The Essential Workers No One is Talking About

Somewhere, thousands of feet above the death and disorder that hovers at ground level, my good friend Cody is piloting a plane into silk clouds. This is what he has always wanted to do with his life, and he tells anyone who will listen that he is living his dream. I’ve been in a plane with him countless times — he is a meticulous pilot who guarantees a smooth ride — but my favorite part of flying with Cody has always been the look of pure, unfiltered joy on his face as he takes the controls and guides us through a cloud bank, or over the coast as the last golden drops of sunset disappear into the dark water.

This time it’s different though.

“SFO is a ghost town right now,” he told me on his last trip, describing the eerie hollowness of walking through an all but empty airport. “We are the essential workers that no one is talking about.” He wasn’t complaining. In this frightening cultural epoch, he counts himself lucky to have a job, even if it does feel apocalyptic.

A creepily empty SFO.

As a commercial pilot, Cody’s job right now has changed significantly. Of course, I assumed that like me, he would have been laid off, or at least he wouldn’t be working, but in a conversation, we had recently he described to me the stark reality of flying during a pandemic.

“The planes have between one and five passengers on a flight with an eighty-five person capacity. Always medical professionals or other essential workers.” If, by chance, the flight is empty, he still has to fly the route — there might be someone to pick up on the other side when he lands. As a bit of a hypochondriac, this immediately sent prickles down my spine. It means that Cody is responsible for ferrying to and fro the people who have had the most exposure to this virus. He’s like Charon, but with a plane instead of a boat. During this talk, he reported to me that flights are being cleaned before and after every flight by volunteer cleaning crews — that it’s like nothing he’s ever seen before, and the clean is thorough, intense, and sterile. But still frightening.

I asked him if he’s scared because as his friend, I can honestly say that I am scared for him. I mean, geez, I’m scared for me too. The reality of this is like something straight out the rows of apocalyptic graphic novels that line my bookcase.

“A little,” he said. “But I’m more scared for Peter.” He then described to me the rigid scourging process he goes through every time he gets home — sanitizing his travel bags with bleach, stripping down immediately and putting his clothes in the wash, and taking a long hot shower, all before he is even able to hug his partner or say a proper hello. This made me think of the disconsolate hollow feeling I have felt every time I leave the back patio at my grandparents’ house without being able to hug them. To feel the creeping concern that at some point you may be responsible for your lover contracting the virus must be crushing, but Cody wouldn’t let it daunt him.

The fact is that Cody has always been stronger than I am. He has a positivity that won’t abate, no matter what gets thrown at him. When I was homesick and heartbroken, it was Cody who held my hands and treated me to coffee and french fries at the Denny’s at 1am. When the terrible injustices of being alive threaten to swallow me whole, I call Cody for a reality check.

To say that the idea of him flying a plane in all this mess doesn’t make me abjectly nervous would be a lie, but I know that there is no better person to do it than him, because in piloting as in life, Cody doesn’t let the turbulence keep him down.

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