ALTITUDE ATTITUDE IN THE NO-FLY ZONE

Yesterday was the first time I´d been to an airport since I quit skydiving a few years ago. In fact, the last 300 times I´ve taken off in airplanes, I haven´t landed in them. I´ve never liked the idea of landing in airplanes. That´s when they crash.

But, there I was, at the Burlington International Airport in Vermont, waiting for my partner to return from a trip to Vancouver. I knew I had serious damage control ahead of me because she´s a smoker, and would land (I smoke, too) feeling like she´d just been through six hours of dry waterboarding in a cattle car.

I arrived at the airport six hours early, allowing ample time for the hundred miles I had to travel across New Hampshire and Vermont, which is impossible to do. Like my homemade woodshed, there isn´t a square corner in the whole of the Green Mountain and Granite States. Even four-way stops always have a fifth option roundabout.

I was also giving myself time to navigate the customary hindrances and hazards one expects to encounter in such a North Country winter trek -- icy roads, unmarked detours, "local" traffic and overturned cows – none of which on this trip, of course, presented themselves. Only when one is running late do such things happen. This will teach me to be tardy the next time I want to be on time.

So, there I was with six hours to kill, and using the first of them spiraling around the claustrophobic helix of a three-story parking garage. This was startling enough, because nothing in Vermont should exceed two stories and not have an attic.

But, it´s also a mandatory fixture, I suppose, for any airport adding "International" to its name, which also authorizes them to charge 30 bucks for a pocket-sized box of gift shop chocolates.

I know that our cultural climate has changed in the last few years, and the word "security" has now come to mean "insecurity," but I didn´t expect the reaction I got from the airport police when I asked one of them if and where I could smoke.

I might as well have asked where I could get bigger shoes because the bomb I had in my earth clogs was numbing my toes. I did tell them (in an effort to get them to lower their guns) about my inbound partner, whose lungs by then were probably emerging on their own, and monster blobbing-up the flight crew.

This didn´t help. Sensing incarceration, I tried to distract them and ease my anecdotal blunder by asking them just what, exactly, was the "suspicious activity" that a voice on the public address system kept telling me to immediately report, should I witness it. Just what kind of activity was considered "suspicious"? At this point, I was only trying to avoid being shanghaied on the next flight to Guantanamo, but my life´s calling to what Mark Twain defined as "literature of a low order," got the best of me.

"Would jumping around in the terminal on TWO pogo-sticks qualify as suspicious activity," I asked?

Right about here, I´m duty-bound to offer some FREE ADVICE FOR AIR TRAVELERS: Airport (In)security guards are not the best audience for auditioning new comedy material.

One cavity-search short of the most intense scrutiny since Britney Spears drove to a Jiffy Mart later, I suppressed my own nicotine craving and made my way to the Observation Tower. There, I had a commanding view of the airport, and could listen to the air traffic controllers on the overhead speakers.

Now, we´ve all heard the one about the guy who fell off a forty-story building, and as he passed the 20th floor, someone leaned out the window and asked him how he was doing.

"Okay so far."

With that in mind, I looked out over Vermont´s tallest garage at the incoming and departing flights, and found myself shocked to hear an air traffic controller´s informal instructions to an approaching pilot: "Let´s get you down to four thousand five hundred (feet) and see what happens."

SEE WHAT HAPPENS? Reflexively reaching for my Marlboros and my ripcord, I remained there only long enough to also hear: "Sorry to keep bugging you, but I need you to lose some altitude."

That clinched it, and I returned to my truck sucking-in a few calming gulps of that intoxicating nicotine/car exhaust combo, expecting to be engulfed any second in a Canadian fireball.

When my partner did finally arrive, after apparently escaping the 4500-foot international coin toss, I told her to keep her cigarettes out of sight until we crossed back into New Hampshire or Cuba via Canada, whichever came first.

We´re okay so far.

The ground´s still the limit for North Country Humorist B. Elwin Sherman. Copyright 2008 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used with permission.