped to catch a score near my departure gate, only to hear the story unfold of a large-scale earthquake that hit the San Francisco Bay area, home to that year’s baseball World Series, which was in process.  They showed the frantic exodus of thousands of fans fleeing the baseball park on the screen.  It gave me chills to think of the massive crowds of people rushing forward into the fear of uncertainty.  As the gate attendant announced our boarding order, she hesitated, then apologetically announced: “Due to mechanical difficulties, the flight to Phoenix will be delayed while we wait for another plane.” Another hour and a half later, we finally boarded the plane.  I noticed several airline captains sitting in first class as I entered the plane. There was some confusion getting to my seat at the back of the aircraft. A young couple wanted to sit together, and a mother and father with an infant from France, who spoke little English, were also separated, and the mother looked distressed.  In these situations, I naturally enter accommodation mode and insert myself into the equation without anyone’s permission.  I asked three rows of passengers to re-arrange their assigned seating to accommodate the young couples, including an airline pilot and myself.  As we settled into our new seating arrangement, the pilot next to me remarked as he smirked, “I hope we don’t have an accident; they wouldn’t be able to properly ID this third of the plane’s passengers!” Tired from this marathon of travel frustrations, I abandoned my idea of reading peacefully, asked for a bourbon and water, and began conversing with the pilot.  We settled into our seats with our cocktails and began to visit.  The eight extra pilots were scheduled to fly into San Francisco airport, but the earthquake changed that itinerary.  The airports were closed and re-routed to Arizona for the interim.  He was uncomfortable explaining this to me because he had regressed into the earlier part of the day on his route home when he was told of the earthquake.  Channeling through various control towers to get any news, his worst fears were confirmed. The quake had damaged his neighborhood where his wife and daughter would have been at that time of day, and there was no news to affirm their whereabouts. The telephone lines were down. A few bourbons later, most passengers were asleep at this late hour as we flew over the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. While talking to me, in mid-sentence, the pilot brutally grabbed my arm and stared closely at my startled face. I thought I was looking at a madman, for he had started gasping, “We’re going to die … we’re going to die!” A loud thud from beneath our seats made our acceleration hesitate in mid-air, taking all the sounds of the plane with it. “Was that the landing gear?” I asked as I tried to move my left limb, which he had pinned to the armrest.  Gravely, he looked at me, squeezing now even harder into my forearm, cutting off the circulation, and my fingers were going numb—time folded into itself as I waited for him to answer me. “No, we just lost power to the left generator,” he murmured under his bourbon breath. I’m no mechanic, but this didn’t sound good at 35,000 feet. Terror sunk into my mind as I questioned being scared of death. “Is this it? This is how I die?” Snapping me out of those thoughts, I felt a wave of calm and the light touch of the unseen hand of my brother Allen.  Fingering the six-pence I wore around my neck that he sent me for my 13th birthday, I heard, “Remember we were lifeguards, you know what to do, you got this, go.” Fearlessness wasn’t about not being frightened; it was going through the terror and uncertainty, leaving the fright behind.  Releasing my arm, the pilot jumped up and ran to the back of the plane, our nearest exit.  My lifeguard training took over before I could think. I was standing in the aisle next to our seats, grasping at whatever I could find in the dimness of the cabin.  The plane started a rapid descent in a nosedive motion, and the sudden drop in air pressure made it almost impossible to swallow with the weight of heaviness in my ears.  The first noise I could identify was the wails of the infant child of the young couple from France.  I turned towards the sound in the blackness as the emergency lights on the aisle floor started to flicker and illuminated the shadows of the terrified mother and the sleeping passengers.  Then, a brief message came over the intercom system: “Flight attendants, please take your seats,” followed by dead silence. “Wait a minute, what about us”? I shouted.  My mouth froze open when I realized we were on our own. Quickly, I started shaking people awake, trying to be calm but having to shout to be heard, “Wake up! “Others who began to wake up began to do the same with the passengers next to them. Turning back and climbing up the aisle against the lack of pressure created a vortex, which felt more forceful than the eye of a storm, and I asked myself why I was traveling in a dress and high heels.  As quickly as the plane had gone into a nosedive, it leveled out, and the overhead reading lights came back on.  When I reached the young Parisian family, they were embraced in a rocking motion, and the husband was trying to soothe the infant’s now frightening screams.  I knelt on the empty seat in front of them and started gesturing to hold the baby’s nose by demonstrating as if I had my own.  The mother wildly shook her head with gasps of French arguing with me.  Horrified, I realized she thought I was telling her to smoother her baby, perhaps saving it from a terrible death we might all soon meet?  Putting on my best impromptu mime show, exaggerating jesters to my ears and then to my nose back and forth behind my anxious smile, the father got it.  Between the awful cries and the infant’s struggle to breathe, the father pinched its nose, immediately stifling its cries, and then he did the same to his wife as she began to cry.