Adventures in a tin can
“I’m going to need your weight.”
“Pardon?”
I was flying from Logan Airport in Boston to Provincetown, and I had already checked in online, so I was surprised when passengers on my Cape Air flight were asked to come to the gate. I wasn’t sure I had heard the gate agent’s question correctly.
“I’m going to need your body weight,” she repeated. “It’s a very small plane—there are only nine passengers, and we have to balance the weight.”
A couple of things occurred to me at once.
How close were we cutting it with this balancing thing? If the heaviest people sat in the back, was the plane going to drop tail first into the water after takeoff?
And did she actually just ask me to say my body weight out loud?
The gate agent looked impatient.
“Ok,” I answered defensively, “I’m going to go with one MILLION pounds.”
She gave me a wan smile.
“If you want to get on the plane, I’m going to need that information.”
“Ok, then. I’m gonna go with ____,” I said, eyebrows raised, giving her my actual weight, plus a couple of pounds to account for the ridiculous number of snacks I had eaten since leaving home that morning.
I sat down in the gate area, stewing about the invasion of privacy. Was there a more personal question a woman could be asked? Then again, what did I care about saying a number out loud? I wouldn’t have thought twice about telling her how tall I was.
I was meeting my college roommate and her wife in Provincetown, and she had purchased my airline tickets as a birthday gift. I had no idea she had already been asked to guesstimate my weight when she booked the flight. I later learned she had graciously shaved 40 pounds off in her estimate.
As we waited for a late passenger, the schoolmarm in me wanted to leave her behind to teach her a lesson about being punctual. When she finally arrived, we were marched out to the tarmac by a rather severe Cape Air employee. Once we were outside, I understood why we weren’t allowed to bring any carry-ons. I had never been on a plane so small.
One by one, our names were called, and seat assignments were made based on the “calculations.”
“Phillips?”
After the Cape Air drill sergeant called my name, he pointed to the middle seat over the wing. Hmm, I thought, what meaning should I assign to this? Was it an insult to be seated over the wing?
As I hoisted myself up the two steps and into the tiny plane, I thought of Amelia Earhart and hoped we would fare better than she had. To my dismay, we weren’t sitting in airline seats. They were leather-covered chairs.
Shortly thereafter, a bearded 20-something seated in the pilot’s chair turned around and said, “Hi. I’m Ryan.” His co-pilot, another 20-something in gaming headphones, didn’t turn around or introduce himself.
We soon began an unsteady takeoff. I usually keep my white knuckles to myself on a plane, but since there were no sides to our chairs, I grabbed the back of the seat in front of me without thinking. I quickly realized I was acting like an annoying 7-year-old and let go. There was nowhere to hold, so I clutched the bottom of my chair instead. I was a study in right angles, my arms rigidly at my side.
The flight was a new experience. Usually, when the air is choppy, the plane bounces up and down. This little aircraft swung side to side as we pulled up and away from Logan. We weren’t very far off the water, which I found unnerving. Would I be swimming with the fishes soon?
I sat locked in that one shape for about 10 minutes, staring out the window. As we got away from Logan, I started to breathe freely again and unclenched my fingers from the bottom of my seat. I reminded myself how infrequent plane accidents were.
That peaceful, easy feeling lasted until I noticed Ryan’s co-pilot craning his neck to stare at something behind us. I had a sudden urge to yell “Keep your eyes on the road!” but stopped myself. A minute later, the same guy was looking down at an information card, flipping from one side to the other. Was he deciding what to order for dinner?
I’ve heard the expression “God only gives you what you can handle” and God must have known I couldn’t handle much more, because although one of the helpful Cape Air gate attendants had mentioned we were “expecting some weathuh” just before we boarded the plane, the skies were clear for our 20-minute flight.
I was relieved when Provincetown finally appeared in the distance—until I realized I couldn’t see a runway. Would we be landing on the beach?
We flew up and over the shoreline, then headed down towards some trees. Would we be landing in some trees?
Instead, we had more side-to-side swinging and then dropped hard onto the runway, which was about the size of a two-lane road.
The woman across the aisle from me, the latecomer who smelled of alcohol, had slept through most of the flight. She and two people behind us began chatting about how easy this trip was. “Oh! Only 20 minutes! So much better than a two-hour ferry ride or driving!”
My face curled in disbelief. Had we been on the same flight?
After the three happy-go-luckies got off the plane, the woman sitting ahead of me to the right (not the one whose chair I had shaken) turned around for the first time. She had the same frozen look on her face that I did.
She didn’t need to say out loud what I knew she was thinking: that, like me, this was her first and last flight on Cape Air.
