Читать книгу My Heart Sutra - Frederik L. Schodt - Страница 10

On September 12, 2016, I was scheduled to go to Los Angeles to work as an interpreter at a conference. The job was to be held in the Japanese American National Museum and focus on aspects of modern Japanese culture. I had a reservation on Southwest Airlines Flight 1518, scheduled to leave Oakland, California, at 7:25 am and arriving in Burbank airport. It was a regular flight for many businesspeople going to Los Angeles, a short hop of about 325 miles, or a little over an hour. I fly a lot and wasn’t worried about the trip. I was mainly worried about my job, since it was to be simultaneous interpreting of a wide-ranging subject area, packed with unfamiliar jargon requiring advance memorization. I worried that I might not be able to keep up with fast speakers in both languages. And as usual in the interpreting business, I just hoped my interpreting partner and I would get through the job successfully, without any complaints, and then happily head home the same day.

On a clear day, the flight from Oakland down to Burbank and the LA area affords spectacular views of California. Out the right windows of the plane there are beaches and the vast Pacific Ocean; directly below, the low-lying coastal mountain range runs north and south; out the left windows, the broad plains of the fertile San Joaquin Valley stretch way out toward the distant, soaring, and sometimes still-snow-capped Sierra Nevada range. But on the 12th, about halfway into the flight, not far from the city of San Luis Obispo, the captain came on the loudspeaker and suddenly announced that the plane had developed a problem with one of the engines, that we didn’t have enough “thrust” and would have to turn back to Oakland. It was a calm announcement, and the passengers—many of whom presumably took the flight nearly every morning—all seemed to take it quite calmly. But it made me feel a bit anxious, if for no other reason than the fact that our airplane, a Boeing 737, had only two engines.