exit row

window seat

Photo by @felipepelaquim on Unsplash

I find myself in a middle seat on my flight from Westchester County to Atlanta. It's a seat right behind First Class. My original seat was in Economy, where I had a window. What was supposed to be an upgrade falls short, more a level grade. I trade the comfort of a window to rest my head and catch a few more minutes rest on this 6:10am departure for the confines placing a man to my left who keeps dropping his phone and a woman on my right whose face shows the money necessary to support a stay at The Opus whose keycard she uses as a bookmark while she orders a Prosecco. First class is so close I can almost - no, actually - touch it. But it's still out of reach for me. And for the woman next to me in 10E.

We go through some chop as the pilot, who announced himself as Captain Obvious - why must all pilots daylight as stand-up comedians? - stated we would when taxiing through the morning's rain, the cause of said chop. It's the kind of chop where you begin to question the whole concept of flying, despite it being the safest way to travel, not as a choice we make - I have no fear of flying - but as a thing of physics and science and technology. It's the kind of chop that forces me to pause my typing, the kind that begins a motion sickness I normally save for cars and boats, the kind that when over, reminds me of that feeling you get when trying your absolute best to avoid soiling your pants as your stomach continues to churn and then all of a sudden stops, allowing you to make it the next 7 miles to a rest stop for longer term relief. I have no experience in this.

The flight attendants cut the service short as a result of the bumps, but not before 10E orders a second Prosecco. The clock is not yet 7:30am ET and I wonder what compels her to imbibe at this hour, and to do so twice, no less. I question why airlines welcome this and I begin to appreciate the smaller planes where in-flight service at this hour - or any hour - is simply coffee, tea or water.

We land just a few minutes behind schedule. This does not stop 10E from calling what I assume is her husband to complain. Not about the delayed landing, mind you. But about the turbulence being rough, how they had to stop the in-flight service - pick a lane, or rather a jet stream, lady - and about the lack of televisions. It should be noted that this flight did not leave her hemming and hawing throughout, as she spent her time updating her daily planner with stickers noting "Self Care Day" and "Mental Vacay" while noting some - nearly all - appointments as "IMPORTANT" and tasks as "Goals!", which was after she read a book, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, which is also an what I’ve decided to name the middle seat in which I sit.

I find myself on a 3:59pm ET flight from Atlanta to Westchester County Airport, fortunate that my request for standby was met, providing me with seat 5C, an aisle in a row of four, in Comfort Plus, again directly behind First Class so close I can nearly touch it. This time I say nearly with accuracy due to the super-extended leg room. I can barely reach my bag under a wool-capped First Class passenger ahead of me enjoying a Sweetwater 420; I do not have to get up when my seat mate in 5D gets up to use the lavatory. I glance across at a bespoke-brown-plaid-blazered man in 5B, quietly enjoying a film on his iPad - no TV necessary for this prepared, dapper man. I draw my gaze to 5A, clad in two jackets, an N-95 face mask, and what appear to be surgical safety goggles over his glasses, hood cinched tightly. Covid fucked all of us up some, but some of us more than others.

I ask myself if there is anything better than catching an earlier flight home, willfully neglecting to tell my wife and daughters about this improvement, only to show up at home 3 hours earlier than expected. My list is short¹.

I used to travel often for work. It was simply part of the days and the weeks and the months passing. And like many things, we form habits around the mundane that create beauty in their repetition.

Exit rows are a standard preference for passengers. The distance between one's coccyx, albeit upright with minimal decline, and your forward passenger's seat back make this an easy pick, especially when one is tall.

A window seat is also not an uncommon pick. There's no having to get up for the frequent uriner, the risk of a not-so-funny-bone being hit by the service cart is eliminated, and the fuselage-created headrest make for added comforts lost on those in the aisle seat. And the middle seat is hell on earth, or rather, hell on 30,000 feet above Earth.

And while all those factors weigh into my decision to pick seat 12A on this CR-J from Wilmington to Atlanta, they are not why I pick a seat such as this.

It is the window's lack of shade that I covet.

But we'll get to that in a moment. First, let's remember the non-physical opportunities afforded one, like myself, who finds himself in an exit row. While exceedingly rare, being in an exit row requires one to consent to serious duties should something go wrong, especially in the case of a water landing. One must be physically able to lift about 40 pounds, rotate a chunk of metal and place it on a seat, all within a confined space. I realize I said we'd talk about the non-physical opportunities and I am talking about the physical.

