Some time ago I wrote a piece about my fear of flying. It was after reading Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, which had nothing to do with flying. But it had a bit in it about her own fear of flying that captured my anxiety. Her description of trembling on takeoff mirrored mine.

Whenever I think about boarding a hunk of silver metal that weighs more than a large beluga whale that’s about to hurtle across the hopefully vacant sky, “my fingers (and toes) turn to ice,” she wrote. “My stomach leaps upward into my rib cage, the temperature in the tip of my nose drops to the same temperature in my fingers, and my heart and the engine correspond as we attempt to prove again that the laws of aerodynamics [will save us].”

My pre-flight anxiety is the worst. It starts the minute I book a flight. But I never give in to my fear of flying because I love to travel, and like most of us I try to believe that “it won’t happen to me.”

But what’s been occurring in aviation recently has ratcheted up my anxiety big time, especially because I will be flying a few weeks after this writing, and again a few months after that. It doesn’t help that both trips involve several flights, two of which are in very small planes, and two of which are transatlantic, which means there’s nowhere to land in an emergency unless you can make it to Iceland.

Now my anxiety is over the top because of all the recent accidents, one of which resulted in casualties, along with near-misses, mechanical failures, and the possibility of FAA being privatized while lots of air traffic controllers are being fired although there’s already a shortage of these experienced people who keep planes from crashing into each other. (Experts have been saying for years that near-misses on runways are more common than the traveling public may realize.)

Then there’s the cluster of potential disasters taking place in aircraft cabins which appear to be increasing. Some chilling stories include a man who tried to stab a flight attendant on a cross-country flight and a flight attendant who had her nose broken by an unruly passenger. Cabin crews have reported other physical attacks as well as sexual harassment.

It’s also clear that climate change and global warming have played a part in increased episodes of severe turbulence. The research is clear: Earth’s warming is increasing the risks of dangerously bumpy flights. Last year thirty-six passengers on a flight to Hawaii were injured and a transatlantic flight had to make an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Incidents like these are ratcheting up as the number of flights increases and the weather makes us all vulnerable to weather conditions.

I’ve probably flown hundreds of flights all over the world for work or pleasure and mostly things have been fine. But I’ve had some close calls. Flying over the Andes once the turbulence was so intense I wondered if I’d be forced to eat survivors as we waited for rescue. I also had a “close as it gets” landing in Honduras when two aircraft rounded a mountain simultaneously while trying to land.

Now I have a new thing to worry about. I’m wondering if I’d be allowed back into the United States or whether I’d be handtied, held for hours (hopefully without my head being shaved) and disappeared into a place like El Salvador. That’s because it’s no secret that I am a left-leaning journalist, an activist, and pro-Palestinian advocate. I’m also a feminist and liberal – words on the don’t use list. My anxiety grows daily thanks to Donald and his sidekicks. So does my husband’s, a green card holder.

When I’m rational I realize that air travel is statistically safer than getting in your car. I know that like cars, airplanes are, for most of us, a necessary part of modern life. Still, there is something that kicks in when I board an airplane, and the door is sealed by a gatekeeper on a terra firma ramp. As the engines rev, and safety instructions, which are pretty useless, are demonstrated, I think of Erica Jong, who admitted that “constant vigilance” was her motto. “I keep concentrating very hard, helping the pilot fly that 250 passenger !#+@!” she said. These days I relate to that more than ever.

A comedian once captured my own aerophobia (a real word). It gives me something to laugh at when the going gets rough. “"My fear of flying,” he shared, “starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it, I'm thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport."

So, here's to all the newly fearful travelers as we buckle up. Long may we have smooth flights to our destinations and return trips home, safely, without incident, or white knuckles.

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Elayne Clift writes, and worries about flying, from Brattleboro, Vt.

All my life I have disagreed with Henry David Henry: Unlike him, I think it is “worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” That’s why inveterate travelers find the return to post-pandemic travel an exhilarating experience.

