This is Why I'll Never Fly Again
Alexandra Fuller is a memoirist whose latest book, Travel Light, Move Fast, is out in paperback in August. This story originally appeared in the July/August 2020 issue of O.
In 2015, my British-born father died of pneumonia while he and my mother were on a rare holiday in Budapest, far from their farm in the Middle Zambezi Valley. I flew from Wyoming to be with him in a ramshackle, communist-era ICU room, where we sweltered in a heat wave. Three days before he died, Dad begged me to take him and my mother home to Zambia.
I considered renting a van, driving him out of Hungary and across Europe to the Rock of Gibraltar; at least he’d die in sight of the continent on which he’d spent 50 years of his wild, wondrous life restlessly farming across southern Africa. But even if I didn’t kill him getting down the stairs—the elevators were broken—the city roads were clogged with an impenetrable murmur of Syrian, Afghan, and South Sudanese refugees, human grief in motion.
I remember thinking: The times we’ve been warned about are upon us. The rivers of displaced people arriving in Europe from war-ravaged, climate-destroyed parts of the world; lives wrecked, motherlands abandoned, families torn asunder. It felt wrong to insist on laying my dead to rest so far away when there was such unrest among the living right here.
I’d been inching toward such an awakening for years: I could travel freely, and I did, but so many refugees are forced to roam due to ecological disasters caused by our rapidly changing environment. Climate change that is aggravated by the devastating harm of an airplane habit like mine.
All my adult life I’ve traveled for work and love, which for me are mostly the same thing. From my mid-20s, I’d flown yearly, at least, between Zambia, where my parents had finally settled, and my home in Wyoming, coming and going as if I could afford the carbon, as if the planet could. And I’d flown for work, for magazine articles and book tours—to Angola, Haiti, Mozambique, Namibia, Chile, London, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, New York City, this city, that city. Just typing the names, I can feel the drug of it, adrenaline and awe, the rush of being in unfamiliar places, breath taken by the speed of it all.
But the constant motion didn’t always feel right, and not just for environmental reasons. It shouldn’t be logistically possible to get from the Zambezi River to Wyoming, for example, in less than two days, because emotionally, it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. Still, I did it, the jet-lag hangover, driven by the fear of what would happen if I stopped; fear of missing out, of work drying up, of becoming irrelevant, of not seeing places and people I love.
Returning home after my father’s memorial service in Zambia—attended mostly by people who’d never left the river’s banks, let alone the country—I decided to follow the advice of every guru ever and be the change. I assessed my carbon footprint to see where I could mend, amend. I had three kids and more pets. Plus, I used the web; studies show the data centers running internet activity produce roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as aviation, each search adding up. I drank tea from India, ate grapes from Chile; if shipping were a country, it would be the earth’s sixth-largest polluter. And on top of it all, the flying.
I couldn’t give up everything, but I knew I had to eliminate something. And because it was easier than undoing the miracle of my three children, relinquishing dogs or tea, or quitting Google, I vowed to give up flying. It was a vow I made a half dozen times in the three years following my father’s death. Every environmental disaster would inspire fresh resolve. The polar bears were starving on their melting islands of ice; Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was dying; California raged with wildfires. I’d ground myself for two months, six, even nine. Then an editor would call with a story in Ethiopia, South Africa, Madagascar.
One last time, I’d vow. Just one more journey. I had excuses; traveling is how I make stories, stories are how I make a living. Also, I felt compelled to go, as if there were a wanderlust mechanism inside me, like a bird’s impulse to migrate. But it was arrogance and ignorance that really kept me airborne.
I was 46 when my father died. It was the sadness of a whole lifetime ripening; I thought I’d never know sorrow like it. Then this happened. In early July 2018, my son, Fi—the middle of my three children, the steady one I worried about the least—died, too, taken by an inexplicable seizure in his sleep in the western Wyoming valley where he’d been born 22 years earlier. You can’t know much in the first searing weeks and months of that kind of grief, just the sparkling white horror. But I knew right away that Fi’s death removed illusions for me; everything wouldn’t miraculously work out in the end. I was wide awake, and I could no longer lie or deny or equivocate. The comforting excuses we have for our behaviors, those casual hypocrisies, stopped working for me.
Mars burned red in the sky the awful, long summer that Fi died, and in September, wildfires tore through the Wind River Mountains. Grief is an inferno; it blazed into fall and beyond the first snowstorms in October. I spent Thanksgiving with a friend who had suffered her own recent loss, our eyes turned upward, watching the moon rise, full and creamy in a desert indigo sky. When an airplane flew past it, creating an illuminated zero, as if to say, no more—a celestial stop sign—I knew my game was up. In mourning, I’d become accustomed to God speaking to me in obvious symbols like this.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m done with planes. I need to stay home and plant trees.” I was determined to stop flying, to stay put where my son is buried, and to reconcile my body and my inconsolable shadow. I couldn’t ignore the toll anymore, the images of mothers holding dead children after floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, disasters caused by a destabilized climate that my own trips upended even further. I knew what it felt like to scream the wrongness of what is into the ears of a deaf universe. I couldn’t ignore my contributions to an increasingly uninhabitable planet, already hotter than scientists had predicted five years earlier. I couldn’t be a part of what would make the world uninhabitable to my surviving children—all surviving children.
Even after that, I didn’t stop flying right away. I took a few last trips, love-miles I deemed worth it—final farewells, a momentous bunch of carefully considered lasts. I went home to Zimbabwe and Zambia to say goodbye to the lands that raised me, to my mother and sister, to the Zambezi River and the miraculous insistence of life along its banks.
When I started to turn down work and invitations, refusing to fly, people reacted much as they had years earlier when I’d stopped drinking. One applauded my morality, a few defensively assumed my decision was an indictment of their flying, more insisted I’d fly again, and many said things like “We all do what we can.” But that isn’t true. Most of us do what we can get away with—I know I did.
Then the world quarantined to a halt, and the thing that stopped everyone traveling stopped me. On my third week of self-isolation during the Pandemic of 2020, as the Antarctic experienced an unprecedented heat wave, I asked myself, again, What will it take for me to take root, if not this? I vowed again, for the last time, no more planes for me. Here was the universal parallel between the vow I kept making and the question we all found ourselves asking: Is this trip worth endangering the people I’m going to see, the community I live in, the world at large?
Sitting with my dying father, the flow of refugees in the streets, the Danube boiling, I thought, Surely, we all need to rest in place. Take a breath. Ask ourselves, What’s essential? What isn’t? Now I know my answer: I can drive less, use the internet less, write deeper, garden better, read and reread my library. I can plant more trees, compost, reduce, rest. I can be more grounded, less addicted, because I am, literally, grounded; it’s my response to this halted world.
So, here I stay in the northern Rockies. Unless by sailboat, then by road or rail, I won’t see Mum again, her joyous, ever-replenishing pack of dogs, the farm, the Zambezi. Or my sister, in her thatched house near the Kafue River. We’re not au fait with the quarantine-era technology of video chats. We can send letters, though; it’ll be like boarding school, but forever.
As I write this on a sunny day in the Rockies, there are chickadees animating the aspens like tiny ascetic monks. We’ve commented on it, my dairy-farmer neighbor and I, the beautiful drama of stillness, about which he knows everything; he has left his farm for only one night in the past 50 years. In our flyover state, there’s flying pollution. Now, with air travel down 95 percent, the skies above us are not besmirched with vapor trails; days are clear much like they were in his childhood. It’s such an abundance, right here, right now. And it’s already taken too much for me to see that the more still I become, the more the whole world is mine, all the time, infinitely.
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