Bus riders in the sky - Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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SAVANNAH, Ga. -- It had been nearly a year since my last flight.

You'd probably have to go back to when I was 5 or 6 years old to find another 12-month span when I didn't fly. We went to Cleveland in September last year, then to Washington, D.C., in October. We drove to Shreveport for a night in December. Karen went to Mexico in January. We were planning a trip to New York in March, but you know what happened.

To get anywhere from Little Rock, you have to fly to a hub, then on to your destination. So a trip to Los Angeles or New York would count as four trips. There were times in the 1990s when I averaged a couple of business trips a month. Throw in two or three we'd make for personal reasons and, yeah, I got off and on an airplane 100 times some years.

Karen can tell you exactly how many flights she takes in any given year, plus what restaurants she visits and other details. The travel diary she's been keeping since 1996 is almost full, and she has a ready replacement. This column is the closest thing I've ever kept to a journal.

All that flying seems so long ago. I don't miss my gold status. I miss some of the destinations, but flying stopped being fun before I did a lot of it. I remember flying cross-country from Atlanta to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and being excited about it. Apparently I fell asleep and missed my dinner. Little kids do that.

We booked our flight to Savannah a few months back when we thought the pandemic might be a memory by the time it came up. We figured we might drop in on the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, but the primary reason was to visit my mother. There was some family business to work out.

I don't have any anxiety about flying in a time of covid, but that's only because I still feel like I did when I was 17 years old. When nothing very bad has ever happened to you, it's hard not to be a little cocky. Worries about the pandemic don't include me catching it. I'm concerned about people, the country, and what prophylactic measures I might have to put up with for the sake of the common good.

I expected the airports to be uncrowded and the planes to be full and was right. I was wrong to expect to see the norm-flouting and outright belligerence observed at most Arkansas retail locations.

People wore masks in the airports; they didn't pull them down around their necks or stomp around righteously with them stuffed in their pockets. For the most part, people seemed to be taking it seriously.

Or maybe they were just aware that the airlines and TSA take this stuff seriously. You can act silly and stick your bare mug out in Walmart or Bass Pro Shop and maybe the hourly workers there will figure they're not being paid enough to risk a confrontation, but the airlines are used to having people arrested and escorted from the premises.

People who will jump ugly with you over whether the gel in your insoles contains a volume of liquid that exceeds the 3.4 ounces that's allowed to bring through security are not likely to care about how, in your analysis, masks are tyranny.

Still, I guess it's too much to ask that people maintain social distancing while boarding and disembarking (why not, though?), and the airlines certainly aren't cordoning off rows or blocking off seats. And while fewer people are flying--remember those photos of nearly empty airliners we were seeing in the spring?--there are also fewer flights, which means most are just as crowded as they were pre-pandemic.

These days we fly as cheaply as possible, partly to protest the airline's attempts to extort nickels by requiring passengers to pay extra for any level of comfort above basic galley slave subsistence (I can put up with anything for a few hours and won't give you an extra $25 for a seat with slightly more but still inadequate legroom), so we generally end up toward the back of the plane. And most of the flights we take out of Little Rock are on regional jets that don't have a middle seat to block off anyway.

So there's no romance to air travel anymore. They don't owe us any more than a seat and the expectation of a safe ride, and mostly they deliver on that. If someone thinks it's worth it to spend money to join a club that gives them access to a private lounge, that's their decision. But I think of airlines as slightly higher-tech bus companies.

And your average commercial flight is like a Stanley Milgram experiment. Yes, the authority figures tell us, it's all right for you to have slightly more comfort if you are willing to inflict slightly more discomfort on the person behind you by reclining your seat, which leads them to recline their seat in a fruitless attempt to regain that lost comfort.

But it really isn't about comfort, is it? Isn't it more about reclaiming our agency? There's so little we can do on an airplane other than tune in to our own interiors or attend to the in-flight entertainment options that it simply feels good to adjust our seat. Even if all it does is make the person behind us incrementally more unhappy.

Flying is about as disheartening as scrolling through social media. All evidence suggests we have become a nation of intellectual and sartorial slobs. What happened to American men in particular? We used to aspire to look like Gregory Peck or James Bond or Ted Williams or at least James Dean, but now middle-aged dudes dress like preschoolers. It's all elastic waistbands, board shorts, flip-flops and logo T-shirts.

This country started to go wrong when we stopped dressing in our Sunday best for church and wearing nice clothes on planes. When we stopped reading books and started watching "The Bachelor."

You can't bemoan democratization too much. Cheap air travel is a social good, and I avail myself of it when I can. But I really do not miss it.

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