Unusual Attitudes: Frustrated in Florida

After a weekend with friends at Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland, my niece and her husband were packing up for the drive home. Somebody tossing garbage bags into a dumpster spied a bundle of discarded Playboy magazines in pristine condition all from the 1980s.

“Any of you guys interested in old Playboy magazines?”

My psychologist nephew-in-law, Jim, took one, as did most of the guys. A week or so later, Jim gave me his copy because he knows David Mamet and I are friends, and this issue (August 1989) included an essay by the famous author, playwright and former Flying columnist.

Nothing to do with sex, voluptuous pinups or airplanes (and written long before David began flying), it’s about his love affair with amusement parks. He compares the rough-and-tumble but magical park of his youth—Riverview Park on Chicago’s North Side—to Florida’s Disney World, which he first visited with his family the year it opened in 1971.

Many years later, he returned with his own 5-year-old on what happened to be Mickey Mouse’s 60th birthday. David describes the colorful parade, singing the familiar Mickey song, smiling and feeling good. Then he stopped and asked himself: What exactly was he endorsing?

“How and to what end this warm feeling?”

He concludes that, rather than celebrating the birthday of an (albeit) iconic mouse, he was doing what was expected of guests: enthusiastically celebrating and extending fervent well-wishes to one of the most commercial of all enterprises.

Reading David’s description of the park and Disney’s genius at crowd control where visitors endure long lines for 55 minutes of every hour—how they accept regimentation and willingly suffer a vague but oppressive feeling of being watched and controlled—I burst into laughter. That same year, long before I knew David, I’d visited Disney World with the very same reaction.

A would-be beau from Dayton, Ohio, owned a Piper PA-28-161 Cherokee that had rarely been out of the traffic pattern at the airport where he learned to fly. He asked if I’d fly it with him on a trip over Thanksgiving; he wasn’t instrument-rated and had never flown long distances. With no plans for the holiday, I thought any airplane trip would be fun, but George…well, George just wasn’t my kind of guy. So I agreed if we’d travel strictly as friend—separate rooms, paying our own ways.

He picked me up at Lunken airport, and we launched for Pensacola, Florida, stopping I don’t remember where. The airplane was minimally equipped and legal for IFR. I had charts and was OK for “soft” IFR if we encountered weather typical for Midwestern Novembers, but it was clear skies and visibility unlimited the whole way with a tailwind, and George thoroughly enjoyed flying his airplane. The next day at the Naval Air Museum was wonderful (truly a must-see), and then we stayed another day touring the Panhandle.

Read More from Martha Lunken: Unusual Attitudes

When he described Cedar Key, Florida, it sounded perfect. We took off on what could have been a two-hour direct flight but was longer because we stayed within gliding distance of land, flying via Apalachicola and Perry, and then hugging the shoreline south to Cedar Key. As Rob Mark wrote recently, this laid-back, charming treasure on the northwest coast of Florida encompasses just 2 square miles. And its 2,355-foot runway is in the middle of a wildlife refuge and bird sanctuary where the birds have the right of way.

“Things” had been going well, but now, three nights into the trip and on this romantic little spit of land, George was getting snarky because I wouldn’t budge on the separate-rooms thing at Cedar Key’s quaint 150-year-old Island Hotel.

But he brightened up when I agreed to fly to Orlando and go to Disney World—though I couldn’t quite understand why that was so attractive to an adult male. But George was learning a lot about handling congested airspace and communicating with approach control and traffic. We landed unremarkably at Orlando and agreed to save Disney World for the next day.

We each paid what seemed in those days to be an exorbitant entrance fee (probably $50), and strolling down the midway, George spied an interesting attraction. I was now in a line that snaked back and forth like some monstrous python, sticky hot under a merciless sun, shoved and kicked by hordes of beastly behaving kids, and assaulted by the shrill complaints of exasperated mothers looking for a restaurant that would take a lunch reservation. It was dreadful.

“Calm down, Martha. Do this with grace and good humor. There are things in life that just have to be endured,” George said.

“Yeah? Well, this isn’t one of them. George, give me the car keys,” I demanded.

“What?”

“I’m leaving. Give me the keys and tell me what time to pick you up at the front entrance.”

I fled, my friend’s mouth agape, stopping at the Disney office just inside the entrance to tell them what I thought of this “enforced, regulated-fun” experience. They were gracious and even insisted on refunding my money, but they’d have to escort me to the gate.

I think I messed around back at the airport but was careful to collect my friend at five o’clock. We didn’t talk about Disney World very much.

Next was another short hop to St. Augustine for Thanksgiving, but George was back to alternately grumbling and whining about the room thing. We’d planned on a few days more in Florida, but I’d had enough. The weather forecast from northern Georgia through Tennessee and Kentucky wasn’t great, but it looked like we could get on top north of Atlanta. Unusually warm temperatures indicated that icing at low altitudes shouldn’t be a problem. I announced the bus was leaving the next morning; we were flying home to Ohio.

A planned fuel stop in northern Georgia would give us good fuel reserves for the flight and an instrument approach in Dayton. But after being airborne for less than an hour, George halted discussing his ex-wife and announced he had to go to the bathroom. I pointed to the pee bottle in back, but he said he “couldn’t.” So we landed in Macon, Georgia, but now—with 48 gallons usable, burning maybe 10 gph, and 450 nautical miles to go at 110 knots into the wind plus an approach—we weren’t so comfortable.

We got on top, with no ice reports underneath but a considerable headwind, and approaching Cincinnati, we found Dayton weather was coming down (besides, I had to pee now). So I made an approach into Lunken instead, promised to fly his airplane back later, and we drove to Dayton, giving thanks for turkey dinner at Bob Evans on Interstate 75.

This story appeared in the March 2020 issue of Flying Magazine