5 WHAT ABOUT YOUR

FRIENDS: THE

RELATIONSHIPS OF HIGH

SENSATION-SEEKERS

Cindy was pretty excited when the guy she’d been dating for

the last few months offered to fly her to Texas to visit her relatives.

After all, she’d never been in a single-engine airplane before. The

trip from Illinois to Texas would take a while. Single-engine air-

planes fly considerably slower than commercial ones. Instead of

zooming at 540 miles per hour you putter along at around 80, albeit

in a mostly straight line.

During the long flight she peppered Tom with questions.

“You know, the way you do when you’re getting to know somebody

and learning about what they’re interested in,” she explained.

Hours later Tom tapped her on the shoulder. Cindy was

surprised. “I figured we were nearly there, except I looked

down, and all I saw was water. I didn’t know what we were

doing out over open water. He had pulled us out over the Gulf

of Mexico and lowered our altitude a bit. ‘We’re clearly not

going to land there,’ I thought.” Then Tom does the unthink-

able, he stalls the plane – deliberately. “We’re in a single-engine

plane over the ocean and he stalls it!” she explained with panic

in her voice. “He said, ‘All you have to do is take the plane out

of the stall.’ I screeched back, ‘I can’t. I’ve never flown a plane!’

I was crazed, hysterical. We’re in a tiny, tiny plane. Just a two-

passenger stalled over the ocean!”

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