Amid Tragedy’s Eerie Aftermath, Travelers Find a Common Bond

What I noticed most on the flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport was the stillness.

Silence as much as noise defines our emotions. Silence turns horror inward and allows sorrow to fester. Silence embraces all things dark and dreadful.

It was Tuesday, one week to the day from the nation’s time of fire and tears.

We were aboard American Airlines Flight 34 from Los Angeles to New York, and the main cabin of the Boeing 767 was unusually quiet.

It was the same type of aircraft that terrorists had hijacked and flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. That awareness vibrated through the plane.

A woman from Laguna Beach, an artist, said it for everyone: “I am sitting here,” said Iris Adam, “with thoughts of remembrance.”

Not since I began flying years ago have I been so conscious of the confines of a plane, a fragile tube of humanity soaring through the skies high above the earth. How vulnerable we are, 158 of us packed in like kids on a thrill ride, susceptible not only to the vagaries of weather and mechanics, but now also to those who would do us harm.

I think all of us are aware of the dark possibilities. None of those I speak with will admit to terror or even fear. They are only concerned or nervous or uneasy. But they also say they would never be on a plane that day if it weren’t absolutely necessary.

“How else can I get to Rome?” asks Italian citizen Michele Labate. Then he adds in the longing tone of a soldier leaving a war zone: “I want to go home.”

“If I should die today,” says Gramercy Park electronics engineer Miquel Goncalves with a swagger in his voice, “I would have had a good life. I am not a bit afraid.”

Later, Iris Adam whispers, observing the tenseness in Goncalves’ bravado, “Did you notice how much his leg jiggled all the time he was talking?”

Caroline Roberts, a clothing shop owner from New York’s Upper East Side, has similar thoughts: “How sad and serious everyone seems to be.”

*

5 a.m. I am at LAX three hours before flight time, shuttled there from the nearby Hilton Hotel. On the bus, I sit next to a pilot for a freight-shipping company. Visibly uneasy, he frets at the airport’s lack of security.

“Caterers and people who clean out the planes aren’t checked,” he says. “They could easily plant a gun or a knife under a seat, and that would be it.” He shakes his head and falls silent.

I have entered this airport hundreds of times before, but it seems strange to me on this day. Partly because it’s early morning and partly because people are avoiding air travel, LAX is eerily empty, like a scene from a science fiction movie where everyone suddenly and inexplicably disappears.

The airport is rarely this way, even before dawn. So I know that the emptiness equates with fear, despite what anyone might say.

After all, it has only been a week.

I am asked for a photo identification as I enter the airport and then, because I have an electronic ticket and only two small carry-on bags, I am sent directly to the security gate. Again I show identification and tell the attendant I am wearing a pacemaker. Because the magnetic scanning equipment could damage the heartbeat regulator, I am advised not to go through the gate.

It has become routine with me. I set my bag on the conveyor and am body-searched. I expect the search to be severe in view of the terrorist attacks. It isn’t. I am wearing a light knee-length coat. There’s a disposable camera in one pocket, a cell phone in the other. The attendant who searches me, a pleasant, chatty man, doesn’t touch either one. At best, his effort is casual. My bags aren’t searched.

This is in sharp contrast to my experience later at JFK, where I am ordered to remove everything from my pockets, loosen my belt and open each of my two bags. Everything is removed from the bags and the items gone over one by one. A nail clipper is studied carefully because there’s a file attached, but allowed to stay. Nothing is missed. Even the inside rim of my trousers is searched.

After the LAX search, I walk to the gate wondering why the search was so casual. I had not been apprehensive before. Now I am, but I’m not afraid. Fear was pounded out of me 50 years ago on the front lines of Korea. I could never be that afraid again.

I am aware of the strangeness of it all at Gate 48. Even as the waiting area fills, there is a hushed quality to the gathering, as though we are participants at a funeral, and maybe in a way we are.

