Plane Soda

Solve your problems with a ginger ale

I am not on the road for work nearly as much as a beat writer, or a consultant, or, like, George Clooney in Up in the Air. But I am on the road just enough to have gotten accustomed to travel as a basic work function. To whatever extent I used to view the airport as a place of curiosity, an obvious, dramatic break from routine, I no longer do. I’m pretty good about preserving a sense of wonder once I get to wherever I’m going. (Or I’d like to think so, anyway.) But the act of travel itself has been rendered more or less flat. Air travel is an email I have to respond to. It’s taking notes at a meeting. Air travel is the slow, lurching boredom of a Wednesday afternoon.

All of which is to say that I do not generally have strong feelings about plane soda. Maybe I’ll ask for a Diet Coke, or for some water, or for nothing at all. It can result in a perfectly enjoyable Diet Coke! (Which, yes, I know, is especially fizzy and can be a pain to pour in the air.) But there is no great attachment to this particular soda experience for me. In my pantheon of Diet Cokes—one at the movie theater on a hot day, one sipped languidly on a road trip, one from a McDonald’s—I have not set aside space for one consumed on an airplane. It’s fine! That’s all.

Except that every once in a while, in spite of the great, empty flatness of regular travel—perhaps because of the great, empty flatness of regular travel—I get on a plane and feel miserable. I want to be anywhere else. Nothing is wrong, other than everything. It’s a dumb, inchoate, childish feeling, and I know it, which makes it even worse. And then I order a ginger ale.

Book is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which I tore through in ~two days after letting it sit on my shelf for a year

It’s a classic plane drink, and a classic sick drink, too. Those reputations are braided together: A ginger ale is a sign of comfort, of soothing your stomach and your nerves, which makes it a natural choice for an environment that’s fundamentally unnatural. (Even for regular travelers.) Yet there’s actually very little to recommend it in this role. There’s essentially no real ginger in a typical ginger ale. For as long as it’s enjoyed this reputation as an offer of standard, automatic comfort, on par with Saltine crackers and staying home to watch The Price Is Right, there’s virtually nothing behind it.

And I think I like it more for this. A ginger ale reminds me not so much of being sick as it does being cared for. It’s not the idea that it will actually do anything. It’s the idea that it’s a small, shared ritual, about as universal as any soda experience can be, just buying you a minute to stop and think. It’s an invitation to let yourself feel bad for a moment. It’s also an invitation to believe that you will eventually feel better. If it’s a communal delusion, it’s a pretty nice one, I think.

I ordered a ginger ale on a flight this week. And you know what? It worked.

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Enjoy the holiday weekend, SodaHeads, and if you’re traveling, I hope you don’t need a ginger ale. If you do, I hope it works.