He’d done both his solo and his solo cross-country. “You think that now, but one day you’ll beg me to take you up.” “I will never, ever fly with you,” I’d announced before his first lesson. He believed that he’d become so awesome and inspiring that I’d have no choice but to relax and enjoy it. But that didn’t make me wrong.Ĭhip believed that his learning to fly was going to cure my fears. “You just never paid attention in science class,” Chip always said, like I was simply under-informed. When it was Man against Nature, my money was on Nature every time. Me, I’d always suspected that chaos was stronger than order. He had an inherent faith in the order of the universe and the principles of physics and the right of mankind to bend those principles to its will.

He never thought twice about flying at all-or doing anything scary, for that matter, like scuba diving or bungee jumping. If I’d thought about it, I might have paused to wonder how my boyfriend, the impossibly fit and charming Charles Philip Dunbar, could be one hundred percent perfect for me in every possible way-and also be such an air travel enthusiast. Which is why I was wearing a strapless black sundress. Dating him so seriously, in fact, that on this particular Saturday, as we headed out to celebrate my not-yet-but-almost-official new dream job, I could not shake the feeling that he was also just about to ask me to marry him. Now, years later, I was dating-seriously dating-a guy who was just days away from getting his pilot’s license. I should have been long over it.īut I never could lose the feeling that “flying” and “crashing” were kind of the same thing. I’d even once interned at an office right next to an international airport and watched planes go up and come down all day long with nary a problem. I’d read the statistics about how flying was the safest of all the modes of transportation-from cars to trains to gondolas. Just as impossibly, I survived many more trips after that, never hitting anything worse than turbulence. “I thought I was the brains,” I said, nudging her. “That’s why I’m the brains of the family.” “We’ll just be dead.” Then she snapped her fingers. And if we do crash…” She paused so I could catch her drift.Ī nod.

“Because if we don’t crash, we won’t need one. I was a freshman, and she was a senior, which gave her a lot of authority. One night after lights out, I snuck to Kitty’s room and climbed into her bed. The phrase “flying to Hawaii” translated in my head to “drowning in the ocean.” The week before the trip, I found myself planning out survival strategies. I dreaded the flight from the moment they told us until well after we were home again. Why go up when gravity clearly wanted us to stay down?īack in high school, my parents took my big sister, Kitty, and me to Hawaii one year. Ever since I was old enough to think about it.

THE BIGGEST IRONY about that night is that I was always scared to fly.Īlways.

Katherine center how to walk away