Vectors

Photo by Divyadarshi Acharya on Unsplash

Seven miles above the expanse of Hudson Bay, 32h is watching the sunset. The plane chases darkness on its way east toward Amsterdam, where it will land at 9 a.m.—midnight in the minds of its Portland, Oregon, passengers. The sun’s rays cast long purple-orange tendrils across the water, glowing the ice of Southampton and Coats Island pink. My seatmate sees the spectacle through the dual-pane stretched acrylic that protects them from the force of the five-hundred-mile-per-hour airspeed and arctic temperatures.

Or not. Maybe they’ve got the shade down to watch a movie or attempt a nap. I can’t know. My seat, 32j, is empty.

I’m still on the ground, watching the journey in real time on an app. I’ve been tracking this flight for weeks now, keeping tabs on the flight path as well as the specific aircraft that travels it today, which arrived this morning in Portland from Amsterdam, where it had been flown from Atlanta. From my palm, I can tell the model of the plane, its current speed and altitude, and how much each parameter differs from those originally logged in the flight plan. I know the plane flies at an odd altitude—flight level 370, 37,000 feet—because it tracks eastward. Jets heading west fly at even altitudes as standard practice, so as to avoid collisions.

I can say where along this flight path there are diversion airports and exactly how long the plane will be suspended over the water. I know how many hull loss accidents—the aviatory equivalent of saying a car’s been totaled—this type of aircraft, an Airbus A330-300, has sustained over its three-decade flying career. (Fourteen.)

This is my second time canceling a flight at the very last minute, suitcase packed, rendered by terror unable to steer myself in the direction of the airport—the second time I’ve cobbled together a thin night of what should have been pre-flight sleep by the grace of a friend’s emergency benzos, replaying, in my wakefulness, the scene:

The calm night outside my porthole suddenly unhinged; the steep dive belly-felt and ineffable; the blink-fast shatter of endless ice or ocean water or—when the flight in question was cross-country rather than transoceanic—a mountain’s slope, a stand of trees. Then, never-ending dark.

It started with my father.

My parents were living in St. Augustine, a small tourist town in northeastern Florida. My wanderlust had taken me to the other corner of the country and covid had pinned me there. These were the early days of the pandemic, before the vaccines. My folks were in their seventies, my mother suffering a chronic pulmonary disorder. To fly to them might be to kill them.

So when my father had a stroke in May 2020, I did not come. Mom had told me the news too casually, her voice steady over the phone as I drove back from Mt. Hood, where I’d been foraging with friends—each of us driving separately to avoid the dangers of close-quarters breathing.

Your father’s in the hospital, she said, but don’t worry.

I worried. I listened to him slur his words through the phone; a stray blood clot had taken the whole left side of his body, lips and tongue included. Later, when his care became too much for her to handle, my mother bushwhacked by herself through the decorative plants surrounding his quarantined inpatient facility to peer at him through the glass.

It took him nine months to die, like a birth in reverse. I timed the trip home for a little more than a month after it happened—exactly two weeks after I’d visit Portland’s soaring convention center to wait in a serpentine, six-foot-spaced queue for my second dose of the vaccine.

Booking the flight was familiar, or should have been. I’d spent my twenties all over the place, running away from the real work of finding myself, cleaving to an almost defensive identity as traveler: I’d flown to California and Dublin and Montreal. Three years before the pandemic, I’d sold my car and bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona, naively planning to bop around Europe indefinitely, to find a way around the ninety-day limit for US passport holders in the Schengen Zone.

Instead, homesick and isolated by language barriers, I’d returned to Florida before my allotted time had elapsed. I justified it as a surprise, showing up at my parents’ door on Thanksgiving, delaying the text messages I’d sent at my overnight New York layover so my mother wouldn’t know we were sharing a time zone. After the initial shock, she cried. Are you real? she asked in earnest. Am I dreaming?

The last time I’d been home had also been Thanksgiving—that time just over a year before, in 2019, when none of us could see the global disaster creeping close on the horizon. I hadn’t known it would be the last time I’d see my father alive.

