Many years ago, my wife and I were returning home to Oregon after a protracted and exhausting visit to the children in California. I was attired, for this much looked-forward-to escape, in my favorite pair of wickedly shrunken and raggedy old sweat pants and the obligatory souvenir T-shirt from Disneyland. Dozing amiably through the tedious security process, I jerked violently awake as I was abruptly hauled from my place in line and roughly shoved into the full-body invaso-scan machine and photographed repeatedly. By this time, I had the undivided attention of everybody else in the area, they all being ever-mindfull of the unimaginable amount of plastique a 300 pound man could conceivably be smuggling aboard their flight in his conspicuously bulky crotch. Still not satisfied, the imposing guards led me to a semi-private stall, where I was compelled to drop my pants and actually 'show them the money'. Finally convinced that I was carrying nothing more than that with which a merciful God had endowed me, I was allowed to stagger, crimson-faced, back into line, where both my wife and I distinctly heard one burly female guard mutter to another one, "THAT guy's going straight into my calendar collection in the locker room!" My wife had way too much wine on the trip home and did not stop laughing for a week.
My last couple of airline flights were not grand, this was before all this TSA security stuff. I am not a big fan of flying at all. I would like very much to go back to Florida, but think I will drive down the next trip. First of all I am afraid of heights so the take-off and landing are stressful alone. Strange but once we are up high enough the height does not bother me as much, it is only when you can see buildings and stuff clearly that it gets to me. One flight to NYC was on a small business hopper and the weather was the worst ever. The turbulence made me sick and I was truly afraid for my life. It was less then 45 minutes and I did not even want to fly home. Then we took a flight much later to Orlando, we had a stopover in Atlanta that was suppose to be for about 25 minutes so they kept us on the plane. Well that turned into four hours and they shut the air conditioning off. It got real hot and I felt like I was suffocating. To make matters worse my mother had booked seats that were awful in the last row so you could not even recline the seat. I feel asleep against the window and something went out of place in my neck. I spent the entire trip in pain every time I tried to lay down. Absolutely excruciating to the point I slept sitting in a chair and spent every day pretty doped up on antihistamines thinking at the time it was a bad sinus infection. Turned out it wasn't, it was a bulging disc in my neck. Since I have only flown 4 times and two experiences were horrendous I am not in a hurry to try that any time soon. I think if they did to me what they did to you Peter, I would be done with planes forever. I just have never seen the point of having to go to that extreme. The evasiveness is just crazy, seriously if I had over heard someone say something like that I would have called a lawyer, thats not funny to me. You know it probably happens quite often.
The last time I flew was in late August of 2001. My wife and I flew from Boston to Florida, where we began a Caribbean cruise. This was about three weeks before the Trade Tower attacks. The strangeness began even before we left Maine. Driving from Millinocket to Portland, where were to catch a train to Boston, all traffic was being pulled over just north of Bangor, like they might do when they are doing one of their DUI campaigns. Only the stop was manned by the state police, sheriff's department, the border patrol, and some other government vehicles that I wasn't able to identify. While the law enforcement agencies were there, I suppose, to make sure everyone stopped, it was the border patrol who came up to the car. Bangor is a few hundred miles from the border, mind you, but they asked if we were citizens, where we were going and why, and they had us open our doors, the trunk, and they even looked under the hood of the car. No explanation. When we got to the airport in Boston, I noticed that anyone who even looked like they might be from a Middle Eastern country was being pulled aside. I remarked to my wife that I was glad we weren't Muslim because they weren't letting any of them go through. This was about three weeks before the incident with the Trade Towers. When we changed planes in New York, the same thing was happening there. While we were waiting for our plane, a man in a pilot's uniform sat down down next to us. He looked like he could be from the Middle East. After a few moments, he got on his cell phone and spoke very rapidly in a language that we couldn't identify. When he hung up, he was crying. Literally, crying. A few moments later, he got back on the phone, and the same thing occurred. Fearing that he might be our pilot, since there was obviously something going on, my wife asked him. He said that he was a pilot for another airline but that he was going to be deadheading with the same airline we were using, I forget which one that was now, but he wasn't going to be on the same plane. He seemed relieved to be talking about pilot stuff, and explained that deadheading meant that he would be catching a ride in the cockpit of the airline but that he wouldn't be piloting it. Later, he spoke about how pilots avoided storms, and some other stuff. We got to Florida okay, did the cruise, but flying back was horrible. By this time, it was about a week from September 11th and, although we had had our tickets far in advance, we were bumped from our flight to Boston, and they offered no reasonable solutions, except that we would have to complete the trip on standby. Since the airport was very busy, nothing was open on standby. After waiting in line for a long time in order to resolve this, we were told that we couldn't be guaranteed a place when we were flying standby. We had tickets, bought in advance, and flying standby was not our option. They tried to shuttle us over to some chairs where we could be conveniently ignored, so we refused to leave the counter. While we were there, another couple was having similar problems. They had found an seat for only one of them and were trying to convince them that, since they had an open seat for one of them, if they refused to take it, that ticket would be forfeited. They were married, and traveling together, so my wife got into that argument for them. Eventually, they found us a seat, and on the same plane, although the seats were not together. Again, in New York and Boston, they were paying close attention to travelers who looked as if they might be Muslim. Obviously, they knew something was up. Since then, I was going to fly from Maine to Seattle once, to pick up our nephew, who we had agreed to take in. This was, of course, after the Trade Center attacks and when I found out everything that was going to be involved, it sounded like far more bother than I was willing to take. I opted, instead, to drive from Maine to Seattle and back, in January.