How I Lost it All at 35,000 Feet
By: Dave Smurthwaite
Tags: Family, Science, America, Parenting, Short Story

“Love, do you have a barf bag in your seat back!?” I whisper yelled to my wife, Marisa across the aisle.

Before children, I’d never imagined being able to successfully incorporate “love” and “barf” into the same sentence.

Catching the eyes of my sweetheart across the aisle, I was reminded why. “Barf” ranked as the least-favorite word in her trilingual vocabulary — even as it topped the charts for her four little boys, who were all now snickering with delight.

I knew one carefully placed “poop” could send all four into a hysteria, however, I refrained in order to preserve my love life.

Asking for a barf bag before takeoff, even when attempted in a hushed tone, is always guaranteed a lively response.

In fact, in the world of least-desired phrases, only “he’s got a bomb,” “is that what you’re wearing,” and “we’re back with another 24 hours of non-stop Jingle Bell Rock,” rank higher.

Unsurprisingly, within seconds I had three barf bags in hand, all from nearby passengers suddenly eager to help. I handed all three to Sam, my eight-year-old son allergic to takeoffs, landings, and everything in between.

As we rolled toward takeoff, a cheery male co-captain was informing us in a lilting English accent that our travel time would be three hours and eighteen minutes, as planned. He was also pleased to report that the weather in Paris was a sunny, 18 degrees celsius.

“18 degrees celsius?”

Finding myself suddenly marooned in the world of metrics, I began flinging out random math equations trying to arrive at an actual temperature in Paris.

Was it 2.2 times the 18 degrees, plus 32? Maybe it was 1.8 times the 32 plus 18?

I remembered having studied this freshman year of high school but had long forgotten it, undoubtedly rationalized by some astute teenage observation like “Celsius is stupid. Nobody uses it anyway.”

As is the case with most fifteen-year-old opinions, I was profoundly wrong in my estimates.

In fact, of the 195 countries that exist today, only three have not adopted the International System of Units: the United States, Liberia, and Burma.

Liberia, because it was founded by Americans and Burma probably just missed a memo sometime in the mid 20th century when the rest of the world was ditching the old British standard, which even Britain ditched in 1965. Of the three outliers, America is the only superpower to resist the change.

The reasoning for America’s continued allegiance to the Big F° is a mystery. Sure, Anders Celsius might not have been the “made for TV drama” type (Daniel Fahrenheit’s parents both died young from eating poisonous mushrooms when he was a child and later he had to run from the police), but at least his measurements came in nice, sensible round packages.

The freezing of water happens at zero degrees and boiling happens at one-hundred. Fahrenheit, on the other hand, chose zero degrees to be the freezing temperature of a unique water/ice/salt mixture which naturally then meant that actual water would freeze at 32 degrees and boil at 212 degrees.

It’s as if he were trying to intentionally come up with a system to confuse the world.

This failure to switch to Celsius is just another example underlining a strong undercurrent of oppositional defiant disorder when Americans are told what to do.

While the rest of the developed world was mandating a metric conversion in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was politely asking its citizens to make the switch. In 1975 the United States Congress created the United States Metric Board.

The legislation, while intended to follow suit with the rest of the developed world, was soft and gooey in comparison to other countries’ official mandates. Unwanting or unwilling to offend anyone, the act was voluntary with no hard deadline. The result was that no one was offended, nothing changed, and the Board was disbanded by President Reagan seven years later.

It would be one thing if America was standing on principle (even if only the principle of capitalism) but even that isn’t true.

In the past 30 years since the rest of the world switched measurement teams, America’s allegiance to Daniel Fahrenheit has cost them and everyone else billions.

In fact, on one day alone in the Fall of 1999, NASA (who arguably employs some of the brightest people on the planet), lost a $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because of a simple conversion error. You would think that switching to metrics after such a loss wouldn’t be rocket science. And yet, twenty years later I’m still stuck on an airline stumped by the temperature in Paris.

I humbly add “how hot is it outside” to the growing mental chalkboard list of things I officially no longer know.

Even how much heat the sun generates, something I’ve never worried about in America, suddenly feels like an inside joke to everyone on this flight that’s not American. Well, that is unless there are any Liberians or Burmese on the plane.

I find momentary solace by picturing both a Liberian and a Burmese in the back of the aircraft, both madly scribbling out random multiplication tables on their drink napkins.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached our optimal cruising altitude of 35,000 feet,” comes the cheery voice once again from the cockpit. Thankfully, the airline industry, like Liberia, was founded by America.

This mental tailspin of mine stalls long enough for me to check the color of Samma-jam’s face.

As his doting father and, more applicably, the only other passenger sharing his row, I’m keenly mindful of his well-being. I’m grateful to see that his nausea advisory status is pale but not yet peaked.

Paris’ temperature is just the latest in a disturbingly long list of things I don’t know about our new home.

Two months ago, the idea of ditching all of our belongings was still liberating. In a period of six weeks, we sold our house, our car, our cat, our turtle, all seven Harry Potter books, all eight Harry Potter DVDs, basically everything except our children, a guitar, and enough clothes to last us through the winter.

Freed from our world of junk, an immediate sense of weightlessness set in.

By the time our takeoff from Salt Lake City came around, I felt like a proper Peter Pan, leading our family “Off to Neverland!”

What I had failed to note was that unlike Peter Pan, we had nowhere to fly home to, no mode of transportation once we got there, and no idea how to ensure that our Lost Boys got a proper education.

Even our kids, initially enthusiastic about the adventure, free mini pretzels, and unsupervised onboard entertainment, were quickly losing altitude after three long flights. Looking around at them now, I could see in their bloodshot eyes and numbed expressions that their excitement for the unknown had been wadded up like dirty underwear in their carry-on.

I couldn’t blame them. Part of me right now was feeling the same way at the moment. What if we’d just stayed in Utah? I’d had a great job that I enjoyed, family and friends we loved, a beautiful mountain setting for a…

“Flight crew, prepare for landing,” the flying Brit’s voice came one last time.

The announcement was quickly followed by the uneven ba-bump of the Boeing 757’s ten wheels hitting the tarmac and then the unmistakable sound of a digested salmon sandwich and fruit salad being retched into a paper sack.

Caught up in my own problems, I had failed to check back in with Sam.

My penance: an agonizingly slow taxi with a warm bag of vomit sinking into my palm.

“Bienvenue en France.” I thought. Welcome to France.

“What on earth have I gotten my family into?”