On flying, risks, and the end of the world: May 21, 2011

I am on the penultimate flight of my trip home from Quito. I am headed to Miami, and after a 3 hour layover, I will fly to Boston. I can’t sleep on the plane despite only 3.5 hours of sleep last night. I had to catch a 6:40 a.m. flight, and when I got to the airport at 4:45 there was a huge line of people waiting to check in. Things moved excruciatingly slowly, but I finally got past customs and onto the plane just under the wire!

I have just watched The Tourist, an Angelina Jolie/Johnny Depp vehicle which is the onboard movie. A predictable story, but just watching the two handsomest actors in the movie business is soothing to me and keeps my mind off my fear of heights and being in planes at 30,000 feet. It’s not a paralyzing fear. I have convinced myself on an intellectual level that flying is safer than driving or any other means of transportation, but on a visceral level, I don’t believe it. I hate being in a cramped and uncomfortable seat with my ears popping and occasionally painful from rapid ascents and descents. It feels like some kind of punishment. I have already read the SkyMall catalog, wondering who actually buys this stuff, and the airline magazine (which is boring enough to put me to sleep but doesn’t) so I whip out my travel diary and begin writing to distract myself from the discomfort.

If Ecuador were any less wonderful, it would not have been worth the 15+ hours of travel time each way that are required. You have to devote a whole day of your vacation to getting there and another to getting home. Seeing Ecuador and my son did make it all worthwhile, but I think I’m done flying for a while. Some people say that getting there is half the fun, but every time I travel by plane I thank God not only that I made it to solid ground alive but also that I don’t have a job (like my friend Barbara) which requires a lot of air travel. It’s exhausting, irritating, maddeningly inefficient, dehydrating, deep-vein thrombosis-inducing, and most of all, IT TAKES FOREVER. OK, I’m done complaining now. The one compensation that air travel offers apart from seeing the world and one’s family is spectacular views from up in the clouds. Coming into and flying out of Quito, you see some of the most beautiful sights in nature, and they are only
visible at 10,000 feet and above. A sea of cumulus clouds. Volcanic peaks 14,000 ft. high and covered with snow. Sunlight glinting on the metal roofs of buildings when you get a little lower. Patchwork of greens and browns. Even the seacoast line of Miami alongside tall buildings is magnificent to behold.

There are just some things in life that require trust and faith even if you are a nonbeliever. The anesthesiologist, the heart or brain surgeon who operates on you or a loved one, for example. You put your life in their hands because you know they have been trained long and hard NOT TO MAKE A FATAL MISTAKE. The odds of waking up/surviving the surgery are in your favor except with some emergency life-saving procedures. I’m told that the pilots who fly in and out of Quito are the best in the business because it is exceedingly difficult to land on the very short landing strip. This gives me a certain degree of reassurance. And of course it has been proven that flying is infinitely safer than driving or riding in a car. The act of driving especially gives you a false sense of being in control. You have to have this delusion or you would never drive anywhere. Sort of like hiking through the Ecuadoran jungle and fearlessly not expecting a 25 foot long boa constrictor to drop on you from a tree or slither stealthily up behind you. You can’t afford to have these kinds of fears if you ever expect to have exciting jungle adventures (which more often than not don’t involve dangerous snakes.) And when you are being slowly lifted in a cable car on a ski lift type cable which is taking you up the side of a very tall mountain, you have to have faith that those cables (which look very thick and strong) are not going to snap. (I’m referring to the Teleferico in Quito, which took me up Pichincha, a 14,000 foot peak. Once it let me off, there was still quite a distance to hike if you wanted to reach the summit and see the volcano. I chose to do the easiest hike, since the air was thin and I was gasping for breath.) And speaking of volcanoes: This one hasn’t erupted in a very long time, but there are active vocanoes in Ecuador which my fearless son has viewed from what I consider to be an unsafe distance. But it must be safe or they wouldn’t let tourists go there! Or would they?

Getting back to air travel: what about the threat of terrorism? My answer: after the grueling inspections I went through in both airport security and customs (Quito officials searched everyone’s carryons a second time after they had gone through the X-ray scanner) I can say with confidence that it is virtually impossible for anyone to get on board an aircraft with a gun, blade, poison, or bomb. Now that Obama and the Seals have taken out bin Laden, there is supposedly the threat of terrorist retaliation, but if there is an incident, it won’t be on board a plane unless they are able to pull off an inside job involving an evil pilot and copilot. Not likely.

So: I have effectively argued against irrational fears of heights, flying, riding in a cable car up the side of a mountain, and hiking through the jungle. WHAT ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD?

