Flight and Freedom

Talk about incongruous.

Flight, once upon a time, was the embodiment of freedom. Not for me. For me it's driving.

I've just finished up this book by David Gessner, called "Soaring With Fidel", in which he narrates his experience of tracking ospreys down the Eastern seaboard during their winter migration. He actually sneaks in to Cuba to see them make a stop there before they head across the Caribbean to South America.

As he was watching them soar down the mountainous spine of Cuba, he thought about how hard it was for him to get there, versus how easy it was for the birds. He wrote this:

"While flight has been overused as a symbol of freedom, it is worth noting the obvious: that the ospreys were flying in and out of the United States and Cuba without passports. There are strong reasons that flight has always been so closely associated with freedom, that an eagle is our national symbol. Movement is our first freedom. On the most basic evolutionary level, flight allows for freer movement than other modes of getting around. Freedom, at its essence, is the ability to move without restriction."

Hm. I agree with his last sentence, but not the next-to-last. And this is why I avoid airports.

Flight today is the mode of travel that has the least freedom of movement. In order to fly today, you need to show your IDs at least twice, have in your possession a bar-coded boarding pass, be scrutinized by a federal official, submit to a search of your belongings and your person (so far the only clothing I've had to remove are shoes and belt, but I'm not optimistic about the trend), have your checked luggage scanned and perhaps searched (mine are opened roughly two out of five times I fly, judging from the TSA slips I find inside), and refrain from using certain words while flying or waiting to fly, even in jest (words like bomb and terrorist.)

However, when I can drive 400 miles door to door in 7.5 hours through 3 states without once minding my language, showing my papers ("no, Vasiliiy, no papers..") or asking anyone's permission, versus fly the same distance in 6 hours (door to door including time spent politely sitting on my thumbs in the airport) and submit to all the indiginities and restrictions on my essential freedom as Gessner thinks of it...

there really is no choice. I drive. Behind the wheel, alone.. I'm free.