But that afternoon, cross-legged on my bed with my laptop glowing up at me, something made me pause. The cheapest available route, the aggregator told me, was through Alaska Airlines—direct from Portland to Orlando. It would be my first time flying with Alaska, and my first time flying at all since before the shutdown.

I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps a year’s worth of pandemic had made me, in a generalized way, more wary. Perhaps some part of me wanted something to fear.

But I did, and the rabbit hole unfolded beneath me. I opened a new tab. I typed alaska airlines safety.This was early 2021, three years before a mid-flight door-plug blowout—on a plane out of Portland, no less—would put the airline under intense scrutiny. The MAX jets, which had been grounded in March 2019, returned to service in late 2020 with little fanfare; without widely available vaccines, few people were flying anyhow. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, a documentary showcasing the decline of the company’s engineering culture following their merger with McDonnell Douglas, would be released about a year later. As I write this essay in 2024—in the wake of a spate of headlines about near-misses, air traffic control shortages, and turbulence severe enough to injure and even kill passengers—air-travel-safety skepticism is a slightly more popular position. But in that moment, even the impulse to search for such a thing seemed on the order of conspiracy theorizing.

Still, a few clicks later, I found myself staring at the Wikipedia article for Alaska 261—a flight that plummeted into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Los Angeles in January 2000.
The page does not have the word catastrophe listed in bold at the top, like a category; that memory I must have invented. But my recollection of the YouTube simulation of the crash is spot on: an animated specter of the doomed plane sits at the airport in Mexico, pixelated palm trees standing sentinel in the background. After takeoff, we watch from the pilot’s point of view as clouds float by, and soon, the windshield tips precariously toward the deeper blue of the water below. Pertinent parts of the black box recording are silently captioned over the prosaic and steady sound of running jet engines: We’ve lost vertical control of our airplane. . . . We did both the pickle switch and the suitcase handles, and ran away full nose trim down. The camera pans back into the cabin, the army of seatbacks mercifully empty in this artificial world. Folks, we have had a flight control problem up front here. We’re workin’ it. Minutes later, the plane is inverted just feet over the ocean. The captain’s final words flash across the screen, uttered one second before the recording ended: Ah, here we go.

I bought the ticket anyway, giving myself all the comfort I could: the two decades of intervening time, the statistics. The number of planes in the air at any given moment, the literal millions of passengers transported each day. All those times I’d been one of them, with my ritualistic air-travel playlists—Iron & Wine’s “Boy with a Coin,” Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars”—that I made sure were ready to go, downloaded onto my phone.

But on the morning I should have been catapulting my body toward Florida, I threw my suitcase in the car and drove to the Oregon desert instead. On the highway, I thought of my mother grieving alone on the other side of the expanse I would not cross—of how she’d held my father’s hand as he slowly stopped existing. I pictured my plane flying overhead, the first part of its trajectory matching this new one of mine, imagined it crumbling in midair, completing the wild cycle of my anxiety, the debris raining down over the road. Ending me anyway.

At 9:07 a.m. on a hot morning in Larnaca, Cyprus, in August 2005, a Boeing 737 floated off the runway. The plane was headed for Prague via a stopover in Athens. The takeoff was routine. The captain had been flying for thirty-five years, accruing a total of 16,900 flight hours. He’d spent nearly two years of his life behind the yoke.

By 9:14, the pilots knew something was wrong. Two minutes earlier, at an altitude of 12,040 feet, an alarm had sounded in the cockpit. The crew was confused; the alarm was misidentified as a takeoff-configuration warning but was instead a cabin-altitude/pressure warning. The captain contacted maintenance, mentioning that “the cooling ventilation fan lights were off,” an ostensible air conditioning problem. Over the next six minutes, an engineer tried to talk the pilots through it, but by 9:21, the crew was unresponsive.

Helios 522 is one of the most famous aviation disasters in history because it is at once so gruesome and so simple. When the plane had arrived in Larnaca the evening before, the crew advised maintenance that the seal of the right aft service door had frozen, and an engineer inspected it. After the inspection, he checked the plane for leaks—which required flipping the pressurization system from automatic to manual.

