Remember when air travel was fun? We even dressed up, like it was a special occasion. We looked forward to the onboard meals. Passengers were cheerful and friendly. Flight attendants were like celebrities. There was no risk of contracting a rare virus that scientists couldn't wait to get under a microscope for a prize-winning discovery. After our arrival, we related the trip's highlights to friends.
Fast-forward 20 years and it's a blood-pressure-catapulting, fingernails-on-the- blackboard, sweat-soaked cattle call. In coach class there is no way to win. If you're seated in the back, you board the airplane first and have first crack at the precious overhead storage compartments. But they put crying babies in the back, a flight attendant told me. Noise-canceling earphones are the only remedy for this contingency.
An aisle seat near the back of the aircraft can put you only feet away from the bathroom door and people standing right next to you -- an endless procession of swinging arms banging against your shoulder.
And then there are the seats. I'm convinced that on the assembly line at Boeing's Everett assembly plant, or wherever these aircraft were built, semi-intelligent robots angered at humans for having to work so hard made the seats as uncomfortable as possible. I am surprised that airlines haven't already adopted a standing passenger configuration in order to pack in more people.
If the airlines provide a seat that reclined an inch or so more, was wide enough to keep the 21st century super-sized Americans from spilling over into my seat, and had enough leg room to keep my knees from hitting the seat in front of me, I would not gripe about paying for meals, water, luggage, or even oxygen if it came to that.
But the airplane is only half of it. Today's terminals are the size of small countries. What's really fun is when your boarding pass doesn't tell you what terminal your gate is in -- and one terminal's big board doesn't post flights from another terminal.
On a recent trip with my family, we spent no less than three hours getting boarding passes, checking luggage, passing through security and immigration. We made our flight by five minutes.
Airline ticket counters are often vacant because they want you to do everything via Internet. With some airlines, ticket purchases can only be done online.
I won't complain about security lines or the hassles of carrying only small quantities of liquids, taking off shoes, etc. That's now part of life as we know it -- to make ourselves feel better.
Then there are the terminal waiting areas -- you know, seats with the metal bar in the middle. These are also designed by evil robots. Minus the bar, a person could stretch out, fall asleep and achieve the only true escape from today's travel travail: unconsciousness.
I am not oblivious to the high cost of airplane fuel and the business pressures airlines are facing. I would gladly pay higher airfares if all of the things I've complained about were remedied -- lousy seating, terminal congestion, long lines, not having live humans to offer assistance, poor directions on terminal connections.
But they won't, I suspect. Airline companies have stockholders to answer to, and top airline executives have to pay really high mortgages on their waterfront homes on Puget Sound.
So for the foreseeable future, my course of action is to avoid air travel altogether. I'm not sure how long it would take me to get to Seattle on my mountain bike -- three weeks? Oh, well, along the way water would be free and at night I could crawl into my tent and get comfortable -- even more comfortable than if I were traveling first class.
Oh, I have fallen back into the surly bonds of earth and ridden my last sardine-canned flight in the sky. I have now shed the traveler's stressful, silvered wings, and earthbound, dance with laughter in pedestrian shoes.
When he's not flying, Frank Baker lives in Eagle River.
By FRANK BAKER