High Alti-poo

My plane has just taken off from Dulles International Airport.

Despite being an Air Force pilot, I am but a passenger on this United Airlines flight. And despite being a frequent flyer, I am on edge during this flight.

Still on the ground back at Dulles are my Mom and my partner. I’m flying solo to Stuttgart Germany to start a 2-year command tour assignment.  Without my partner, to whom I’ve been married for less than a year.  Without my Mom, whose age and health make me nervous to be more than a few miles, much less a continent away from.

I’m not totally alone on this assignment though. At my feet, in his carrier, is my loyal dog Marcel. I got him as a rescue dog and like most rescue dogs, they come with some unknown baggage. I’m still learning the ropes as his baggage handler, but from our first meeting, it is very clear that I am his human. So I have a little comfort from the brown fur-baby at my feet.

But this is also the first time in his life that he’s been on a plane, so I’m on edge for how this 8-hour flight is gonna be.

I know that my bladder can’t endure an 8-hour flight, so I head to the bathroom and bring Marcel in his carrier along with me. I packed pee pads and figure I’ll at least give him a chance to do his business 30-some-odd-thousand feet in the air.

As spacious as airplane bathrooms are, I decide to leave Marcel’s carrier on the floor outside the bathroom. Marcel stays nearby in the flight attendant galley as I gather the needed supplies for this miles-high adventure. Once I have his pee pad and leash, we cram ourselves into the bathroom. 

Marcel only watches as I do my business (we’re close like that), but has no business of his own to conduct.  I give him a second chance (at business) before deciding he must have a stronger bladder than his human and we head out.

I get out to where I left Marcel’s carrier and am mortified to see that in the short amount of time he was out of his carrier before he and I crammed ourselves into the bathroom, he had had enough time to make a perfectly-coiled soft serve of the former contents of his small intestine.

Preemptive jet lag and overall emotion of the move freezes me. As I stand there staring at the pile of poop, a flight attendant sweeps in front of me, gently telling me, “It’s ok. I can get it.”

It’s the sympathy that usually only comes from another pet owner who has at some point been caught out on a walk with their poop bag at home. And it’s not that I didn’t have a thousand rolls of poop bags, it’s just that it was so uncharacteristic of Marcel to drop his doody anywhere other than where he was supposed to. It was even more uncharacteristic of him to doo so so quickly.

This kind flight attendant is way more of a dog or pet fanatic than me, because she wastes no time picking up the pile of my dog’s poo BARE-HANDED.

This may have been before the whole emotional support pigeon movement got flown away, but it was certainly after hygiene had become a thing.

Before I can yell out in excrement, I do a quick flushback of the turd of events.

Marcel hadn’t been out of my reach while I was grabbing our supplies.

Marcel was a very finicky number two-er, so him doo’ing in anything less than 5 minutes would have been cause for alarm.

Also, when I say his rectal serving was perfectly-coiled, I mean perfectly. As in the perfect spiral you would find in a mass-produced, made-in-China rubber dog-crap toy used for pranks.  Like the one the smiling flight attendant held in her human paw right now.

For whatever reason, this flight attendant dropped the right relief I needed during the precisely right flight and moment.

Not saying I find signs in plastic poop (besides “Made in China”), but the comfort of the whole interaction flushes me with a sense that everything is going to be ok.

I wonder how many times this flight attendant has carried this plastic poop on board and I wonder how many times she’s been able to employ it. In all my careful packing for long trips as a pilot, I never considered toting some poop.  Opportunity missed.

The opportunity I didn’t miss was the power of levity. Beyond the relief of knowing Marcel wasn’t a bad boy, the flight attendant’s humor brought me relief and zoomed me out to a larger perspective. 

Staring at the plastic poo in her hands, I realize there are so many opportunities ahead for all of us.  Let’s not waste them!