one more life experience, experienced | 5:48 PM >

You're probably wondering why I'm not in the States right now.

I woke up this morning with a pretty big sense of dread. I generally feel uneasy on mornings where I have to fly somewhere, but this time was different; this time was that sense of darkness at the edges of your vision that you only get when the part of your mind that hides secret data is trying to let you in on a secret from the rest of the universe. However, I did as I usually do when I get that feeling: I told myself that I was being a paranoid wanker, and to get ready for the coming taxi.

To start out with when I got to the airport, though, the plane was late. In fact, all the planes in my section of gates were late or cancelled due to some huge thunderstorm in New England. (Boston was apparently hit most hard. That is technically New England, right?) My plane eventually landed and unloaded her passengers and we were admitted on, late. Then the plane got on the runway and speeded towards takeoff.

Just as the plane's ailerons were tilting to make it ascend there was a terribly unsettling jittering and the brakes came on, slowing the plane down. The captain wheeled it onto a parallel road and announced that the sensors were complaining about the right engine. Some people were talking about smelling smoke. Then, not too long after, the captain came on the speaker saying only, "Passengers, evacuate, evacuate, evacuate." The right engine may or may not have been on fire. Of course it got a little crazy. Some people went out the front. Sitting as I was in the row behind the emergency doors, I got to have the experience of actually slipping off the wing of a plane and onto a tarmac, with the notion in the back of my head that, at any moment, the plane behind me could very well explode.

Not that such terrible things happened, mind. Logically, I'd assume that there was some engine trouble that would have brought us down had we actually made it into the air, but as it was the plane was going to be fine and none of us were in real danger. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself now, halfway into my second beer on an empty stomach.

They assembled us on the grass near the tarmac. One lady had hurt her wrist. Another had strained her shoulder badly in an attempt to help a woman who'd slipped off the wing (it was raining, and the wings were slick) and landed on her head. Firemen and paramedics and police arrived, the firemen applying short streams of water to the right engine. The wonderful, diminutive form of the stewardess who'd been assigned to us flitted back and forth like Tinkerbelle, ministering kind words and confidence like fairy dust despite her own obvious emotional condition. (Her name is Gabrielle, by the way, and she should be commended.) Then most of us were rushed to the lounge in which I now sit, while the woman with the serious head injury was taken to a hospital somewhere. The injury wasn't pretty, and I hear afterwards she was in a state of conscious unconscious (eyes open, but not kenning a thing).

So.

I'm not a good flyer normally. It takes an extreme amount of willpower and control to get on a plane in the first place. While I'm good in situations like that (I can postpone my freakouts until I and those around me are safe), I'm not ashamed to tell you how much I'm freaking out inside right now. I'm doing that thing where I try to do everything but look at how I'm feeling, because if I do that I might break down in this crowded place and that's not very manly, is it? So I post. I post, and I wait for my bags. I post, I wait, and I drink myself numb.

But I'm fine, I'm alive and uninjured, for the curious. Pictures will follow, as they always do.