The Fight on Flight 611

Allegiant Flight 611 provides economical air transport between Bozeman and Nashville. Amy and I sat in economy, I at the window, she at the aisle. Our relationship came with this unanticipated bonus compatibility: I want the window to see, she needs the aisle where she can stand and move. We both held sleeping children.

The confines of an aircraft cabin impose an unwanted intimacy upon its occupants. Like it or not, when the doors are sealed, the passengers are bound to one another in often unsettling ways. We are jostled by the same turbulence; we eat the same dusty biscoffs, breathe the same air. Unspoken but always top of mind is the unusual awareness that if the ship goes down, these are the people with which we’ll spend our final moments.

Along with our suitcases, we check in privacy, and for traveling families, the fish-bowl experience of an airliner where our travel-ravaged, emotionally-compromised children are confined in small seats can feel like a parental nightmare. All parents intuitively understand the stakes when a family passes through the gullet of the jet bridge. Will this be the day when someone taps our shoulder at the baggage claim and confesses in an awed tone, “I’ve been watching your family…?” Compounding the anxiety is the alternative; these same observers gasping as the curtain is pulled back on our family and the soiled reality of our life spills into their laps.

Across the aisle, in 8A and 8C, the middle seat empty, sat a boy and girl. They looked to be 8 or 9, the boy blond and blue-eyed, the girl dark-haired. They seemed happy, alert children as I watched them get settled in their seats. Flight 611 reached cruising altitude, and they untangled some ear buds and a phone. They inserted a bud in one of each their ears and sat back in their seats. The earbuds, I noted immediately, weren’t split deeply, and they lolled their heads together so as not to dislodge their sibling’s buds. No way, I said to myself, will that work. The arrangement proved satisfactory until one moved his head, which immediately yanked the bud from the other’s ear and plunged the listener into silence while the story continued ever onward in the other’s ear. Initially the head movements were involuntary. Honest position adjustments, the normal squirms of the nine-year-old body. Soon though, each earbud was held jammed into its ear with one hand, while the other covertly braced and supported the small-scale tug-o’-war. It was over in under a minute. The boy yanked the bud from his sister and threw it into a tangle. I leaned forward carefully so as not to waken the child in my arms and hissed and gesticulated—No more! No more! The scuffle subsided, and they quieted down.

Soon the boy left his seat for the restroom—what nine-year-old can resist taking a look at an airliner’s waste disposal system? While the boy explored the restroom, the girl unbuckled and furtively slid across to the window seat. When the boy returned to find his seat taken, he froze, standing in the aisle. The sheer injustice, the blatant unfairness! He could absolutely not believe she had done such a thing. The girl gazed happily out the window, serene, unconcerned. He scooted into the seats and sat in the window seat anyway, on top of his sister. She dislodged him in a flurry of punches and slaps. Again, he climbed onto her. She drove him back once more. The passengers around them, those familiar with children and families, become mercifully engrossed in their books and devices. Those more attuned to their lower natures put aside the violent content on their devices and watched appreciatively.

I was now hunched forward under the cover of the seat backs scream-whispering and motioning down, no, stop! He threw himself once more on top of her fighting body. I saw her face darken and her eyes narrow. I closed my eyes and wished Jesus would come. The girl’s right hand closed on the seatbelt buckle and in a single savage stroke drove the metal buckle into his face. He fell back clutching his face, sobbing, and bleeding from his nose.

I sat the child I held onto my seat, moved across the aisle and sat between my son and daughter. I wiped my son’s bloody nose and buckled my daughter’s seatbelt. I met no one’s gaze. I did not engage my fellow travelers. I stared sightlessly into the first class bulkhead as humiliation had her way with my soul.

Our Bible speaks of private things proclaimed to the world from the housetop, but for some of us the roof is not high enough. Our lowest moments will be broadcast at 30,000 feet on Flight 611, providing economic air transport between Bozeman and Nashville.