This spring my husband and I were excited to resurrect an aborted trip abroad that was planned almost four years ago. We were so excited you might have thought it was something we’d never done before. The truth is travel is in our DNA so having to stay close to home for so long was hard.

The joy of travel began when I was a child,nd the high point of summer was a family trip to Toronto to visit my father’s relatives. On the eve of the journey my sister and I laid out new shorts, T-shirts, and sandals to be ready when the alarm rang at 6:00 a.m. Teeth brushed and hair combed, we skipped to the back of the black Buick and didn’t argue with our brother for the window seat. We were too busy savoring breakfast at Howard Johnson’s, part of the annual ritual that always began our trip to another country.

Every year we took a different route to enjoy the scenery. Pre-interstate and Holiday Inns, we drove through Pennsylvania Dutch country or New England or New York State, where we visited Ithaca’s gorges, the 1,000 islands, and of course, Niagara Falls. Every night, we looked for AAA-approved cabins in which to sleep, with their worn linoleum floors, chenille bedspreads, and inevitable spiders. We thought it was pure heaven (except for the spiders.)

Crossing the border was like going to a forbidden country. We had to answer questions about where we were going, why, and for how long, and reassure customs officials that we had nothing illegal with us. Once cleared to proceed we headed to the Falls to ride in the Maid of the Mist boat that went behind the Falls spraying us with water.

In Toronto we checked into the Royal York Hotel where a little man in a maroon uniform roamed the lobby every day calling out, “Call for Mr. Smith!” “Call for Mr. Jones!” The next morning, before heading to my grandfather’s cottage, we ate breakfast in The Honeydew Restaurant. Only then were we ready for the obligatory visits that lay ahead.

Later, in my early twenties, I took my first solo trip to Europe. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven as I experienced Amsterdam, London, Paris, Rome, and the Swiss landscape, relying on travel books that promised you could do this kind of thing economically. Relishing every moment and every conversation with fellow travelers from different cultures, I thought I’d go mad with the pleasure of it all. I marveled at the sight of Michelangelo’s David, wept in San Marco Square, thrilled at the pageantry of the Changing of the Guard, sat in cafes on the Champs Elysee and smiled back at Mona Lisa. I even fell in love twice. More importantly I knew that my life had changed and that I would never stop traveling.

Luckily, I married a Brit who loves traveling as much as I do and with whom I was able to travel internationally because of his work, then mine. We even lived for a year in Thailand when I got a teaching gig there. We traveled like cockroaches then, scurrying around Southeast Asia, discovering new foods, new art and music, new friends, beautiful rituals, and other ways of living.

Travel also offers a diverse and sometimes dramatic education. History, art, literature, religious beliefs all come alive as we are exposed to other cultures, rituals, and norms. We become more curious, learn new ways of thinking or expressing ourselves, and grow in ways we never imagined.

Traveling also offers challenges. Before there was a single currency in Europe, I had to learn how to convert currencies, to communicate without a common language and to know the difference between the Alps and the Pyrenees. It was instructive and fun. I also had to develop bargaining skills and to know how to deal with dangerous situations. Luckily, in my experience, there is always someone to help.

Travel, if it’s possible, can be simply a pleasurable experience or a profound life-altering event. For me it was both, and I view it as a great blessing.

That’s why I continue to agree with Mark Twain who claimed that travel is enticing, not least because it is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Like Twain, whose account of one trip gave us Innocents Abroad, I think “it would be well if such an excursion could be got up every year and the system regularly inaugurated.”

Traveling may have seemed a thing of the past during the pandemic. Now we may find ourselves changing venues because of the climate crisis or different opportunities. We may prefer more café crawls and fewer cathedral and museum visits along with more chatting with the locals. But I am among those travelers who are not ready to let a passport expire because I never know when I might have a fierce urge to weep again in Venice, to learn something new, to make new friends, or to count cats in Zanzibar.