Childhood at Thirty Thousand Feet
Lessons of an Unaccompanied Minor
I started traveling by myself when I was in early grade school, sometime around first or second grade. My mother was perpetually moving up and down the California coast before later moving to a number of places around Seattle, Washington. I lived with my father in Alaska. Once or twice a year I would board a flight to and from one parent to another as an unaccompanied minor. On many of those flights I would make a new temporary friend with whomever was in the seat next to me. People always had a lot of questions for a child under the age of ten that was flying alone. The word “brave” was used a lot even though I had no idea of how being shipped back and forth at the will of my parents a few times a year constituted any kind of bravery on my part. Normality and bravery never really overlapped in their definitions for me at the time. Eventually I realized the strangers sitting next to me were projecting their own healthy fears and apprehensions around the idea of sending a six year old on a solo flight, or flights as it sometimes was, exposing them to god knows what along the way. To my temporary traveling companions I was a spectacle, an anomaly, something to be studied. And when you’re a little kid on a plane by yourself, adults have a strange tendency to never shut up. To start telling stories without being asked or prompted to do so. As a kid set adrift you are at the mercy of adults who feel the need to be validated or who perhaps don’t have the connection they desire from the rest of the world caught in the hustle of life on the ground. You are also at the mercy of a number of questionable gestures and advances, requiring the development of coping mechanisms and conflict resolution strategies most people don’t develop until sometime around early adulthood. I was forced to grow somewhat comfortable learning to screen the strangers I was essentially forced to interact with. I learned which nervous ticks and quick glances a pervert might display, and when to fake sleeping or when to keep my headphones on but the sound off. I also learned to spot sadness and loneliness, drunkenness, nervousness, and just plain boredom. I don’t know if I could describe what I experienced and felt on those flights as kindness. And if it was there, I was immediately and undeniably suspicious of it. I learned that studying people and engaging with them on different levels wasn’t so much of a choice as it was a requirement.
Occasional uncomfortable interactions aside, I still found myself developing an eagerness for hearing stranger’s stories. Over time the basic excitement I felt toward traveling between parents was overtaken by the excitement and curiosity around whom I may be required to share my space with as I was shuttled between shared custodians. Along with the desire to hear more stories from people I met in transit, a desire to travel and experience the world outside of myself developed. I started to want see the world in ways I wouldn’t have if I had grown up under more traditional circumstances. I was hearing stories about people and places I’d only read about or seen on television. As I’ve grown older I’ve kept a lot of those interactions with me. I still clearly remember the lady who swore she used to date Carlos Santana and buy him his guitar strings before he became a big rich and famous rock star. She told me about him doing too much acid and locking himself in the attic for days at a time, and how the only thing that would bring him comfort was her special recipe for egg salad sandwiches. And I was barely out of grade school when I met a mildly intoxicated off duty pilot who felt the need to explain the basic principals of aviation to me. The lack of detail and his apparent inability to tie one sentence to another in his description, and the smell of liquor on his breath, has made me uncomfortable with flying to this very day.
While the majority of the kids I grew up with were enjoying basic kid life and doing whatever else they did at home with their families and schoolmates over the holidays and summer breaks, I was often in a metal tube thirty thousand-ish feet above the ground, making temporary acquaintances and learning about the world I was growing hungrier and hungrier to see. It was those early experiences that have fueled my desire to stay on the road, or in the sky, as long as possible. Those early experiences have kept me open-minded and willing to engage with new and interesting people along the way. And to give new strangers the same interest and respect those strangers from my youth gave me when I was just a little runt being passed between my father in Alaska and my mother in some new city along the West Coast. And it’s the continuing experiences I’ve had as an adult that keep me wanting to push further into territories I’m less than familiar or comfortable with with the hopes of furthering my interaction with the greater human experience.
