By The Grace Of, by Jenny Bahn

The terminal is familiar but I don’t recognize the name of the airline I am supposed to fly on. Something terrifying and anonymous. Sun Country Air, I believe.

I spoke to my mom last night, expressing my concern that I would be on one of those tiny commuter planes that seem to be the ones most likely to fall out of the sky at the most inopportune moments. (Not that there is an opportune moment for a plane crash.) Mom told me I’d be fine.  I told her, for the 1,278^th time, that my worst fear is dying en route to some middle-of-nowhere town for a job.

“Model dies while earning money to put towards rent and her 2011 ROTH IRA.”  – My obituary.

While I don’t necessarily want to die on a flight on vacation, somehow plunging into the middle of the Atlantic on the way to a Paris seemed far more appealing.  Today, however, if I go down, I will be going down for a two-day job in Bloomfield, Minnesota.

Sun Country Airlines occupies a tiny corner of a large international terminal.  There are no large, grandiose signs advertising its location.  There is no flag or fanfare otherwise marking its spot.  And, apparently, there is no self-service kiosk.

What the fuck is this, 1998?!

It is not until you don’t have something that you realize what an integral part of your life it has silently become.  Janet Jackson sang something about this, I believe.  It was pretty and soft and is something I’d like to sing to the many boys who have dumped me over the course of my life.  There’s no time for that though; the song in my head right now sounds more like “fuck…fuck…fuck…fuck.”

I’m running late and I look around frantically for some way to expedite my check-in while grappling with the reality that I am going to have to stand in line behind five people to interact with a real human.  I toe-tap until it is my turn to not really talk to a woman with brown lip liner and eyebrows dyed an intense, unnatural shade of black.  She doesn’t ask me my name or if I have been handed a bag full of semi-automatic weapons or if I am carrying a sack full of knives.  She serves no purpose beyond tapping the same buttons I could have tapped myself and effectively wasting my time.  She passes me a hard ticket and I turn for the security line, the ticket’s thick paper feeling formal and substantial in my hands.

The security line seems brief enough, though it is surely slow-moving.  A digital departures and arrivals list shifts and changes, my Sun Country Airlines flight to St. Paul, Minnesota mixed in with flights to Grenada and Dubai, Cairo and Zurich, Moscow and the Port of Spain.  It’s like JFK is purposely trying to give me an inferiority complex.

I’m on the other side of security with just enough time to spare.  I change into a pair of black leggings and throw my leather jacket on over my cotton shirt.  I swap my summer sandals for a pair of gray Converse.  When I emerge from the bathroom, I look ready for a flight or a bar brawl, depending on whom you ask.  For example, if you were to consult any one of the uber-white-bread, Americana-Supreme individuals on their way back to the motherland – my Sun Country Airlines comrades, that is – they would likely tell you I was the leader of a dangerous bike gang.  Everyone here looks like peaches and cream, and they look like all they eat is dessert.

We board.  I sit down in the aisle seat I paid $15 for, per Sun Country Airline’s “Our tickets may be cheap but we’re going to rape you on the extras” policy.  The plane, I’m delighted to discover, is clean and new and makes me think of Jet Blue.  There appears to be no immediate cause for alarm: I will not be dying today; at least that’s what snap judgment affords me.

I settle in, staring over the shoulder of the woman sitting next to me, who is reading some book about Jesus and God, both of whom are characters with contemporary voices, people just like any other.  She thumbs through the pages with an orange-painted fingernail.  “Larry,” Jesus says, “You’ve got spinach in your teeth.” Mass-Market- Religion.  Can’t-Get-Enough-of-It-Christianity.  I’m headed into the Bible Belt.

The flight attendants have thick accents.  They pronounce their “O”s like my ex-boyfriend’s grandmother, a darling tiny thing who told me that the secret to her famous fried chicken was “jus’ a lil’ bit’a budder.”  In the last ten minutes, I’ve heard the word “Gosh” about ten times.  Just sitting here, with my head full of unspoken profanity, I feel like a sinner.

Outside, it begins to rain.  The clouds look heavy with thunderstorms, just as my source (weather.com) predicted.  Our plane, undaunted by the blackening sky, backs out of its gate and heads for the runway.  Here we go.

The turbulence comes immediately, our wings chopping through fog and rain.  We rise and fall with violent, shuddering jerks.  I am writing in my notebook some musing on the pedestrian nature of love and marriage until my futile attempts to distract myself from the shaking cabin become useless.  As our plane charges upwards through the rain, I resort to self-help.

FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH

I write this over and over again with my shaky hand, my head buried into the back of the seat in front of me.

FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH FAITH

When the turbulence gets unbearable, I can’t even write. I can only close my eyes and bury my head in my hands.  I just want the pilot to come over the speakers and tell us how the weather will be and for how long.  There needs to be a transparency mandate when it comes to turbulence.  If I survive this flight, I will start a petition.

In the midst of my meltdown, I look over at my seatmate.  Her eyes are closed, her book folded in her aging hands.  She rests her head on the shoulder of her husband, the grounding rock in her real life and not some unseen figment above.  She doesn’t yelp or cry or rock back and forth, but I can tell she’s afraid.  Even with her God and her Jesus and all of that stuff, she’s still terrified.  No one, no matter what their policy is on the afterlife, wants to die.  And, I believe, in the end, no one really believes their god is going to save them.  Her faith is just as feeble as my own, just as thin as the paper I scribble on.

Ten minutes later, it seems we have gotten through the worst of it.  The pilot comes on.  In between telling us that the weather in Minneapolis is 58 degrees and that we will be flying over Upstate New York and past Lake Eerie, he says, “Uh…so…we were possibly hit by lightning back there, but, uh…the navigation didn’t go down, so that’s usually a good sign.  We’re going to have maintenance take a look when we arrive.”

Awesome.  Because that’ll do me a lot of good when we FALL OUT OF THE SKY.  Which, of course, we don’t.

Perhaps, one could say, by the grace of God.  Or, perhaps, by the grace of physics.

For more from Jenny…

Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow her on Twitter.
To send her an email.