I grew up in a household that didn’t do big vacations; I have two working class parents; my dad lost his job to the 2008 recession; we had things but we didn’t have everything. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to my life. We grew up hearing about Disney cruises, European vacations, and trips to the Dominican, but our vacations included a Go Train to downtown Toronto and a ticket to one of the sights there — nothing international, nothing even really… national. I’m not knocking my childhood — I grew up knowing love, happiness, and family, I still find joy in taking a Go Train ride downtown — but it always created this divide in my mind, reminded me that “hey, you don’t get everything those kids do.”
One thing that always stuck out as a “rich kid” thing to me was flying. Airplanes are this big, very expensive way to travel, and we were people who used cars, rode buses, or even walked a lot of places, but we didn’t go on planes. I’ve flown on an airplane twice. In June 2008 and 2011, two of my cousins from New Brunswick were graduating from high school, and because my dad couldn’t get the time off work either year, we ended up flying. Myself, my sister, and my mum flew together both times. I was 8, then 11, and the only things I really remember were things that I still look back on with a little bit of trauma: having to take my shoes off to go through security, my mom’s hands getting swabbed after security checks (this is traumatizing in and of itself, but I’d just read a 17 magazine article about a girl getting caught smuggling things across the border — oh the joys of being 11 and having an older sister with a magazine subscription — and I had this irrational anxiety). These more traumatizing notes of airplane travel didn’t really make me have the desire to get on a plane again, and the opportunity never really arose (again, we were car people), but flash forward nearly 11 years later, and here we are: I’m flying again.
In March 2020, before the world shut down, my older sister was supposed to fly out to Ottawa to see a Glorious Sons concert with me and my roommate. Obviously, given the state of the world (yikes!), this concert was cancelled and so was her flight, but instead of a refund WestJet gave her credit. This lonesome $300 credit sat in her account for nearly 2 years until it was set to expire just weeks after my winter reading week this year. Her solution? Flying me home. I don’t know if you’ve caught on by now, but I don’t travel a lot; in fact, the most I’ve travelled the past few years is back and forth from Mississauga to Ottawa on a VIA rail train and let me tell you, my travel anxiety can have me showing up at the train station over 3 hours early, so a plane, something I haven’t been on in 11 years, yeah… my travel anxiety was through the goddamn roof.
Now the actual trip was fine: I had a friend to go to the airport with me, and she’d been there a ton of times so she knew what was going on. I, on the other hand, just followed along like a little duck in a row, found the GQ Robert Pattinson’s cover I’d been obsessively looking for, bought myself a little orangesicle smoothie from Booster Juice, and relaxed. Was I almost denied boarding because of an expired licence? Yes. Did that experience make the start of my trip not so great to the point of me sending my sister a text reading, “I’m never doing this again I have a ripping headache the seats are so small and I feel like I’m going to puke”? Also yes. But, the very minute we took off and I felt the force of the plane rushing forward and pushing me back, I knew every last fear or anxiety I had was unfounded. It was the moment we started taking off that all I could think about was “how could I have ever have been scared of this? How could I have ever not wanted to do this?” It felt almost like a spiritual experience, just the joy and amazement that came over me, looking down while we were getting higher and higher and seeing this view:
Looking down on such large spaces — towns and cities, that just looked like little specs — it almost felt like I was playing a game of Life around a table, spinning a wheel to see how many streetlights I got to move forward. I was nearly in tears, and probably would have cried if there hadn’t been a man sitting beside me. It was up in that plane, above the clouds, that I realized there were people in the world, probably people I sat next to in my own classes, that would never get to experience this feeling of part weightlessness, part the heaviest realization ever — that the world really is so small. In that moment, I knew that any chance I got to fly again, I would take, if only to be able to look down at small sleeping towns again. If I were younger maybe I would have thought that this was what Santa felt; if I was more spiritual I would think it’s what God saw; but I’m neither of those things, so all I could think was how freaking lucky I was to be able to feel and see all of this.
I caught my flight at around 5:30 pm on a cold February evening and was flying West. I flew into the sunset, chasing the red strip of sky, and landed at around 6:30 pm over a dark sky but a golden lit Toronto, the CN tower winking at me like she knew what I had just been through. That was when more tears came, when I realized how quickly I’d gotten home, how I was about to step off the plane, walk through the airport and see my family in all of 45 minutes when I’d been over 300 km away. When I finally made it to my dad’s car in the busy overpacked arrivals of Pearson International Airport, I could hardly speak because of how much I’d just experienced. I was realizing in that moment the privilege I held: the ability to get on a plane, arrive in my dad’s car, go home to my family. If you ever get the chance to fly, I say this sincerely, please please take it. If you have the opportunity and privilege to see the world like that, you should experience it, even if it is only once for 45 minutes.