Only when a Middle Eastern couple comes to the area does attention seem to focus. A woman had told me a few minutes earlier that it would make her nervous to see “Arab-looking people” board the plane. “I’m not at all prejudiced,” she said, “but .... “

I talk to the “Arab-looking people.” They are Ramin and Shakiba Almassi. Both were born in Iran. They had been visiting in Pasadena, where they once lived, and are now returning to their home in France.

“I’m not really afraid,” Shakiba, the woman, says. “Maybe a little nervous. My mother is worried about my flying so soon after the attack. I told her everything would be OK. They are watching over us.”

I ask how they are being treated. “With respect,” Ramin says. “No one has hassled us. We are all together in this.”

*

Aboard Flight 34, the muted condition prevails, although the bustle of boarding allows some relief. Activity, doing something , lessens stress. I notice the excessive fussing over bags being pushed into overhead compartments, the arrangement of bags under seats, the this-ing and that-ing of preparing our emotions for the flight ahead.

Luis Viana, a Bolivian flying to visit a son in Madrid, sits perfectly still, staring out the window as the big jet climbs skyward, the roar of its twin engines filling our consciousness, somehow soothing us.

He’s a dark-skinned man with thick, black hair and a black mustache, and his wife worried as he left home that he looked like an Arab.

“What I did,” he says, “is shave off my beard to please her. She still wasn’t satisfied. She said, ‘Maybe you should wear a sombrero and they’ll think you’re Mexican instead of looking like an Arab.”’

He sighs. “Maybe I’ll shave my head bald too.”

*

The face put on by the flight attendants is an official one. They wear it for us, but their own concern is obvious in their voices, even in their movements, in the way they look at us and almost seem to study us.

I ask one attendant if she is glad to be back on schedule, back in the air again. She says nothing, but looks at me in a way that says she doesn’t know.

Then I ask, “Are you worried?”

She answers emphatically, “Yes!”

Flight 34 lands a half-hour late at JFK. I ask to speak with the captain, 44-year-old Les Abend. We meet in a corner of the airport. Even here, there isn’t the kind of activity one would expect. New York is in pain.

“They were our brothers and sisters,” Abend says of the flight crews who perished in the terrorist crashes of the jetliners. He seems weary. The attack has changed him.

On that day of fire and tears, he was preparing to fly from L.A. to New York when all flights were grounded. He spent the following five days, he says, looking at horror on television, each scene of disaster burning itself into his consciousness. “It will take a long time,” he says, addressing an unrelated thought. “A long, long time.”

A “support volunteer” for the airline, Abend encouraged his colleagues to talk about their feelings. One flight attendant told him she never wanted to board an airplane again. But after being counseled by him, she changed her mind.

On the Friday following the attack, he piloted a red-eye from LAX to Newark. The people who boarded the plane, he says, looked “shellshocked.” The flight attendants were apprehensive. His own feelings? “Helplessness, anger and tremendous sadness,” he says. Then he adds: “I have flown the very planes they used as missiles. This is personal.”

*

On the return flight to Los Angeles, a woman from the Philippines, sitting next to me, prays much of the way. I wonder as I glance at her, her head bowed and hands clasped before her, how many prayers are being offered. How many for us, how many for them, how many for the world.

It’s a busier flight. There is conversation. There’s a walking up and down the aisles. There are clusters of people gathering here and there to talk about their fears. When sitcoms are played on screens in each compartment, there is laughter

It’s as though we have left our deepest emotions behind in New York, where sorrow abides. I felt that way too. I had journeyed to the wreckage of the twin towers on my afternoon in town as one might journey to a sacred site. Smoke still rose in puffy gusts over a skyline that only a week before had offered a different vista.

I think about it as we fly home. And I think that despite what might lie ahead, I am still not afraid. But I am very, very sad. The big jet lands safely. I rush away from the airport.

*

Al Martinez’s regular column appears Monday and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.