No less a source than the New York Times had an article yesterday about a fanatical Christian group which prophesied the end of the world on May 21, 2011. It’s not clear where this information came from, but apparently not from Jesus. I’m wondering why they didn’t give us more notice—say six months—so we could all get our affairs in order, at least wash the car and get someone to feed the cat, and in general do whatever is necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Rapture. Because we all know what happens to the people who aren’t Raptured. I haven’t viewed all those great Last Judgment Renaissance paintings for nothing. Wailing and gnashing of teeth, and burning forever in the lake of fire. (See James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for further details.) The word is that if you do not turn over your soul completely to Jesus, you will not be Raptured. Instead you will be condemned to eternal damnation.

There’s apparently a cover your ass clause in the doomsayers’ prediction: if, as has thus far been my experience (though the day isn’t over yet!) there are no clear signs of the world coming to an end, this simply means that the world HAS BEGUN to come to an end, presumably in ways too tricky, sinister, and subtle to be recognized until it’s too late. Like a panther pouncing on you after following you a mile or so through the forest while you whistled a happy tune. [Update! When the world failed to end as scheduled, the leader of the sect said that God in His mercy had postponed the end of the world until Oct. 21. Whew.] Oh, and lest we forget: it's all the fault of gay people. God decided to destroy the world because gay sex is proliferating! Not because of evil corporations that destroy people's lives and the environment. Not because of murderers, skinheads, fascists, and bigots. Gay people, who dare to love each other.

I would argue that for many of us—-survivors and victims of 9/11, the Haitian earthquake, hurricane Katrina, the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan, monster tornadoes in the southern U.S., and the many wars which still rage pointlessly in the world today—-the world has already come to an end. In some cases, ten years ago or more. I could also argue that we humans are the architects of our own destruction in our continued foolhardy and desperate search for oil and other non-sustainable fossil fuels. We’re causing wildfires, floods, killer tornadoes the likes of which the world has never seen, deforestation and the resultant extinction and endangerment of animal and plant species. We’re melting the polar ice caps and creating a greenhouse of CO2 instead of an atmosphere. This is more than 40 years after scientists warned us about this. If we had begun work on solar power in 1970 there would be no need for nuclear power today. And to those who say that nuclear power plants are safe, this is my retort:
1) Three Mile Island [contaminated]
2) Chernobyl [contaminated and uninhabitable for decades to come]
3) Reactors in Fukushima, Japan [damaged by a tsunami which destroyed the cooling system, with the result of cores overheating and the release of radioactive isotopes like cesium into ground water and being dumped into the ocean in an attempt to cool down the cores and avoid meltdown] Traces of radiation being detected in vegetables and milk. After two months, cores are still overheated. Scary.
4) NUCLEAR WASTE. Just what are we supposed to do with lethally poisonous by-products of nuclear fission, some of which will remain radioactive for tens and maybe hundreds of years? BURY IT IN THE DESERT? YEAH, RIGHT. NOT AN OPTION. NOR IS SENDING PLUTONIUM INTO SPACE (WHAT GENIUS CAME UP WITH THAT PLAN?) WHEN ONE TINY PARTICLE CAN CAUSE LUNG CANCER.

These are the things that we should be afraid of, people. They are the end of the world.

But it seems that greed is a more powerful motivator than fear or even caution.

The ancient Siona shaman I met in Cuyabeno said that in the sixty-plus years he has lived on a certain reservation on the river, he has seen animals dwindle in number and disappear. Some of this is from over-hunting and fishing but the biggest problem is oil companies deforesting the jungle. Our jungle guide, Hugo, showed us a patch of “young” forest which is what grew after oil companies slashed and burned the forest more than 25 years ago. THE TREES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. And no one stopped the oil companies, who just did whatever they wanted because they could. Today they are more restricted in their depredation, but it continues. The road to Cuyabeno is lined with huge storage tanks and oil fires burning off impurities. Insidiously, the companies offer the poor local people low-paying jobs. The people continue to live in the hundreds of wretched shacks that also line the road to Cuyabeno.

This will be one of the many environmental/humanitarian battles that my son and his generation will have to fight. My generation has utterly failed. We have either joined the ranks of the enemy, or we ignored at our peril the dead canary in the mineshaft. Seduced by consumer goods and technological toys, we continue to be in denial about the future of this planet. Al Gore, an expert on this subject, has warned us that we may already have reached the tipping point. We may have irreparably destroyed the climate of the earth that our children and grandchildren will inherit. It is to be hoped that they will clean up the mess we self-absorbed postwar babies have made.

WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.