The flight to Athens should have taken an hour and forty-five minutes; the plane arrived in the Greek capital’s airspace around 10:40 a.m. as planned, entering a computer-perfect holding pattern. By this time, fighter jets had been dispatched to intercept the aircraft; unable to establish communication, air traffic controllers suspected an act of terrorism.

When the fighter jet pilots got close enough to look into the plane’s windows, they saw oxygen masks dangling in the main cabin. In the cockpit, both pilots were slumped over their controls. It was a ghost plane. The vessel had never pressurized, so the pilots, confused by the homophonic cabin-altitude alarm—and soon thereafter, the brain-fogging effects of hypoxia—hadn’t understood what was happening. They fell limp as the autopilot pulled the plane upward and onward into thinner and thinner air, plunging everyone onboard into a deep and irreversible coma.

Or nearly everyone. At 11:49 a.m., the fighter jet pilots, still tailing the plane, saw someone enter the flight deck. Andreas Prodromou, a junior flight attendant, had been clinging to consciousness with a portable bottle of oxygen. Maybe he guessed the entry code to the cockpit’s reinforced, locked door—a security measure mandated after 9/11. Or maybe he found it, perhaps by searching the unconscious body of the purser. No one alive can know.

Once inside the cockpit, he bleated a frantic “Mayday!” into the radio—which was still set to the Cyprus frequency, and thus inaudible to the controllers below in Athens. It didn’t matter: Everyone already knew the plane was in trouble, and Prodromou was far too late. Just a minute after he took the controls, the left engine flamed out due to fuel depletion. The right one lasted for ten more minutes. Then the plane plunged at more than four hundred miles per hour into the mountains outside Grammatiko. Prodromou, who’d obtained his pilot’s license but was not qualified for the Boeing 737, managed to bank the plane away from the urban center of Athens, saving an untold number of lives on the ground.

While fingers quickly pointed toward Alan Irwin, the chief engineer in charge of running the pressure check—who was eventually convicted of manslaughter, though the case was appealed and Irwin found not guilty—there is still some controversy about who is truly responsible for this crash. The pilots, after all, failed to reset the pressurization system during their multiple flight checks, and to recognize the cabin-altitude warning horn that sounded as they crossed upward into unbreathable air. Boeing, too, came under some fire for recycling an alarm linked to such a critical flight system.

But the simplest version of the story is the most chilling: a single flipped switch led to the deaths of all 121 people on board.

Wikipedia’s list of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft dates back to 1919. Over the months following my father’s death, I turned those blue links purple like it was my job. It was mesmerizing, masturbatory. I stayed up late into the night scouring investigation findings, watching chilling flight simulations on YouTube, and learning the call signs of high-profile accidents—Air France 447, American 191—by heart.

I was looking for a pattern. A way out.

I’m not alone in my thanatotic craving for plane-crash porn, and you don’t have to scour the depths of YouTube to find it. A Canadian show called Mayday: Air Disaster, which airs in the most anodyne setting imaginable—The Weather Channel—has run for twenty-four seasons and counting. Every time there’s a commercial crash, global news outlets cycle the story for days on end. At the time of this writing, the most recent such accident is Voepass 2283, which entered an uncontrollable flat spin just short of its scheduled landing in Sao Paulo, Brazil. ABC, CBS, and CNN have all publicized the horrific cell-phone footage of the plane drifting down like a winged seed before it crashes in a residential neighborhood in Vinhedo.

Still, like any secret worry stone: the shame.

I started writing this essay in Bend, Oregon, where I’d driven myself once again as my plane outpaced me overhead. I should have been at a writing workshop in Europe and had taken a week off work for it. Instead, I spent the time alone in an Airbnb, panicking.

