Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, December 15, 2024

10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #10 Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll look back and pick ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s choice is Ann Patchett’s wonderful “Flight Plan” (August 2, 2021).

“Flight Plan” is Patchett’s reflection on how she learned to live with her flight-obsessed husband. It features one of my favorite opening lines: “The three of us were in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” No throat clearing. Patchett puts us immediately there, “in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.” I love the specificity. I love the exoticism. Why is Patchett there in that float plane, in that remote location? Who are the two men she’s with? What’s this all about? Patchett tells us in detail after fascinating detail:

Karl and I were spending a week fishing at a fly-out lodge outside Iliamna, by which I mean nowhere near Iliamna but closer to Iliamna than to anywhere else. Each morning, we and the dozen or so other guests gathered up our neoprene waders and were divided into groups of three or four or five. Along with thermoses and sandwiches and tackle boxes and a guide, we were loaded into a string of warhorse floatplanes bobbing at the dock. The pilots who flew for the lodge struck me as men who would have had a hard time finding work elsewhere. After a flight of twenty or thirty minutes, we would land on a river or a lake, then pile out of the plane and into a small waiting boat. The plane would then taxi off while the guide and the boat took us even deeper into nowhere, the idea being that special fish congregated in secret locations far from civilization. But there was no civilization, and there were plentiful fish in the lake in front of the lodge. Taking a plane to a boat to find an obscure fishing spot seemed to be a bit of Alaskan theatre. After we reached whatever pebbly shoal the guide had in mind for the day, we arranged our flies and waded hip-deep into the freezing water to cast for trout. Despite the significant majesty of the place, wading around in a river for eight hours wasn’t my idea of a good time. Bears prevented me from wandering off. Rain prevented me from reading on the shore. Mosquitoes prevented everything else. 

On the fifth day of their fishing trip, Patchett’s boyfriend, Karl, suggests that they skip the fishing and pay extra to spend the day flying instead. She agrees. She writes,

Flying was what he’d come for, anyway: the early-morning flight out to the fish and the afternoon flight back to the lodge. Karl liked talking to the pilots—who put him in the right seat and let him wear the headset—and they liked talking to him, because he was a doctor, and free medical advice is hard to come by. Karl and I were less than a year into our relationship when we went to Alaska, and I didn’t yet fully understand the centrality of airplanes in his life. After Alaska, I got it.

She got it, but at a cost – the loss of peace of mind when Karl is flying solo and is late calling in or doesn’t call at all. Patchett tells of the time Karl flew a Cessna to Kingston, Ontario, to look at a boat. On the way home, the weather turns bad. He calls from Bowling Green, Kentucky to say that he’d landed because the transponder was out, which meant the plane couldn’t be tracked. Patchett tells him to stay there and she’ll drive up to get him. He says no, maybe he can fix it. Two hours later there’s still no call, and still no answer when she tries his cell phone. She writes,

Around midnight, the clock and I had a conversation. I told the clock that I wanted to wait fifteen minutes before my new life began, the life in which Karl had been killed in a plane crash. I requested fifteen more minutes in this world—which I was quickly coming to see as the past—before figuring out whom to call, whom to wake up. You’ll remember this feeling when the phone rings, I told myself. You’ll remember how scared you were when he calls to tell you he’s fine. And it was true. As many times as I’ve been in exactly this situation, I never forget it, and it never fails to shock me, the flood of adrenaline that does not serve for fight or flight but drowns me. At twelve-thirty, I shifted my perspective again, from wondering what it would be like if he were dead to understanding that he was dead, and I decided that I could wait another fifteen minutes. He would be dead forever, so what difference did it make if I gave myself a little more time? I still had no idea what I was supposed to do.

After I had extended the final cutoff two more times, he walked in the door. That’s how these stories always end, of course, except for the one time when they don’t. I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief. I wanted to kill him because he had not been killed. I wanted to step into his open jacket and stay there for the rest of my life, for the rest of his life. How had he not called?

I love that “I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief.” There are so many great lines in this piece. Return to that opening scene for a moment, where Patchett is in the float plane with Karl and the pilot. The pilot asks if Karl would like to try flying the plane. Karl says yes. Patchett describes the experience:

After a demonstration—up, around, down again—the pilot turned over the controls. This was not Lake Michigan. Getting up to speed required circling, but you had to take off straight toward a fixed point on the horizon and into the wind. Karl took off toward the shore, and then we lifted off the lake, flew past the mountains, through the clouds, around the blue sky, back through the clouds and past the mountains, then nose up, plane down, smack into the lake. The pilot was right; it was hard to see it coming. I reminded myself to relax my jaw. The pilot offered Karl some pointers, some praise. There was a quick discussion of how the landing could be improved, and then we were off again, a tighter circle, greater speed, straight up, lake-mountain-cloud-blue-cloud-mountain-lake, the nose up as we came down. The jolt was harder this time—I felt it in my spine—but before I could fully register my relief we were up again: a carnival ride for which no one bothered to take the tickets.

I wasn’t prone to airsickness or seasickness, but the combination of air and water in rapid succession was something new. I turned away from the window to contemplate the floor, stamped metal rusted at the edges, like a service elevator in a hospital. I stared at it while Karl took off, turned above the lake, then dropped back down onto the surface. Repetition was the key to learning. The only thing on hand to throw up in were the pilot’s waders, which seemed better (better?) than throwing up on the stamped-metal floor. I held down my breakfast through sheer force of will. I was angry at both men—especially the one I was sharing a bed with back at the lodge—for not caring about how seriously unpleasant this might be for someone who did not live to fly. But, despite the rage and the nausea pulsing in the back of my throat, I wasn’t afraid. Considering that about half of all small-craft accidents occur during either takeoff or landing; considering that taking off and landing was all we were doing; considering that the plane was rusted and the pilot had struggled with the aftereffects of Agent Orange and my boyfriend had never landed a plane on water before; considering that this lake was somewhere far from Iliamna and no one knew we were there in the first place; considering that if the plane flipped, as it had been established these planes could do, I would probably not be able to swim through the freezing water in my sack of neoprene (which I had stupidly worn against the cold), and that, if I did make it to the shore, my chances of surviving whatever came next were probably zero—I should have been afraid.

That “I turned away from the window to contemplate the floor, stamped metal rusted at the edges, like a service elevator in a hospital” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of my all-time favorite “Personal History” pieces. 

Credit: The above illustration by Sam Alden is from Ann Patchett's "Flight Plan."

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