You'd think I'd remember that, right? I didn't. I also didn't remember much about the people in my row -- I was in an exit row at a window seat. I have zero recollection of people crying, praying, or making phone calls to their loved ones. I don't remember what I did on the flight, not at all. What did I remember? Something big happened, right?

I remember a landing that was nowhere near as bad as a typical landing at Vienna, Austria's perpetually windy airport. I remember a shift in realization that, oh, all those emergency vehicles racing this way? They're for my plane! I remember the guy in the blue jumpsuit -- in the terminal he patted me on the shoulder, very kindly, after I told him what had happened. I remember the smiling face of the woman on the grass at O'Hare. I remember that the cabin got very hot, and I remembered a woman walking her cooing baby in the aisle. I remember the stewardess on the replacement flight bringing me a couple of bottles of scotch, which I stowed in my backpack and drank later at my hotel. I remember buying a sandwich from a deli just a few doors from my hotel. When I walked in, two enormous African American guys in big blocky specs were playing chess and they were wildly friendly. They asked me where I was from and when I told them, one of them, the guy in a white track suit, responded, "Damn, girl, what are you doing all the way out THERE!?" as though I was his cousin and had moved too far away.

I hate to fly, though over the past three years I've become more relaxed on a plane. I still get green pretty easily, a little turbulence will cause me to break out into a sweat and wish I'd chosen an narrower obsession, one with rail travel, perhaps. Coach aggravates me to no end. I can't get comfortable enough to sleep, and I'm a pacer, I get up and walk to the lav very frequently. I think it's because I'm nervous.

There were two points that the lawyer for the plaintiffs -- they're plural, I learned today -- seemed to be trying to lock down. The first was that perhaps I'd somehow just missed what was going on around me. I wasn't paying attention. Passengers may have been praying or crying or making phone calls to their loved ones on the ground and I just didn't notice it.

The other was that I'm somehow biased positively towards air travel because I'm a travel writer. At this point, I really had to try hard not to laugh. "Would you say it's your job to promote tourism and travel?" I had to think about that. I suppose so, but I've also written about seasickness and the tragedies of history and just recently about how I had to haul myself across the planet in a blaze of fever. The premise that I just might be a booster for the airlines -- well, it's not fair, really, the lawyer doesn't exactly know me.

"Flying," I said, "is a necessary evil. If I could take the train everywhere, I would."

I don't watch the lawyer shows anymore, so I'm not exactly sure what happens next. I know I'll get a copy of my deposition and I'll probably read it over and think, "Oh, did I really say that?" Still, I stand by my potentially poorly observed and possibly pro-airline biased story: You've been in worse landings. And when a pilot puts a broken plane on the ground and everyone walks away, well, I'm all for that. Though I kind of want my New York dinner with Wendy Perrin. I feel like I got cheated out of that.

Photo credit: Pam Mandel. I took it while walking from the plane to the shuttle they'd brought to bring us to the terminal.