I’d gushed about the workshop, which I’d had to apply for, to my nonliterary colleagues as an accomplishment. I’d waxed euphoric with friends on my plethora of extracurricular plans in Amsterdam: the Anne Frank House, whose tickets were in such high demand that I had to wake up at 1 a.m. to snag them when they went on sale at 10 a.m. local six weeks before my visit; Electric Ladyland, a museum of fluorescence I was planning to visit under the influence of the psychedelic truffles widely available in the city’s “coffee shops”; a day trip to see the tulip fields, just then in bloom, an hour outside of town. Even as I recounted my itinerary and watched nonrefundable reservation fees fly out of my checking account, I worried. As I drove east out of Portland, passing first the airport and then the city line, I turned over excuses in my head. Having to explain on my first day back at work that I’d changed my plans at the last minute for mental health reasons was so much worse than the wasted money.

I knew I was far likelier to die by meteor strike or drowning in my bathtub or driving. I knew about the redundancies, the contingency plans; about ETOPS and TCAS and MELs. I knew that, statistically, I’d have to fly every day for ten thousand years before I’d be involved in a fatal plane crash. I drove to a park near Portland International and watched from the ground to see for myself: the planes land and land and land.

But then.

My father was afraid of airplanes. He was afraid of many things. When I was growing up, our home was an Easter egg arsenal: handguns hidden in the kitchen drawer, the laundry room, the bedside table. A tiny one tucked into a wicker basket by the front door.

We lived in South Florida, the third house from the end of a dead-end street along the Intracoastal Waterway. My bedroom was in a corner of the house, so I slept between twin picture windows, the muffled sounds of the subtropical night leaking through the glass: cricket song and drunken revelry from the tavern across the water. We had an alarm system—which dinged annoyingly every time a door or window was opened, foiling any chance I had for adolescent escapades—but I knew from early on it was irrelevant. If someone really wanted to get you, my father said to me, they could just break that glass and step in.

When I was still small enough to hold hands at the mall, my father made me jump over the last step as the escalator finished its ascension, warning that if my shoelace got stuck, my foot would be sucked into mechanical oblivion. He swung me midair over the metal sewer grates I was still young enough to call grapes—what if I fell through? Later, he cautioned me against walking between parallel-parked cars: If the parking brake gave or there were an untimely swerve from oncoming traffic, my legs would be crushed to uselessness.
If. If. If.

By the time I was twelve, I had a full-blown anxiety disorder, complete with panic attacks and prescription medication. I remember the moment it began. My parents and I were crossing the Sunshine Skyway in our little canvas-top Jeep. The bridge soars 180 feet over Lower Tampa Bay. My father, from his vantage in the passenger seat, noticed the guardrails: They were low, he thought. Too low. And we were traveling so fast, so high above the water.

He started to panic.

Pull over! he shouted at my mother—who always drove, due to her relative cool-headedness and sturdier attention span.

I can’t, she said. She couldn’t. There was no shoulder. We were already on the bridge.

Crouched in the backseat, the canvas top whipping relentlessly around me in the wind our motion made, something in me quickened.

Yes, I pleaded, joining my father’s chorus. We have to pull over. We have to stop.

We can’t, my mother said again. Steady. Measured.

By the time we’d reached the other side, I’d learned a new kind of fear—a grown-up and insidious one.

It worked like a spore, regenerating itself in unpredictable ways. It manifested broadly, turned me inward. (Probably, in making an astute observer of me, it made me a writer. Look, fear tells you. Look again.)

But the main effect was withdrawal. I missed so much of sixth grade that I was saved from being held back only by the grace of my straight As. I changed schools for seventh, the first in a series of attempts to reinvent myself that would persist well into adulthood. I fumbled my way through high school chronically terrified, wearing my black eyeliner and wielding my poetry-filled notebooks like armor. I made snarky remarks from the shadow of whoever was my best friend at the time—invariably someone louder and more popular than me, someone more externally readable as present. In college, I replaced the best-friend figure with my first serious boyfriend—and less than a month after we broke up, my second.

I was never alone, and always.

I spent my twenties systematically running at everything that scared me—failing, of course, to outrun myself in the process. I was determined to earn back my life, though I’d yet to learn what, exactly, that life meant. I drove across the country by myself, then turned around and did it again, hiking in remote wildernesses and eating in nice restaurants the same way: solo. I moved to a new city where I knew no one. I got on the goddamn airplane, no matter how hard my heart beat, again and again and again.

