The Million Miler
Shortly into my flight from Seattle to Cleveland, the pilot made a special announcement over the intercom: on this flight, there was a passenger hitting one million miles. The flight attendants walked down the aisle to congratulate someone several rows in front of me.
One million miles.
How many flights, how many years, had that taken to accomplish?
Where had the million miler traveled over the course of those miles?
A while ago, one of my favorite podcasts - Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ‘StarTalk Radio’ - had done an episode on Lagrange points. One of them, Lagrange Point 1 (or L1) I think, is almost one million miles from Earth, between us and the sun. These points are areas in space where the gravitational pull between two bodies balances out and a spacecraft can stay put, so to say, with minimal effort. Drift too far into either body’s gravitational pull, and more fuel and effort is needed to course correct the orbit to stay in place.
The million miler had traveled enough to get to L1, I mused.
I was flying with my friend Shanna to surprise another friend, Jillian, for her birthday. We would all now be 40 years old. For a short while, anyway. My next birthday was coming in a few months. The personal mileage I had put on through the years seemed more than enough to get me to my own Lagrange Point - coasting between the worlds of youth and old age. Though as the years ticked up like miles, and I edged older, I found myself having to make more effort to maintain the in-between orbit.
My skincare routine lengthened. More and more meals became more and more veggie. My muscles ached sooner on runs, and took longer to recover than they used to. Daily vitamins turned to daily supplements. Even the fertility that I had always taken for granted now needed maintenance. A year or two ago, I had surgery to remove uterine fibroids. In another year or two, I’d need to do it again. Last summer, I went through six uncomfortable months of egg freezing. And if I wanted to try for kids, I’d need to add regular acupuncture and more supplements to my routine. I’d need to eat even cleaner for fertility.
All that effort just to stay in orbit. And I still have no way of knowing if it will pay off. Will I end up with kids, like Jillian, in Cleveland? Or will I not end up with kids, as Shanna has opted to, in Seattle? Even this flight was a reminder of my in-between reality.
Eventually, though, the gravitational pull of age will knock me out of my orbit and pull me irrevocably further away from my youth, and from my fertility. I’ll be beyond a million miles and my own Lagrange Point.
The pilot broke in on the intercom towards the end of the flight to announce that we would soon be making our descent into Cleveland. I got up and walked to the back of the plane to use the bathroom.
As I waited, a flight attendant left the back galley area and knocked on the door of the bathroom closest to me.
“Are you ok in there?” she asked.
It seemed a little odd. I hadn’t noticed anything off. Maybe the person had been in there for longer than usual? It seemed kind of her to check on them.
Satisfied with whatever response she received, she returned to her duties.
After another minute or two, though, she came back and knocked again.
“Are you ok?” She asked.
This scene repeated a third time before the door to the bathroom finally opened to her knocking. Her face was hidden by the bathroom door as she spoke with the person inside.
Then she started laughing, a lot.
A man emerged, also laughing hard. He wore slim black athletic pants, a gray half zip athletic pullover, running shoes, and a black baseball hat.
Realizing I had been waiting, he seemed to feel the need to explain.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “They’re calling me the million miler. While I was in there, I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t flushing, and then, why they kept knocking on the door asking if I was ok. Turns out, I was hitting the wrong button! I was hitting the call button instead of the flush button!”
He kept laughing.
“When I finally figured it out and opened the door, they saw it was me and joked that ‘what, after a million miles you still can’t figure out the bathrooms?!” He was still chuckling as he walked back to his seat.
I sometimes wonder how many more miles he’s traveled since that flight. I wonder how many more miles I have left in my own orbit. It’s funny - after all the mileage I’ve put on my own body, I still can’t seem to figure it out either.