I recently flew from San Francisco to Dallas on my way to visit a friend in the Deep South. Ever mindful of finding a reasonably priced flight, given the recent hikes in air fare, I capitulated to the worst case scenario: a red eye for my outbound flight, a return on Christmas day. You gets what you pays for.

We took off at one o’clock in the morning: the plane was full, long gone the days of having three seats to oneself on such a flight (my last full row to myself flight was on a red-eye a year before 9/11…) I was trapped moreover in a middle seat, but my neighbors on either side were quiet and slim and like me, wanted only to grab three hours’ sleep before landing in Dallas.

Alas, my seat would not recline. However I pressed the button or pushed on the back, it would not budge from its righteous upright position, declaiming that it was forever ready for take off and landing and would have none of this pretending to be a luxurious first class recliner, even if I did bring my own inflatable pillow. Fortunately, the flight attendant was sympathetic, and after a bit of a kerfuffle which involved moving my aisle seat neighbor and lifting the seat cushion and performing some magic on the seat’s hidden gears, he made my seat recline: I was ready to sleep.

A ping from the loudspeaker warned us that we would be going through turbulence and reminded us to have our seatbelts fastened. A brief grope in the dark did not find my seat belt in its usual place so I assumed that when the flight attendant had fixed my seat he had pushed the belt to the side; I would find it before landing. So I placed my hands over my blanket and nodded off, with unsettling pictures of air pockets and my head banging against the ceiling of the aircraft replacing the sugar plums that should be more appropriate at this time of year.

Still, the turbulence was mild and I managed to doze until we were told to prepare for landing. My seat, now comfortably resigned to being lazy, would only go upright with the help of the passenger behind me, and a hurried search for the seat belt in the dim light turned up nothing. In vain I tried to get the flight attendant’s attention but soon realized I would be landing without a seat belt.

Driving without a seat belt is one thing. Many of us do it—I never buckle up on short local trips, although I know like everyone about the percentage of accidents occurring near home, etc…and years of driving in cars where seat belts were designed for tall Swedish men and act more like a guillotine on short dark-haired women has made me resist them for other physiological safety reasons. Flying without a belt however is quite a novelty. I first flew in 1958 and I think we had belts back then too. No take-off or landing is complete without the seat belt; the vocabulary is anchored into our collective unconscious, in any number of languages or formulae: please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened…merci de garder votre ceinture attachée…bitte schallen Sie sich an… until the pilot has switched off the fasten-seatbelt-sign…

I felt like an atheist in the church, like a sinner in the presence of a saint. I felt guilt: tremendous, nagging, I-am-doing-something-very-wrong transgressive guilt. It was more the sense of transgression and disobedience that rankled me than the notion that I might be in any physical danger: apart from the big bad air pocket which on very rare occasions might cause the plane to fall and the passengers to bounce skyward, or a severely botched landing which I have never experienced in fifty years of flying four or five times a year (so much for my carbon footprint….), the idea that a flimsy belt could save my life has always struck me as rather ludicrous, almost as bad as the flotation device or the life jacket or the air mask.

The closer to the ground we got (look! all those houses belonging to people who voted for George Bush!), the stranger I felt, and after a while I began to enjoy my unattached sinfulness. How often do you get the chance to do something so strictly forbidden? Would there be a fine waiting for me upon landing, an air marshal to escort me to the room for bad passengers who try to smoke in the toilet or open the door, or make inappropriate remarks about post-9/11 air travel? (A French colleague was once brutally collared and interrogated—despite diplomatic immunity—at Logan for joking about the bomb in her bag…) Or would I catapult into the seat in front of me and end up in the Dallas E.R. and lie there with sad thoughts about President Kennedy?

Of course none of these things happened. I gripped the armrests and we landed gently and safely, and no one was any the wiser.

How much of our sense of safety comes from within rather than without? There are people who are inherently afraid of flying, of leaving their doors or windows open or unlocked, of walking through city streets at night, of going to certain countries they’ve heard negative things about. And yet there is no absolute where safety is concerned, as inadequate “airport security” has proven time and unfortunate time again. A terrorist determined to blow up a plane will find new ways to circumvent existing precautions. Inversely, the burglar who sees an open window may assume (one hopes) that there must be nothing worth stealing.

On the next leg of my trip to the Deep South, thirty minutes into the flight the pilot announced we would be turning around and flying back to Dallas because of a faulty fuel gauge. We were actually halfway there: wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep on flying rather than waste all that time and fuel? We were in no great danger, the pilot told us so himself, but there were moments when I wondered if he were not lying to us, and every change in engine noise made me nervous in a way I had not been with my missing seat belt. If we were in real danger there wouldn’t be much he could do; all he wanted was to avoid a panic, understandably. All I could do was sit there with my seatbelt fastened and look at more homes of people who had voted for Bush.

There is a vast, and necessary, collusion among human beings where air safety is concerned. Air travel is so unnatural, so environmentally dangerous, that the only way to get people to go 30,000 feet into the air in a vibrating tin can is to delude them into thinking that they are safe. And, most of the time, they are, securely fastened into the modern way, the accepted norm. It’s hard to go against it, hard to find safer ways to travel, or to live. But the more we believe the collusion, the less safe we feel.

Try it some time, leave your belt unfastened beneath your blanket. Just don’t listen too closely to the engine.