350 POUNDS by Marybeth Holleman
We’re on the runway, waiting. We’ve been sitting for twenty minutes, everyone in their seats, seatbelts fastened, luggage on board.
The plane is full. Twice as we boarded, the stewardess urged us in an increasingly tight voice to stow our smaller bags under the seat in front of us, to remove coats and small items from the overhead bins, to be courteous and make room for fellow passengers or they’d have to check carry-ons that don’t fit. There are no empty seats, no empty spaces. Behind me is a mother with a baby on her lap. Next to me is a man who needed a seatbelt extender.
A jovial voice comes on the intercom to tell us that “Hi folks this is the pilot” and “We’re 350 pounds over weight” so “We’re just going to sit here for a few more minutes and rev the engines to burn this extra weight.” And then, reassuringly: “We do this all the time.”
I stare at the SkyMall magazine in front of me and feel heat rise to my face. I’m flying home from Colorado to Alaska after giving a talk entitled “Climate Change and the Literary Imagination.” To a packed room, I spoke about the shrinking ice pack and starving polar bears, about social ennui and political inaction. Science, I said, is not enough to motivate us. We need more than information; we need the emotional appeal and intimate awareness of story. We’re lead as much by our hearts as our heads.
Then I jumped in my rental car and drove to the airport on an interstate flanking the Rocky Mountains, past spires dipped in snow and skirted by forests of quaking aspen and paper birch. I sped by them having just learned that these birch forests are dying because of heat stress, because of climate change, because of us.
I’m uneasy doing all this flying to give a talk on global warming. I paid extra for carbon offsetting, but so what? And now this. Carbon offsetting be damned, we get to sit here and burn off 350 pounds of jet fuel.
I look out the window. It’s five p.m. in Denver, mid-November. The sun glowers back at me, a huge orange sphere anchored to the horizon. Off to the plane’s rear, the air wavers, runway lights glowing in quivering lines. Is that heat rising from the tarmac, or the fumes of burnt fuel?
350 pounds. It’s a familiar number, 350. It’s the uppermost safe limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We must bring it from 392 down to 350 parts per million to curb global warming, to have a chance at saving polar bears, walrus, birch forests, and ourselves.
350 pounds. I sit and recall an old John Wayne movie in which Wayne takes a gun away from a drunken passenger, only to return it to him when he’s had some coffee. And then one of the plane’s engines fail. Wayne pushes open an emergency exit door and they begin throwing luggage out – clothes flying everywhere, women hanging on to seatbacks – so the plane can lift and miss hitting the Golden Gate Bridge.
I look around at the other passengers and wonder what they’re thinking.
The large man next to me laughs and says to the woman next to him, “I’d offer to get off, but the wife’s expecting me.” She laughs, says something I can’t hear, to which he responds, “Yes, it’d be enough to run your car for quite some time.”
I wonder if they are thinking:
Those 350 pounds of gas would save me a ton at the gas pump.
Those 350 pounds of gas just blown off is probably why my ticket was so damn expensive.
Those 350 pounds of gas burned into nothing but heat in the night air, we might as well shoot the polar bears between the eyes.
“Please put your smaller bags at your feet. Please don’t fill the overhead bins with coats and small items. Please place wheels facing out so we can fit more in.”
Surely the pilot will tell us a truck has come to siphon it off. 350 pounds must have some value for an airline industry that is now chronically in financial trouble, chronically late and cancelling, chronically packed to the gills with people and luggage. Surely they’ll siphon off the 350 pounds, and we’ll lift, flying above all obstacles.
“We’re just going to sit right here and burn it off. We’ll rev the engine for a few minutes and that 350 pounds will be gone.”
Of course, burning it off is the easiest and fastest way to get rid of excess weight. It’s the best shot at getting us home on time. It means this flight, and the ones after it, will proceed just as planned, as if nothing at all is wrong, we’re not living a death by a thousand small burns, weighed down by our own desires.
“We do this all the time.”
We all sit, packed in, compliant. Passengers murmur to each other over the roar of revved engines. The man next to me opens a Time magazine; the baby behind me sucks on a pacifier. I lean back and try to close my eyes. I can’t.
I lean forward, press my face to the window. The sun has sunk. A red light pulses in the thickening runway dark.
Marybeth Holleman is the author of The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost (University of Utah Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in the North American Review, Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, Sierra, and The Seacoast Reader. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.