A Loan to Life*

Good evening. I'm in Hawaii.

It's finally being paid off; the debt that life has taken out on me, that is. I loaned to life four years of striving for a high school GPA, five years of crumbling through engineering classes in college, and two years of long, long days in pilot training. By my count, without factoring in any interest, life owes me 11 years of enjoyment and fulfillment. A deal's a deal, and all this time I've been wondering at which point I'd start to be paid back.

I've been on and off of the road now for a few months. Life's birthday present to me the day I turned 26 was my first trip as a pilot. Maine, New York, Boston, can't complain. Trip #2 was a ridiculous training week in Louisiana pretending we were gonna fly everyday until every single B-52 in the inventory broke each morning. Then things got interesting after being home for a few days; I was offered a trip to England and happily volunteered. A day later that trip canceled but I was added to a crew going to Hawaii. That trip DIDN'T get canceled, and our jet broke the second we landed (boost pump failure—wasn't me, I didn't touch the fucking thing). So now you're caught up. I'm sitting in my hotel room overlooking downtown Honolulu from the 30th floor enjoying myself. 

Despite the fact I'm quite isolated from everyone I care about for the time being, I do enjoy being six hours separated from the rest of my world. I've felt it in Cambodia, I've felt it in Europe and Dubai—a feeling of peace and calm at about 5 or 6pm when every single person you know turns to sleep other than the four people who are on your crew. For the first time in a long while you become unable to share your every thought with your friends and family; it's just you, in your own head and keeping thoughts to yourself for a time, walking down a beach in Hawaii. The sun sets and the buildings glow orange and the skies pink, and while you can take a picture and send it across the world, it won't be received anytime soon as the sun set hours ago where everyone you know happens to be. 

There's a feeling of welcomed isolation in flight as well, specifically over the oceans. Los Angeles Center signs you off via radio and Oakland Oceanic Control signs in you in via text message, then it's twenty minutes of radio chatter steadily draining into silence as one by one almost every other plane drifts beyond the curve of the Earth, and far beyond contact with you. The few callsigns you still hear more than once are the few planes flying to exact same place as you, and even they are hundreds of miles ahead or behind. 

I was serving as the relief crew-member, and had my 3-hour nap break during the last third of the flight. The only bunk left was a top-bunk right near the heating vent and was far too warm for me to be comfortable, so I took the mattress down and made a nest in the boom pod. I put on a podcast and went to sleep with my head a foot away from the boom pod side windows. I could open my eyes and see straight down from 36,000ft to the ocean, just to serve as a reminder that I'm in a jar of aluminum with 27 other people surrounded by thousands of miles of saltwater, and that's it...alone. 

When my nap break was over I walked back into a much busier cockpit than I left it. Oakland Oceanic turned into Honolulu Center, radio silence turned into a fast paced radio jive of instruction, and planes from all over the world, who just hours ago were each isolated by hundreds of miles, were now converging on a single island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We found our place in line between A330's from Tokyo and Dash-8's from Lanai, and touched down to join the crowd of a metropolis in the middle of nowhere. 

Everywhere you go on this island you find yourself inundated by people who paid a lot of money to be here, who dipped into their savings for the dream Hawaiian vacation. We walk among them, snorkeling and swimming and taking pictures of the turtles, but we didn't pay a thing to be here—the contrary, in fact. And while I'm away from my wife and simply doing my job as a pilot, there's plenty of opportunistic fortune to be had by seizing a tropical island holiday when one is dumped into your lap. 

Tiki-bars and mai tais, hours on the beach being warmed by the sun and cooled by the waves, I'd be a fool to even attempt to find a reason why I shouldn't make an effort to enjoy it. The caveat is only being able to enjoy it alone, but the trade is fair. And if this is what being a pilot means, then I was right to assume a decade ago that a pilot's life is for me. 

There's a thought that's been frequently sparking in me since I turned 26. It may occur to me while stepping off the jet into someplace new, while walking through Central Park or a riverboat casino on the Red River. I think of it while floating in my pool with Karen and whenever I see the sunset from 30,000ft. 

And it popped into my head just now as I looked out my balcony over Waikiki: "I guess life just made a payment."