Every few weeks, I listened to my father’s voice pour worriedly through my cell phone speaker as I updated my parents on my adventures.

I’m so proud of you, he’d say. But I wish you wouldn’t.

By the time I was thirty, I thought I’d conquered my fear. At the very least, I could get on an airplane with no trouble. I’d amassed a string of travel destinations and experiences, was seemingly at home wherever I went. It took me a while to realize that my fear had simply transmuted again: although I could run freely, I was always running. My next challenge was to tolerate stillness.

I’d started that process when my father died. I’d landed in Portland with plans to stay just months before the pandemic forced my hand. But in the moment of his passing—my mother’s name flashing on my cell phone screen as I sat three thousand miles away in my redbrick apartment—the combination of apprehension and morbid excitement I’d felt as a child during hurricane season—his fear, our fear—bubbled back to the surface. The frantic clamor to stop the car, to come down from the bridge, to control the situation: It had been waiting all along. It found me anew from all the way across the country, inhabited me like a ghost—like his last words to me: Here. Hold on to this.

When I met Andrew, I’d just gotten back to Portland. After torturing myself for six months about it—lying awake at night, imagining all the time and energy and money it would take to drive six thousand round-trip miles, comparing it to the looped vision through an imagined porthole of the quickly approaching ground—I’d finally driven to Florida to grieve with my mother. I watched every painstaking mile between us transpire up close. It took me a month, that trip: a week’s worth of continent each way (five-plus hours, if I had flown it) and two weeks to reckon the loss. To hold my mother’s hand while we watched Jeopardy! To stand in the room my father had died in once he’d been sent home on hospice, silver-streaked hairbrush and mouthless teddy bear silent on the dresser, guarding the place where his hospital bed had stood.

Our first date was more like recognition than acquaintance: We were both artists, both originally from Florida, and each had an extensive, peripatetic history of traveling and moving, of starting again. I walked away feeling felled and giddy.

Fourteen months later, I sat across from him in our living room, curled into the couch, tripping on mushrooms. It was daytime, and he was on his laptop, editing music. Andrew, who’d included such travels in his roster of twenty-something adventures, had introduced me, at my request, to psychedelics—which I’d always been curious about but, of course, too scared to try. Now I was having my first solo trip, and he was serving as sober sitter.

It was late January, and the rose bushes outside our picture window spread skeletal toward the sky, screeching against the glass with the wind. I watched their shadows against the far wall. The second anniversary of my father’s death was approaching in March. Everything ends, I thought. My body felt weighted and weightless at once.

I turned to Andrew, who looked up to meet my gaze. Seeing the question in my eyes, he pulled the headphones from his ears.

“What do you do about fear?” I asked.

He smiled. “You sound like you’re on mushrooms.”

“I know,” I said. “But . . . it’s hard. Fear is the problem. It limits us. But it also”—

I thought of seatbelts and expiration dates and the helmet he’d insisted I buy with my bicycle. I thought of the time we’d hiked together to a high ridge in the Columbia River Gorge in winter, the gusts I thought threatened to blow his slight form over, of holding him back when he’d wanted to stand on the farthest outcropping of the rock, the most precipitous ledge.
—“it also keeps us safe.”

Aviation terminology is co-opted from the maritime—the language used to describe the first way we devised to cross an ocean. We board the plane, stepping past the cockpit and into the cabin. The crew calls the lead pilot Captain. Pilot itself predates aviation by a long stretch: It comes, by way of medieval Latin, from the Greek pēdon: oar, rudder. Navigator.

It filters into our everyday speech. We call the person in the passenger seat our copilot; we say we’re taking off when it’s time to leave a party; we’re so exhausted the next day, we’re running on autopilot—we had a rough landing.

Or we’re flying by the seat of our pants: acting without extensive preparation, making decisions as we go. In aviation, flying by the seat of one’s pants is to fly by physical feel, without the aid of navigational instruments. It can be dangerous. In foul weather or darkness, without the guideline of the horizon, what feels like forward motion might actually be circular—and a tightening circle, by sheer virtue of its physics, will funnel an aircraft down and down. The dynamic is common enough to have a name: the graveyard spiral.

