Airplane nightmares

It's the only thing I dream about.

When I woke up yesterday, I told my kids that I’d had a scary dream. They didn’t need me to tell them what it was about, because they know that I usually only dream about one thing. I dream about airplanes.

For fifteen years, I worked as a flight attendant with Air Canada (in between freelance art and writing projects, while I was trying to figure out how to make a living doing something along those lines.) It’s been twelve years since I took the big leap and quit my job, for better or for worse. Now I stay at home and do art stuff, and the last time I flew anywhere was 2019. But still… I dream about airplanes. I dream about being late for my pre-flight briefing. I dream about getting to customs and realizing I don’t have my security pass. I dream about meal services, emergecy procedures, and airplane crashes. For some reason, I dream about being on airplanes that fly really low over oceans (those ones are terrifying, but also often kind of beautiful and awe-inspiring). Last night, I dreamt that my 2024 self was working on my old Calgary-Frankfurt flight, with the growing suspicion that I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I guess this stuff is just hard-wired into me, after all that time.

That picture from the drawing book in 2000 shows me on an airplane, having an airplane nightmare during a turbulent landing in San Francisco (I still remember it). It seemed like the right picture to use for this newsletter.

When I first started flying, it was a big adjustment. I went from being an art student in Toronto to being an always-out-of-town flight attendant based in Calgary (my old hometown). I wrote about that transition on some of the earliest pages of the drawing book. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good job! But it took me a long time to figure out what I was doing. The drawing book was a good place to vent my woes. Sometimes I drew on the crew bus (“Stau” means a traffic jam)…

Around the same time, I wrote in the drawing book about a memory of a plane trip I took as a kid, back when air travel seemed glamourous and exciting!

(By the way, my mom had also been a flight attendant!! She actually had a glamorous job, taking charter flights on Wardair for week-long layovers in places like Honolulu and London. That’s another story, but maybe I can put this 1971 article in here, because why not?

My job wasn’t quite so glamorous, but after a while, I started to get the hang of it and discover some things that I enjoyed about it. The next few pages of the drawing book show some of the good things that went along with it. Like a trip with my dog in late 1999 (flying on a travel pass - NOT a work trip!)…

Thanks to my job-related travel benefits, I travelled with my dog to a few other Arctic destinations. You can read about one of those adventures here, in an earlier Drawing Book newsletter. Also, while I’m writing this, I’m remembering that a few years after that Inuvik trip, I met my Inuvik hosts again… when I was at work! They were travelling on the Calgary-Frankfurt flight!

In those days, the drawing book gave me something to do while waiting in hotel lobbies for the crew pickup, or in airports between flights…

(Back in the days before cell phones, I kept track of my life in these coil-ring daytimer books, and misplacing them was a big deal! I wrote about losing another one just before a Bob Dylan concert, in this post from last year.)

Anyway, not only did I start feeling like I had accomplished a few things, I also started making friends with some of my work colleagues! If it hadn’t been for those friends, I never would have lasted as long as I did at that job.

(What was Joe Btfsplk’s Diner, you may ask? It was a restaurant in Banff, back in the days when you could still buy a not-too-expensive milkshake in Banff. Joe Btfsplk was a comic book character, and the owner of the diner named his restaurant after the character. My dad’s office designed the restaurant, so it felt like the right place to go when visiting Banff. It’s been gone for a long time now, though.)

Wishing you safe travels, smooth landings, and also hoping that your job isn’t driving you crazy! Most of all, wishing you peaceful dreams.

(I’ve always liked that photo, taken in London, because it looks like the door just vanishes into the air. Oh, and hello to the new followers and subscribers… it’s very nice to have you here!)