I do remember looking out the window at one point and seeing the Rocky Mountains
right there, but the feel good medicine was working and I just remember thinking how beautiful it was instead of being scared.
I don't know that I'm necessarily "afraid" of flying, but I usually would "self-medicate" when I had to so it wouldn't really be a problem. The first time I remember being stone cold sober on an airplane we were landing in Indianapolis on a crystal clear day and I could see the city down there -- way down there in among all the corn -- and thinking "Jeez . . . we're really up here."
See . . . most of the time when I fly I like to pretend I'm on a bus or a train, which is perfectly fine except for the take-off and the landing.
Worse than coming down out of a clear blue sky, however, was having to land in pea-soup fog in Boston -- where the runways jut out into the ocean -- because we were running out of fuel and coming out of blind cloud cover. We came out of those clouds and the ground was
RIGHT THERE. It was terrifying. All I could think of was how lucky we were that somebody figured out how to make all those instruments work correctly, because we had absolutely no margin for error.