But the physical here is not comfort related like extra leg room: they are instead a means to an end - though hopefully not the end - in providing for the safety and care of others. In too few instances in our lives do we willingly consent to willingly ensure the safety of others while so often willy-nillyingly ignoring our fellow man. But before we disconnect the plane from the jet-bridge and secure the main cabin door, we all consent to the flight attendant with a verbal, yes: in the unlikely event of an emergency landing, I will do my part. When I think back to all the flights in my life, I can count only a handful of times when someone did not consent and was required to change seats.²

But when one looks to his community, we see other places where we do not assent to the safety and best interests of others. Voting, for example, is something that could serve as another way to assent or dissent to the vision someone has framed as the path forward. But we don't vote. We hit an 120-year high in the United States with 66% of eligible votes voting in the 2020 Presidential Election which still leaves 1 in 3 of us deciding to stay home with a giant middle finger to the rest of us.

Voluntary fire departments make up the majority of departments and their volunteer firemen make up 67 percent of the country’s firefighters. At the same time, while the number of calls to these departments has tripled in the last 40 years, has seen rosters fall by 25% in this same period. Applications to join the armed forces has also dropped from 800,000 in the early 1980s to 205,000 today; at the same time, 77% of eligible Americans would be unable to serve: they would fail the qualifications. A recent event at my daughter's school was postponed for lack of parent volunteers; full disclosure, I did not myself step forward either. Society has gone so far as to create a portmanteau to address this with individuals being "voluntold" to act.

But in an exit row, we volunteer. My guess is it's our collective laziness and apathy making it easier to say yes - and at the same time removing the forward seated passengers ability to recline their seat, for which their is a special place in hell, that place being the seat behind someone with their seat reclined, laptop crushed in the process - than to say no, I cannot perform these duties, and move to another seat.

But the magic of an exit row, and specifically the window seat in which I sit, isn't the restricted movement of the seat ahead of you, the slightly longer leg room, or doing a limited, though no less societal, good by consenting to the duties required therein, and being the person to open the latch and move the 40-pound door into the seat. It's the lack of window shade where magic is found.

On an early morning flight, that shadeless window provides its passenger with no other option than to see the sun rise off in the horizon across spacious skies before descending while looking onto amber waves of grain. That mid-afternoon flight West is met with the welcomed view of purple mountain's majesty. Landing in the midwest without a window shade volunteers you to take in the fruited plains. God sheds his grace on thee who sits in an exit row window seat. And without the need to get up for someone to use the bathroom, there is nothing to do, but bask in it.³

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." From 30,000 feet, from the exit row window seat, there is nothing but cleansing light (and some radiation) to wash away the hazy laziness within which we normally walk.

And there's a metaphor somewhere in all of this. Too often, we put blinders up, limiting our perspective. We only look for stories and information that supports our view. We don't willingly seek out contrarian perspectives. We close the shade on those, figuratively throwing shade on other points of view. We only open our eyes when we want to see, not when something needs to be seen.

And while there are good reasons for this - some things are just pure garbage and should be ignored - too often we close off discussion and debate before we learn to live in nuance. Or even live with others. We put our in AirPod Pros the second we leave the house, shutting out the world in favor of streaming music (that doesn't pay musicians nearly enough for their work) or listening to a podcast (don't forget to buy your Athletic Greens) instead of listening to the world around us.

Am I guilty of all of this? Absolutely. Even as I type this I am cocooned in my middle seat within the confines and conveniences of my earphones. And while I've never stooped so low as to have the noise-cancelling, over the ear monstrosities⁴ that seats 5A, 7D and 6C have around me, they signal the same thing: I'm in my own world right now; leave me the fuck alone.

And this is exactly why I pick an exit row, window seat, every chance I can get, as a stark reminder to permanently leave my window open to the life outside of me.

1. Besides some obvious things, "Earlier flight from Las Vegas" would be three notches above my current scenario.

2. This happened on my return flight from Atlanta to Wilmington later this same week. While I was not in the exit row, I was also not asked to change seats, though I would have.

3. An unexpected benefit to the window seat in an exit row happened on my return trip from Atlanta to Wilmington, when I dropped my phone in between the seat and the fuselage. Unable to reach it myself, I conversed with the stranger in the aft seat to see if she could reach it. While she could not reach it either, I welcomed the break from the typical ignorance of our fellow passengers, not in the sense that they didn't know anything or willfully ignored something but in the sense that they typically ignore their fellow passengers. Without my phone for the hour-long flight, I instead took to writing some of this essay. And just staring out the window. When we landed, I was able to retrieve my phone, which, for the record, was never placed in airplane mode due to the time of my dropping it. This flight was also delayed exactly 9 minutes ahead of our departure - it said so on the monitor - which is about as silly a delay as I've ever seen.

4. I recently tried on a set of AirPods Max at the Apple Store and within 30 seconds, I felt as nauseated as one did flying through turbulence in the 1980s, when air sickness was much more of a thing.