Chapter 1

Prologue

The cabin of a 747 is seldom, if ever, this quiet. We had prepared the passengers for the fact that we would be evacuating; we had shown them brace positions and selected strong and willing helpers to sit nearest the exits. Now, along with the other flight attendants, I was sitting strapped into my jumpseat, reviewing my evacuation commands in my head, only slightly distracted by the calm that had descended.

The minutes spent on our jumpseats waiting for the signal to brace dragged by. The hum of the engines was the only sound; passengers sat in silence, all eyes on the flight attendants, waiting to follow our lead. But when the detached call to “Brace! Brace! Brace!” echoed over the PA system, time put the pedal to the metal; my heart immediately started beating like the wings of an over-caffeinated hummingbird, desperate to keep pace.

“Brace! Brace! Keep your head down!” All the flight attendants were shouting in one voice, and suddenly every passenger’s face disappeared behind the rows of seats. I could see the three people immediately across from my jumpseat clutching their ankles obediently.

“Stay down until the plane stops! Keep your head down!” Whether consciously or not, the crew hit a rhythm with our commands, which we continued to shout even as the cabin began to shudder and lurch. A few heads popped up initially, one or two meerkats in the cabin who ducked back behind their seats when “Keep your heads down!” rolled around again.

A loud boomwas the indication that we had smacked the ground, although the cabin, plunged into darkness, rattled until I wondered if my jumpseat would stay bolted to the floor. Then, after maybe thirty seconds, everything was still. There was absolute silence for a split second before the flight attendants, again somehow as one, were all scrambling out of our harnesses and onto our feet. The screeching evacuation alarm, triggered at every jumpseat, rent the cabin.

“Release your seat belts and get out!” we hollered by rote. Metallic clicks echoed throughout the cabin. For some reason, the three people across from my jumpseat were still sitting in their seats gawking at me, so I shouted once more with feeling, “Release your seat belts and get out!” The look on my face was apparently motivating, too; they were on their feet in a flash and piling up behind me as I used the window to assess conditions outside. “Stand back! Stand back!” I yelled, using both hands to rotate the oversized silver handle. The power assist yanked the door right out of my hands with a loud hiss, but I had been prepared for that and had loosened my grip at the first sign of a tug from the door. Without having to look for it, I felt my hand automatically find and grip the handle that I would use to keep from being swept out the door, and I stood away from the exit path, shouting, “Come this way! Come this way!”

Now that we had all the doors open, the air of drama in the cabin had evaporated, and my adrenaline level dropped like a stone. The two dozen or so “passengers”—fellow flight attendants all—filed out the exits in a perfectly orderly manner and into the bright, warehouse-sized classroom that housed the cabin trainer, now sitting innocuously in the center of the room, its hydraulic platform still. When the flight attendants who had volunteered to be the “crew” for the training exercise took little jumps out the doors to rejoin our classmates, we were greeted with a few claps and “well done”s before the instructor raised her voice to be heard above the hubbub and released us for lunch.

After lunch we’d critique the Evacuation Preparation exercise, then get re-certified in CPR, and I would have another year of Emergency Procedures Training behind me. 1

A week after EP Training, we were delayed coming home from Paris because of a ground staff strike, a not-uncommon occurrence in France. I didn’t get home until almost midnight, so I was a little slower than usual getting started the next morning. It was actually probably closer to most people’s lunchtime when I dragged myself downstairs to The Button Hole, Katie’s vacuum cleaner and sewing machine repair shop, for my coffee.

Never heard of a vacuum cleaner repair shop with a café in it? Yeah, neither have I.

Katie Alvarez is one of my very best friends, and her shop is on the ground floor of my apartment building on Divisadero. On the days when I’m home, we pass many happy hours sitting around the dining room table she uses for a desk, sipping strong coffee into the afternoon hours (when coffee cups are often cleared to make room for the wine glasses), talking, arguing, philosophizing, and, very occasionally, gossiping.