When someone is acting just short of recklessly, fighting to go beyond the defined boundaries of some situation, we say they’re pushing the envelope—an engineering idiom popularized by test pilots. An aircraft’s flight envelope is its set of limits: the airspeed, weight, and altitude at which a plane, given its build, can safely fly. To push the envelope is to approach these limits, sometimes even to surpass them. That’s the entire purpose of the test pilot: to see what happens. But the consequences of such pushing can be deadly. Planes traveling outside their flight envelopes can stall, dive, break up in flight. Disintegrate. The triangle traced at the top of the envelope chart is known as the coffin corner.

No wonder we keep this sea-faring terminology in our mouths, fall back on its metaphors. This is the technology that shrank the world, that gave us the globe—that tens of thousands of people have died devising. Without envelope-pushing, without leaning into danger, we’d never get anywhere. That’s the knife-edge of fear: We must push against it to live; for the same reason, we must heed its warning.

And we must know, too, where to turn when our precautions prove inadequate. Mayday is a phonetic borrowing of the French m’aidez: help me. An outstretched hand.

In Lost & Found, Kathryn Schulz recounts the implosion-like loss of her father. Death is “the most common of all losses, repeated every hour of every day since the dawn of history,” she admits. “But viewed up close, it is shocking, a whole universe flashing out of existence.”

As my own father’s death collapsed in on me, my anxiety changed at a molecular level. My fear was no longer theoretical. Until this moment, even my worst fears had mostly been about bad feelings: I was afraid of the claustrophobia I’d feel when the plane’s door closed, of the panic I’d felt on the Skyway, so for a time, I avoided air travel. I was afraid of embarrassment, so I kept one eye over my shoulder in social situations. I was afraid of feeling misunderstood, so I never let anyone too close.

When I encountered death, all of it crumbled. It was nonsense in the face of impermanence.

Everything is different now: crossing a busy street, strapping myself into a roller coaster, running my hand over the bony expanse of my lover’s shoulders. We are so fragile. We are built to end.

I tried to recount this to a friend, to explain how my first major experience of death metabolized in this strange way: a reignited fear of flight.

“It’s a container,” I said.

She laughed. “You put it in an actual container. In the sky.”

Of course it’s all illusory—my subconscious’s attempt to crystallize the unfathomable into something I can measure, can make predictions about. Something with the gloss, however flimsy, of control.

All that tracking, all those numbers: I was desperate for a calculus of safety. But my efforts were themselves a ghost plane, a phantasm of agency. No one has the capacity to steer themselves clear of death.

To be alive is, necessarily, to be in a precarious position. We are temporary, in motion. We’re already high above the water. There is no place to stop.

We each owe an ending, be it skydiving or shrinking under bedclothes. And to put fear first—to spend our brief lives trying to avoid the loss that is our birthright—is a fundamental self-denial.

It’s the surest way to lose everything before we’ve had anything at all.

If you look up into a clear night sky for long enough, you’ll see them: the blinking red-and-green lights that delineate an airplane in flight. These are, again, a maritime tradition—red for port, and green for starboard. My father taught me.

We were always on the water when I was a child. Despite the ocean’s dangers, my father stood collected at the helm, with purpose—though he readily admitted his respect for the water included a healthy dose of fear. I couldn’t have been more than five years old when he offered this orientation: I learned port and starboard at the same time I was learning left and right. I also learned fore and aft and head and galley. My whole world floated in this unanchored certainty, in the physical wooziness of waves: on a traveling vessel, directionality is self-referential. If we’re both heading north, side by side, my port faces your starboard.

Sea ships and airships light themselves the same way: the left side of the vessel blinks red; green shines on the right. Starboard comes by way of Old English: stēor, meaning steer, and bord, meaning side. Before centerline rudders were invented, boats were turned by oar, and most oarsmen were right-handed. Coming home to port, they lined up their left sides along the dock to leave the steerboard side open for maneuvering.

