No Things

The year 2014 was, for me, never better than for a brief hour on the morning of Sunday, June eighth, several thousand feet in the air above the southwestern edge of Costa Rica. It was my last day of vacation — my travel day, really. Six of us had spent a week snailing our way around the tiny country in a Toyota 4-Runner. We scrambled first up into the mountains, among coffee plants and volcanoes, and then we wound our way down to the beaches along the Osa Peninsula, flinging ourselves into the merciless surf, for shits and scrapes.

My long trip back to New York had begun around seven that morning. Two friends drove me forty minutes down the gulf side of the peninsula to the lone airstrip in Puerto Jiménez, where I climbed into a Cessna Grand Caravan 208 just after nine a.m. The plane was a twelve-seater with two pilots (a “puddle jumper,” as my father says), and there were six other passengers on board. After about fifteen minutes we made a “technical stop” on the Pacific Ocean side, in Drake Bay, a fact I had been warned about in an email update from Sansa Airlines. What I did not expect was for all the other passengers to disembark. Where the hell were these people going? I could have sworn the stop was just technical. I wondered, was I supposed to get off too?

I stayed put, figuring someone would shoo me off if needed. One pilot secured the door and the other prepared for takeoff. Somehow, I had just won the air travelers’ lottery — I was the only passenger left on the plane. The pilots seemed unfazed by this happy miracle. They spoke to each other through the on-board communication system, which I had no access to. I felt something akin to the exhilaration of being in a car alone for the first time at the age of sixteen, newly licensed, except in this case I wasn’t steering. And then — away we went! I had no reason to believe we weren’t on our way to the San José International Airport, and yet I couldn’t quite be sure.

My own private plane! A laugh bubbled up from my diaphragm, but I couldn’t hear it over the hum of the engine and propeller. I felt invisible. There was no one else I had to monitor for potential signs of airsickness but myself. There had been no safety regulations to review, no exits to locate; the pilots and I needed nothing from each other. They flipped their switches and checked their gauges and ignored me completely. It occurred to me they would have gone through these exact motions whether or not I had been there.

I had achieved a momentary escape velocity, some sort of blissful Lloyd Dobler fantasy — I had nothing to read, no schedule to mind, nothing to say, and no one to tell. I don’t even remember having any specific, language-based thoughts beyond understanding how private air travel could be height of luxury. It was the best feeling I had all year, and I think it only lasted about forty-five minutes.

I didn’t get home to my apartment in Manhattan until well after one in the morning, after two more flights and a five-and-a-half hour layover in the Orlando Airport. I have no recollection of what I did with myself for three of those hours, but I do recall watching the San Antonio Spurs lose by two points to the Miami Heat in Game 2 of the NBA Finals — it was an exciting game. The rest of 2014 was pretty crappy. I hurt people I loved, I fought with a landlord, I got a canker sore ON MY TONSIL. But for a brief moment there in the sky, things were good, because there were no things.

Never Better, a collection of essays from writers we love, is The Awl’s goodbye to 2014.