Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (10 page)

I
n 1989, I worked a flight with a flight attendant named Jan who makes me laugh so much I really should never work in the same cabin with her. Jan doesn’t mean to be funny—she just is. Even her look was funny to me. Jan was tall and thin, but it was her hair that was especially stunning. Jan liked puff, so she doubled the size of her long, dark tresses with hair extensions. Here was this tall, thin flight attendant with a winning smile and huge hair.

The flight was a long one, over three hours, and Jan and I were assigned to First Class. This was in the days when First
Class included a four-course meal, served on china, with silver and linens on the table and hot towels distributed before dinner. My favorite presentation was the hot towels—passengers loved getting the personal warm towels to clean their face and hands.

As we prepared the hot towels, I mentioned to Jan that I liked to do the dry-ice presentation with the towels. She had never heard this secret to making the hot towels look extra steamy. So I showed her.

I arranged the hot towels in a circle and poured the steaming water over them. Then, for extra effect, I put a small piece of dry ice in a cup of water in the center. Adding water to dry ice results in a lovely cloud of white smoke curling up around the towels.

I soon learned that Jan’s rule in life is, “If a little is good, more is better,” and that rule didn’t apply just to her hair. I left the galley after I showed her how to set up the hot towels, and I was standing in the back of the cabin when she came out with her presentation. I was dumbstruck.

She hadn’t used the small tray I had suggested. She had used the largest tray we had. And she hadn’t used just one piece of dry ice in a tiny cup. She had used every piece of dry ice on the plane in a huge pile in the middle. A mountain of dry ice. She had poured so much water on the dry ice that it looked as if she were walking in a volcano of smoke. From her waist to her head, you saw smoke. Billowing white circles of smoke.

Apparently Jan realized she couldn’t see well enough to walk. So she took the metal tongs and used the tongs to wave one of the towels in what appeared to be a serious effort to clear the smoke in front of her. The effort wasn’t working.

What the passengers saw was a torso with legs surrounded at the top by a swirl of white smoke, with glimpses of dark hair wherever Jan waved the towel. Huge dark hair.

As she moved forward, no one spoke except Jan.

“Hot towel?” she said. “Hot towel?”

One passenger, a woman in the front row, finally looked up as Jan approached and then leaned over and pulled out a tiny personal fan, which she pointed in the direction of the hot towels. When the smoke parted, the woman grabbed a hot towel, saying, “Delighted, I’m sure.”

After that I hid the dry ice from Jan.

I
t seemed like a good trip in the beginning. The reason I chose to work it is that the first night’s layover included twenty hours at Daytona Beach, Florida, in a hotel right on the beach. My husband agreed to drive the four-hour trip from our home in Savannah, Georgia, with our seven-year-old daughter, Mandy. We would all stay in a fine hotel, eat at fine restaurants, and play at the beach.

Everything went as planned. Tom, Mandy, and I had a
great twenty hours at the beach making a memorable home movie. Mandy later said it was the best movie she ever saw.

The second day of the trip looked easier than the first. I would simply fly two easy legs: Daytona to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Newark, New Jersey. What could go wrong?

The first thing that went wrong was that after a night and all day at the beach with my family, I was tired. On the Daytona Beach to Atlanta trip, we flew in the early evening, and I had difficulty staying awake. Next, my allergies were acting up. When I couldn’t find my allergy medicine, in desperation (I mean I can’t work with a drippy nose) I took an over-the-counter sleeping pill that contained an antihistamine, thinking I’d be in the hotel room in Newark in less than two hours before the I’m-drugged-and-can’t-stay-awake feeling hit me.

I took the tablet at 9:30 p.m. Our flight was due to take off at 9:43 p.m.

Our pilots were late arriving in Atlanta, delaying our takeoff a bit. Then, just as the pilots announced we were ready for pushback, a flash of lightning lit the sky near our aircraft. All takeoff times were delayed, and an hour later, the airport was shut down. Here I was—barely conscious—on the airplane with all the passengers, sitting at the gate for two hours. Finally at 11:30 p.m., we took off. I have very little memory of that flight. My coworker said she couldn’t believe how awake I seemed. And that I appeared to function normally.

But in reality, I faked staying awake. For weeks after that trip, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was draped over one end of the beverage cart with my face down in the ice: my eyes were open, but I was sound asleep. In my dream, my coworker pushed me along, saying the passengers, “Beverages? Beverages? Oh, don’t mind the sleeping flight attendant. We’ll use a different bucket of ice for your drink. Beverages? Beverages?”

I have never again substituted over-the-counter sleep aids for allergy medicine. You just never know when the flight will be delayed several hours and you’ll be tempted to use an ice bucket for a pillow.

