16. Susan Steinberg

“Because there was something different about crashing on land. I mean it was different from crashing to land.” -Susan Steinberg

Of course we know, as does Susan Steinberg’s narrator, that “the chance of a [plane] crash [is] small.” We know, we’ve been told repeatedly, that flying is a far safer way to travel than driving, and indeed, the numbers back this up. The National Safety Council maintains an odds-of-dying table which calculates the chances of meeting your end from a specific cause over the course of a lifetime. The survey concluded that the odds of dying in a car accident were 1 in 114 while the odds of perishing in a plane crash were 1 in 9,821. Of course, most people drive far more than they fly so these numbers are a little misleading, but consider that, in 2015, there were over 35,000 traffic fatalities or 1.13 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By contrast, for the same year, there were 27 total aviation accidents, none of which proved fatal. This translates to 0.0035 accidents per 100 million vehicle miles traveled and of course 0.0 fatalities per any amount of miles traveled.

But because risk perception outpaces statistics, many people continue to feel safer behind the wheel of their car than they do up in the air. For one thing, the sense of control a person feels driving herself, rather than entrusting control of her life to an unknown pilot, can be reassuring. (Although entrusting control, with its abdication of responsibility, can also be reassuring.) Then, there’s the fact that plane crashes are spectacular events, often killing dozens of people at once, leaving behind a massive ruin, and earning extensive news coverage. Car crashes don’t tend to capture the public imagination in the same way, and thus don’t fuel people’s fears to nearly the same degree. Finally, there’s that comforting sense of being close to the ground that comes with driving. No matter how often we fly, the idea that we are somehow thousands of feet above the ground, zooming through the air in a hunk of metal, can be difficult to fully assimilate.

Certainly this is how I felt. It is how I continue to feel about flying—though I’ve discovered that this fear is nothing a couple Klonopin can’t temporarily tame—but my feelings about driving as a viable alternative have significantly cooled. A longtime sufferer from anxiety, my condition often takes on some odd manifestations, and a few years ago, it presented as a perverse desire, when driving on the highway, to intentionally turn the wheel and crash the car. I was fine driving around the city or on local highways that I knew well, but as soon as I got on the interstate, the idea that I was going to run the car off the road got in my head and I couldn’t shake it. And unlike with flying, popping a few pills to ease the anxiety was not an option.

I’ve never actually forced myself into a crash, though, and over the last few years, I’ve learned to manage these feelings. I stay largely in the right lane of the highway and, when I feel the perverse thoughts coming on, I either try to distract myself by thinking of something that requires a fair amount of concentration—predicting the final baseball standings for the current season, for example—or imagine that I’m driving on a local highway where I feel comfortable. In the end, though, we can’t avoid travel and we can’t abolish risk, and so we have to find ways to make our peace with real or perceived danger. While it’s true that this country erred in putting all its stock in one particularly dangerous and environmentally unsound method of transportation, we nonetheless have little choice but to reconcile ourselves to the car’s dominion, particularly if we don’t live in a large city. When I lived in New York, I could get by without a car; now that I’ve moved upstate, this is no longer possible. In the city, I could resist; now, instead, I’ve adapted.