SERVICE ANIMALS

Air travel is hideous.

I know this in large part because my husband is an airline pilot. What in god’s name he is doing intentionally entering several airports and boarding (and then flying) several planes every week is anyone’s guess and surely involves a masochism I should be deeply concerned about.

(I am told the folks up front with the stripes on their epaulettes are fed the fancy food in the cockpit, not just the PopChips, and he gets some rest time in some kind of semiprivate capsule while lawn-darting at .78X the speed of sound over the Atlantic Ocean, but come on.)

Dealing with just one gate agent, one delay for a busted windshield wiper or a hungover flight attendant— just one drive through an OBX tropical storm to the airport— any one of these is all it should take to convince a soul it is moral folly that air travel exists at all.

I, personally, will take the ox-drawn wagon, and die of dystentery with thanks on my parched lips that I did not have to endure glares about my lime green roller-bag’s neurodivergent retraction handle.

Life in Western culture, friends, is air travel. Reality here—though in theory conducive to a longer life for homo sapiens than in the Stone Age— is not particularly bearable.

We are assembled into our boarding groups with a cruel arbitrariness, made to feel shame and apprehension about our personal items; we are given instructions over a fuzzy intercom, asked to pay attention while a passive-aggressive flight attendant mimes the story of our potential demise; our knees bonk the seat in front of us; our heads go unsupported; the food is packaged, preserved, parsimoniously distributed from tank-like carts that could make easy roadkill of a person just trying to find the loo. And the list goes on.

And oh, the noise, the noise.

*

I just attended the Journey to Jupiter Writing Retreat in Salter Path, NC, this past weekend. Seventeen writers, two of whom (Julia “Writing Is Joy” Green and Ralph “Make it Worse” Walker) had taken on the monumental task of building the whole thing and serving as our skilled and knowledgeable guides, attended— most, I believe, suffering from some degree of either impostor syndrome or the level of introversion which suggests to the brain stem, like a faint but engaging melody, that it might be prudent to diaper oneself before a social gathering.

Let me tell you something about what happens when two giant-hearted, searingly insightful writer geese take in a gaggle of introvert writer-goslings for a weekend: the indignities of air travel begin to fade.

Here, you are a valued member of a community— someone people want to talk to, someone others approach, though they may have to make use of their recent diapering to achieve it.

Here, the intent is to nourish you, to give to you whatever you may most need, rather than take from you your precious, unruly roller-bag. Here, the instructions on what to do in the event of an emergency mostly involve remembering you are not alone, and that helping others will help you.

Here, there are no boarding groups, there is no jostling. There is room for all of it. Writers working on everything—from fast-paced heists to historical mysteries, from Young Adult love stories to the equivalent of literary lace-tatting across the pins and bobbins of memoir—have all gathered here.

The sensibility of “we all have a place here, and there is room for every bit of what we’ve brought” is so palpable, after just a few hours, that people begin visibly spreading.

Their things start to straggle across the table, on the morning of the first full day. By that afternoon, little nests of creation have started popping up on couches and floors. By day two, faces have opened fully into laughter and inquiry, and the tense, bobbling micro-pods of twos and threes that had begun the weekend have given way to amoebic dances of five or ten individuals, moving across the landscape in a trajectory so fluid that one can hardly tell which are giving and which receiving.

This distinction itself, between giving and receiving, ceases to matter, since each is just a part of the other, made possible and come into being because of its partner.

So you take my point: this shit’s not air travel. It’s the good stuff. I was even reminded that some people, like novelist and fellow Substacker Penny Zang, and pan-genre writer Kate Blackwood, who really seem pretty damn polished, are just as cracked as I am (a thing you encounter when you’re writing in the dark of 5am together in a conference lounge, within earshot of each other’s sweet mutterings of creation, or riding in a rental car for six hours together), which gave me oh so much hope, and belonging, and bristling excitement to read their upcoming books.

*

We all need the blessing of contrast. We all need to spend time swimming in what is clearly NOT the water we usually swim in. And if we’re doubly lucky, we may carry some part of that experience, of immersing ourselves in new, swirling, expanding waters, back to the poopy fish-tank of our usual habits of mind.

But let me make my way back to my air-travel metaphor, in honor of retreat co-leader Ralph, who rides his metaphors until they die of exhaustion and then whips out his defibrillator, to everyone’s horror, and benefit.

By the end of the retreat, we’d all really, and I mean really, earned a wee breakdown, just from the magnitude of the receptivity, the sheer volume of experience— of having such massive potential gathering right there, within the puny, leaky barrels of our ribs. And a few of us were able to take that chance, for disclosure, introversion and diapers be damned, and, in the final large-group meet-up, actually utter aloud to the group some version of what it had meant to live in these waters for a few days.

One of these grateful confessions came from a fellow poet-writing-a-novel (public persona LiteraryPug), who said he wondered where he would ever find another group like this, how he wished he could bring us all home with him. To which I responded that he could bring us, because we were his service animals.

So now, we all have sixteen service animals in the cat-carriers of our imaginations. And listen up, world: you’ll just have to let me ride with mine, because why yes, I do have their paperwork, right here.

I have inside me all the words and words-to-be that you could need, to show you how we all belong—tapped or scribbled out in the dark of the pre-dawn morning, or in parking lots waiting to pick up our children; I possess even those words yet to come, from the lonely corners of our apprehensions, into the glow of a coastal evening— see? They are all right here, in the seat next to me, as we fly into that night.