I
was on my way from Seattle, Washington, to Atlanta, Georgia, and there were no seats on the airplane. So I had to fly “jump seat.” Jump-seat riding is what flight attendants do when there are no passenger seats but they want to travel so bad they are willing to sit on a hard little seat that is virtually unpadded and meant to harness crew for takeoffs and landings.

Only trained flight crew are allowed to fly jump seat. It is not comfortable, but it does get you where you are going. We can be in street clothes on the jump seat, but we have to have our IDs out and available. On this trip, the captain turned off
the seat-belt sign and left it off. As soon as the sign went off, I talked to the flight attendant in charge, whom I knew, and mentioned how tired I was. I told her about flying all night the night before and spending the day running around visiting friends. And how difficult it was going to be sitting up on a jump seat all night. “Well,” she said, jokingly, “there is no one in the closet.”

I looked in the extra luggage closet. It was three feet deep and nineteen inches wide, and I thought,
I can fit in here
. I got in, spread a blanket on the floor, and slept soundly for the three hours and eighteen minutes until descent.

So, if you were one of the passengers on the flight that day who went to use the First Class bathroom but opened the wrong door instead, it was me you saw. Me on the floor, using my coat for a pillow, sleeping in the closet.

S
ometimes when my family wants to get away for a mini-vacation, Tom will ask me to look for a trip that has a long layover and open flights, and Tom and Mandy will come with me. Last summer I found just such a trip—a thirty-hour layover in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was on that trip that Tom did what he now refers to as a Stupid Dad Trick.

It wasn’t that Tom meant to do anything that would be classified as not smart. He had only the best intentions in mind as he tried to teach our seven-year-old daughter, Mandy, to do backward flips into the hotel pool. Tom later said he didn’t
notice the sharp aluminum edging around the pool or how far the concrete gutters stuck out into the water.

As a testament to Tom’s teaching ability—or Mandy’s learning ability—she did get a lot of height on her spin. And flip. In fact, she was completely upside down when she crashed. Which would have been good if she’d been over water. She wasn’t.

She hit the side of the pool with the top of her head, slicing a straight line across the top of her skull. As she continued down, now propelled to the edge of the water, her forehead slammed into the concrete edging.

Let me tell you right now, Mandy survived with no brain damage. And no permanent scarring, except for the scar across the top of her skull, which is mostly hidden by her hair.

As we describe the accident now to friends and family who weren’t there to watch, we like to say, “She didn’t bleed that much. They only had to drain the pool twice.”

We actually don’t know how many times they drained the pool because, as soon Tom saw the cut on the top of Mandy’s head and the blood running down her face, he raced her upstairs to the room, where I was quietly writing another chapter about our chaotic life. He needed my help in deciding what hospital in this unfamiliar city would be best to stitch up the gash in a seven-year-old’s head.

Later that evening, when everything was calm, Tom mournfully said, “I’m so sorry. I feel terrible.”

“It was an accident,” I said. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“You would never have allowed her to jump backward off a hotel pool,” he said. “It was a Stupid Dad Trick.”

I wanted to say, “You’re right on the first and second points,” but since I’ve done a few well-meaning dumb things myself, I was in no place to judge. So I just said, “Thank God it wasn’t worse. I mean, she could have broken her neck or her nose or had brain damage.”

On my next trip as a flight attendant, I was still so stunned by the accident—more stunned by what could have happened and didn’t—that I felt the need to talk about the incident. I told the flight attendant sitting with me in the back of the plane the whole story.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” she said. “Listen to what my husband did on his Stupid Dad Trick day.”

Apparently she had been on a long layover at a Miami hotel, and her husband had come to visit her and brought their three-month-old daughter. Mom was in the room resting, and Dad decided to take Baby to the pool. Not wanting Baby to get any sun damage, the Dad had greased her all over with a thick coating of SPF 45 sunscreen. Then they got in the pool. That’s when Dad realized Baby was slippery. So slippery that she popped out of his grip, and when he tried to capture her, he couldn’t.

“It was like trying to catch a greased watermelon,” he said. Dad said he tried at least ten times, each time more desperate than the others, to grab hold of that baby. He estimates she was underwater for several seconds, maybe even a full minute, before he finally got a grip on her diaper and lifted her out of the water. He said the baby was laughing and happy as could be.

But the dad was so shaken by the incident that it was five years before he told his wife about it. “You would have strung me up by my thumbs,” he said. “It was a Stupid Dad Trick, but I was just trying to do the right thing.”

I like to think that kids have special baby angels that protect them from things like Stupid Dad Tricks. And keep their well-meaning dads from having to deal with what might have happened.