I'm sitting in the terminal at Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia, hoping someone will find a way to turn off the soul-piercingly obnoxious squealing alarm before I'm forced to propel myself through the plate-glass window in despair when suddenly, without warning, Lisa comes running up.
Who is Lisa? I don't know, but her flight is about to leave and an increasingly insistent disembodied voice keeps coming over the speakers to urge her to get to the gate before it's too late. Just as the disgusted voice says "This flight is closed," here she is! Running to the gate! Getting her boarding pass scanned and running up the ramp to the plane! I've never seen her before and I'll never see her again, but her just-in-time arrival provides a satisfying sense of resolution for those of us observing from the cheap seats. Lisa has arrived! My heart will go on!
And my body will go on too, eventually. Sitting in Yeager Airport always reminds me of Chuck Yeager, the test pilot whose lightning-fast flight exploits, distilled through the tornadic prose of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, represent the extreme antithesis of modern commercial air travel. In Wolfe's portrayal, Yeager is a force of nature blazing his way through barriers to burst the surly bonds of earth, while airlines today herd people like cattle through queues and security checks only to make us sit and wait and sit some more and wait some more while ear-splitting alarms pierce our eardrums and continuous urgent blather blares from televisions over which we have no control.
In times like these, we all need our Lisas. You go, girl! And take me with you!
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