She had grown up earthbound. Chained to a suburban Southern California tract development, restless by nature, Rosa spent her childhood summers exploring concrete storm drains, half-made houses, and the neighborhood’s few surviving orange groves. A reader, she devoured stacks of Little Golden Books, then the Bobbsey Twins, finally her older brother’s collection of How and Why Wonder Books, wherein she discovered a volume devoted to Airplanes—which ignited her long romance with the idea of flight.

The Orange County air was full of a number of things, mainly petrochemicals, but including passenger jets, helicopters, and military aircraft. Whenever one of these machines passed overhead, Rosa would come to a stop. She would stand at attention, head craned upward, one hand raised, as if in salute, to shade the sun from her eyes. “F-104,” she would announce, or, “Looks like a DC-8.” She became a student of silhouettes, a connoisseur of contrails. Always meticulous, she taught herself the history of flight from Montgolfier to the Atlas rocket.

Her obsession baffled her friends. Her parents were barely aware of it. Her father designed circuits for an electronics firm. Her mother played bridge with women whose suntans had acquired the quality of aged leather and whose jaw muscles stood out like taut little ropes when they laughed. Rosa imagined herself in a Fokker, strafing her parents’ barbecues and garden parties. No more fat men in business suits exhaling sour whiskey clouds, no more creased women in pastel shorts drinking martinis. She would rise above all this.

Her parents hated flying.

They had family back east—Grandma Perry in Wisconsin, Grandma Hagstrom in Florida. Sometimes Rosa’s parents took her visiting. By car. Across the desert. Across the farmland. Earthbound. Wheeling through an interstate hell of Stuckeys, Bide-a-Wees, and souvenir shops. Instead of above these dreadful things!

Rosa, from the age of seven to the age of seventeen, begged her parents to fly, at least once, one summer. Leave the car at home, she pleaded. The car was hot, crowded, and took forever. An airplane would save days of travel. An airplane would turn torture into ecstasy.

“But if we drive,” Rosa’s mother said with maddening patience, “we can see the country.”

Ye gods, Rosa wanted to scream, we’ve seen the country! Every inch of every road was tattooed indelibly into their brains! What could be left to see? One more plastic teepee? One more jackalope postcard?

Meanwhile, she made plans. She would go to college. She would study… well, whatever was useful to a pilot. Mathematics, aerodynamics. Her eyes were good. She would take a job in civilian aeronautics. Somehow, she would find her way into a cockpit.

And then—ten days before her eighteenth birthday—her parents announced yet another trip to Florida. “But this time we’re flying.”

It was the best present ever, and it almost made up for all those miles on the road.

Rosa waited with itchy impatience for the appointed day. The trip to Los Angeles International was novelty enough. From the waiting room at the gate she was able to study in gratifying detail the silvery bodies of Vanguards, Convairs, 707s. They were cumbersome on the ground; out of their element, like beached whales. The distant runways turned them into sleek sky-things through the redeeming magic of speed and altitude. Watching, Rosa trembled with excitement.

The boarding call startled her. After an eternity of waiting, it seemed almost—too soon.

Their plane was a new Douglas DC-8 Super 61, a stretched version of the standard DC-8. Rosa had picked out, had insisted upon, a window seat, and she watched with honed attention as the luggage was loaded from a cart, thumping into an invisible space under the passenger compartment; listened with keen ears to the final latching of the door, revving of engines, rumble of wheels as the taxiing began.

She was able to see the runway before the plane turned for takeoff. The runway was long and empty, a strange road for this massive machine. The stewardess demonstrated oxygen masks and advised passengers that their seat cushions could be used for flotation. Rosa watched and listened with a sense of unreality. Flotation? She was interested in flying, not floating.

Then the engines whined to a higher pitch. The sound invaded every part of the plane: the bulkhead, the window, her seat, herself. A brake was released and the aircraft began to roll.

To accelerate. She had not been prepared for this brutal burst of speed. From below, every takeoff had seemed graceful. Elegant. From inside, it was patently an act of force. The wings, which had seemed so solid, bounced and wobbled against the air. The fuselage rattled as if its rivets were about to pop.

And Rosa began to entertain her first doubt.

Was this practical? Would all this machinery really work? Could this fragile bus possibly sustain itself a mile from the surface of the earth?

She believed in flight. She was not sure she believed in the invulnerability of engine parts manufactured by sweaty men in a Pratt Whitney factory.

But then the wheels lifted from the runway… and she was flying.

The DC-8 rose with the prompt efficiency of an elevator. The ground simply dropped away at an angle that seemed to Rosa precipitously steep… She couldn’t help imagining the DC-8 as if on a hill, stalling and rolling backward.

Her hands began to sweat. She wiped them on her skirt.

There was a knot of excitement in her stomach. I’m flying, she told herself. This is the real thing; I am true-to-God FLYING. She gazed at Los Angeles below her, its gridwork vanishing into a gray diffusion of smog. The aircraft tilted and seemed to rotate around the point of the wing as it banked over the Pacific. Rosa’s parents read magazines. Incredible, she thought. Her mother read Redbook. Her father read Time. As if they were in some dentist’s waiting room! Not a metal cylinder high above the ocean!

The airplane circled as it rose until it was high and heading east.

A stewardess offered soft drinks. Rosa said, “No, thank you.” The knot of excitement in her stomach had become… something else.

She felt flushed and hot and unwell. Her eyes crept to the window and back again. If she didn’t look at the window, she wouldn’t see the ground. Wouldn’t be reminded of their astonishing height. Of the distance the plane would fall, if it fell.

But I’m FLYING!

But she wasn’t. She was just sitting here, strapped in. Helpless! In a metal box, suspended above the San Gabriel Mountains by the clumsy rotation of a few greasy turbofans.

It might be flying… but it felt more like risking her life.

The aircraft lurched in a pocket of air, and Rosa gasped and tightened her grip on the armrest.

Her mother glanced over. “Are you all right, dear? You look pale.”

“I think—” She swallowed hard. She couldn’t decide what was worse: the fear, the humiliation, or the disappointment. A dreadful lump had formed in her throat. “How long is the flight?”

“Five hours. More or less.”

Five hours? Could these engines really operate for five hours? Full of volatile jet fuel? Revolving at God-knows-what velocity? Bearings hot as griddles? Metal fatigue tearing at the fuselage?

She glimpsed mountains down below. Clouds. And an impossible volume of empty air.

“Rosa?” Her mother again. “Dear, what’s the matter?”

“God’s sake,” she heard her father say. “Give her the goddamn paper bag. That’s what it’s there for.”

She traded in her return ticket and rode a bus back to California.

The trip was long, uncomfortable, and depressing. Every inch of highway under the wheels was a confession of failure. She spoke to no one. She focused her eyes on the horizon, the uneasy intersection of Earth and sky.