One side toward safety, one side toward the stars—and all to which they lead. They are a kind of safekeeping, these little lights we use to show ourselves to each other: Here I am. Here’s where I’m going.

Do I need to spell it out? Or is it understood?

How I resented him, my father, and his fear. How it changed the tenor of my loss of him.

How it added to the distance—how, when my mother called to tell me he was gone, I let out one wrenching, choked sob, then couldn’t cry again for weeks. It floated like a half-formed bubble atop a skid of soap, never ascending, my grief. It got stuck deep in the muscle.

When I stood in his empty bedroom that summer, six months after he’d passed, it was still hung with framed photographs I’d taken: a stretch of Irish coastline he’d never been to—couldn’t, unwilling to take a cross-water flight; a trawler in the Matanzas River in the very same city where he died, taken with him beside me, manning the wheel of his own boat.

I didn’t figure out until after he died that he’d meant it as a gift. As protection. Guard yourself. Look where you’re going. Stay in reach of the light.

He was handing me the directions the best he knew how. Vectoring me in.

Although he hated it, my father did fly—had to, for work. My parents were young and broke and had just started their own business. There were important meetings in Texas. You’re getting on that airplane, my mother told him. He did.

By the time I was making memories, the business had outgrown the need for in-person rendezvous. Dad quit flying because he no longer had to; his fear then became a family affair. The three of us rode Amtrak sleeper trains up and down the Atlantic Seaboard to see family in New Jersey. Or we drove, expending dozens of hours and thousands of miles along the I-95 corridor. I never flew with my father that I can remember, though I’m told we flew as a family a time or two when I was still a babe in arms: a wedding, a funeral.

ut he romanticized it, his time as a business traveler—told me about all the thinking and drinking he did at seven miles high. I know we have shared the experience of staring, terror-struck and tantalized at once, out that double-paned porthole. Defying gravity.

Just four months after I got home from Florida, I went back again. This time, I flew: my first flight since all of this started. I was still afraid—if anything, more so, with all my newfound knowledge, with so much context for what could go wrong. When the plane made its first wide bank, turning eastward out of the airport, my whole body shook. But with my hand in Andrew’s— m’aidez, m’aidez—I could stand it.

I wanted him to meet my mother. And he wanted me to meet his dad. Although we would first meet years later in Portland, we were born and raised just a hundred miles from each other. We’d attended, as teenagers, many of the same concerts; we grew up traversing the same beaches and roads.

We wanted to take each other home.

I watched through the window as we backtracked together, at speed, all those miles I’d driven alone. I squeezed his hand, hard. When we arrived, I stood again in my father’s empty room, showed him the photos on the wall. Andrew is, as my father was, a musician—has his same mess of curly, dark hair too. We spent our last night in St. Augustine in the garage, picking through the dozen or so guitars my father had collected. My mother told us to take as many as we could carry.

I sat on the concrete floor and looked up at Andrew, perched on an old stepladder. I watched as he reverently drew one, then another instrument from its dusty case. He pulled quiet music from them, touching them each in turn, gently. They looked so easy on his body. I could not stop picturing them—Andrew and the guitars—floating back again over all those miles, like dolls picked up and placed down in a different room by a child. It made my stomach feel roller-coastery to imagine it—the motion, but also the impact: these ancient relics in new love’s hands, flying at speed to the home I’d made on the other ocean, the home that felt in some way outside of all this. I’d left Florida in part to leave my inheritance of fear behind, to outrun the ways I’d lived its legacy. It would be three more years until my mother would come to Portland, conquering her own fear of flying to do so. My father never did.

At the airport in Orlando, we checked the two hard-cased guitars we’d taken, but Andrew insisted on carrying the soft-cased Telecaster through security. It meant we’d have one too many carry-on bags—yet another reason for me to be nervous. We’ll be fine, he assured me. We were. The gate agent didn’t even look up as we walked onto the plane with our extra cargo.

The miles rewound themselves outside our window—over the port-side wing, where the red light blinked our position. Fear thrummed quietly in my chest: a companion, a teacher. We were racing toward the sun.