FLYING THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES.

• Author: Ervin, Mike

I have no plans to fly anywhere anytime soon. And that's OK with me.

My relationship with flying has always been love/hate. Actually, it's more like a will-ing-to-tolerate-out-of-necessity/hate relationship. I grudgingly acknowledge that if I want to travel beyond a certain distance, flying becomes unavoidable. And I love going to new places and seeing new people and things, so I suck it up and fly.

Maybe someday we'll advance to where humans can transport ourselves as they do on Star Trek, by disintegrating at one point and reintegrating at another, or on The Wizard ofOz, by donning ruby slippers and clicking the heels together while wishing hard. When that day dawns, I'll gladly swear off flying once and for all. But until then, I'm stuck.

My fear of flying is born of the standard anxieties. Realizing that I'm hurtling through the atmosphere in a metal tube is a jarring existential blast, like an air horn honked in my ear from point-blank range. And, these days, if one factors in the likelihood that this metal tube is teeming with airborne coronaviruses that are jockeying for the pole position in their mad quest to be inhaled, the stress is redoubled.

Because I use a motorized wheelchair, the stress is retripled. (Did I just coin a word?) Here's the drill when I fly: At boarding time, an airline gate employee escorts me down the jetway to the entrance of the plane. Waiting for me is an aisle chair, which is basically a hand truck with a seat and three seatbelts. It's used to haul people who can't walk to their seat on the airliner. Thus, it's narrow enough to fit down the aisle of a plane, which is pretty damn narrow.

Also awaiting me are the humans who help transfer me to and from the aisle chair. I'm sure you've seen those poor, grossly underpaid souls who push people through the terminals in airport-issued wheelchairs. They're the ones who pull aisle-chair duty.

Once they plop me into the aisle chair, they fasten the seat-belts across my lap, waist, and shoulders. Then they tilt the chair back onto its rear wheels and haul me down the aisle. My thighs bulge out over the sides of the narrow chair and brush against the passenger seats as we pass.

Meanwhile, someone from the baggage crew, usually a burly man wearing a fluorescent construction worker's vest and noise-canceling headphones, hauls away my empty wheelchair. My chair is loaded into the cargo hold along with the luggage.

Even after our plane returns to sweet terra firma at the...