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January 4, 2006
Turbulence
The atomic clock has struck 2006, and the new year finds me oddly agreeing with Momus: it's great to be back in Japan. We have different reasons, of course. He needed to "recharge his batteries." I needed to return to solid ground after a hellish afternoon on a terrifying aeroplane excursion.
Two weeks earlier, I had quipped to my parents that the Narita-Houston-Pensacola route was as easy as "commuting." Through the magic of movies and Zelda - Second Quest, I had come to find a new simplicity in passing those eleven to thirteen hours trapped in a seat with little leg room. Intercontinental flight: my generation's equivalent of taking the F out to Forest Hills.
Oh the irony. At Hour 9 on my return flight, somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk, the plane started violently jerking up and down. I'm no stranger to slightly bumpy rides, the occasional roller coaster drop, but I had never been through anything quite as frightful as what I experienced for the next forty minutes. The mystery air condition introduced me to a whole new world of plane movements - the side to side shift, the shakey, shakey grumble, the five second free fall. I literallly clutched my seat with both hands and dripped sweat, only to have the pilot come on and tell us all, "Everyone, please buckle your seatbelt, as we're going to be in this for the next thirty to forty minutes."
As I rode out these terrible waves, I suddenly came to understand the total delusion and hubris of air travel. Usually, the calm stillness of the airplane suggests a time-consuming version of teleportation: you sit in a seat quietly for several hours and then you're suddenly somewhere else. In the "moderate" turbulence yesterday, I could hear the Sun melting away the wax from our wings, Kid Icarus chuckling heartily from the Famicon Mini cartridge in my bag. The shaking and stochastic movements reminded me, yes, I'm in a giant metal object flying thousands of miles an hour, hundreds of miles over a icey sea. The Mongols got it right - they saw the whole world and never got more than six feet off the ground.
I really didn't want to die in this manner, especially since the last film I saw was NANA, which featured the worst acting in a motion picture since, well, the last Japanese mainstream film featuring good-looking young people. (Nakshima Mika may be an adequate singer, but she's a black hole on screen, sucking in what little talent the supporting cast brought to the production.) Finally, we got back to smooth skies at minute 45 or so, at which point, two dozen passengers ran for the bathroom. Few stomachs can take prolonged periods of unsolicited theme park thrills and spills.
The pilot warned of more turbulence as we approached the ground, but it was nothing compared to earlier. Customs was easy too. For the first time in ages, they didn't intentionally bring the drug dogs over to me and my bags to sniff out "MDMA" or "LSD" or "banana peels" or whatever they think they're stopping. I suspect the dogs get お正月 holidays off, especially this year.
Now that I've survived and will not board a plane for a while, I can spend the next few days finishing my thesis. I send it to the binders on Friday morning. The jetlag is zapping my revision prowess a bit, but I'm just happy to be in a place where the ground underneath me doesn't violently jerk around. Well, at least not for forty straight minutes.
Posted by marxy at January 4, 2006 6:15 PM
Comments
such a brave guy
Posted by: porandojin at January 4, 2006 9:30 PM
It sounds awful. I've flown all my life, and had some bad flights (like the time with Toog and Matt Jacobson from Le Grand Magistery when our pilot aborted the landing at the last moment during a freak hurricane on a midnight Georgia to Texas hop, and we really all thought we were going to die), but I've never experienced the sort of really bad, prolonged turbulence you describe. The worrying thing is that climate change will almost certainly make such experiences more common in the future as weather patterns get more violent and unpredictable. And mass aviation (people treating umpteen thousand mile trips as a "commute", for instance) is contributing to that.
Posted by: Momus at January 5, 2006 5:01 AM
so is treating an upteen thousand mile flight as a commute a bad thing? and is to help blame for bad weather during the trip? just sorta confused on that. i would think mass, long distance, affordable travel to be a good thing?
Posted by: trevor at January 5, 2006 7:11 AM
I feel for you, that would have shook me up.
A friend of mine had a similar experience on a busy flight, although she puked into her hands and because she felt guilty and didn't want to cause a scene she eat her own vomit, much like a cat would do when really ill.
How guilty does a Japanese person have to feel before they consume their own vomit in public instead of wiping it off in on tissues/sick-bag/the seat in front of them?
Posted by: matt at January 5, 2006 10:57 AM
welcome back, david!
Posted by: r. at January 5, 2006 4:53 PM
Hey, I live in Forest Hills. Was that a dig?
Posted by: Rio at January 6, 2006 9:14 AM
i once heard that certain air routes are known to be bumpier than others and that the wealthier airlines buy up the smooth routes while the crap airlines can only afford the rollercoaster routes. am i completely naive to believe such an outlandish rumor? ive done the japan-nyc flight many times, always flown the cheap seats with nearly (and now fully) bankrupt airlines and half of these flights were terrifying. so i thought, maybe...
Posted by: js at January 6, 2006 3:05 PM
Since when did mass-long distance travel become affordable?
Posted by: Michael McCarthy at January 6, 2006 5:08 PM
Good to have you back, boyo. Glad they didn't give you a hard time on arrival - when I returned on Dec 29th, the customs dude at Chubu International informed me that they were doing a tokubetsu search, what with the New Year coming up and all, and proceeded to rifle through my bags, coat, made me remove my hat and then fucking frisked me. Do you think these guys have some sort of quota to fill? Must confiscate X number of drugs/pornos/pirate DVDs/potatoes per month, that sort of thing?
Posted by: Jrim at January 6, 2006 9:07 PM
My favorite is when they ask me whether I have any marijuana on me - as if anyone other than Paul and Linda thinks that it isn't such a big deal to bring it into Japan.
Posted by: marxy at January 6, 2006 9:13 PM
I don't mean to be an ass, but the speed of sound is around 760 mph ... unless you were on some kind of black-market concorde, you were going somewhat slower.
Posted by: ls at January 7, 2006 1:20 AM
Sometimes people use exaggeration as a literary effect.
Posted by: marxy at January 7, 2006 8:01 AM