Friday, Jul 25, 2008
And it's now that the noise begins. As he steps away, the pilot hears a deep and powerful burble, which immediately repeats itself and seems to emanate from somewhere in the bowels of the plane. How to describe it? It's similar to the sound your own innards might make if you've eaten an entire pizza or, perhaps, swallowed Drano, amplified a thousand times over. The pilot stops and a quick shot of adrenaline pulses into his veins. What was that? It grows louder. Then there's a rumble, a vibration passes up through his feet, and from behind him comes a loud swishing noise.
He turns and looks at the toilet. But it has, for all practical purposes, disappeared, and where it once rested he now finds what he will later describe only as a vision. In place of the commode roars a fluorescent blue waterfall, a huge, heaving cascade of toilet fluid thrust waist-high into the air and splashing into all four corners of the lavatory. Pouring from the top of this volcano, like smoke out of a factory chimney, is a rapidly spreading pall of what looks like steam. He closes his eyes tight for a second, then reopens them. He does this not for the benefit of unwitnessed theatrics, or even to create an embellishing detail for eventual use in a story. He does so because, for the first time in his life, he truly does not believe what has cast itself before him.
The fountain grows taller, and he sees now that the toilet is not actually spraying, but bubbling -- a geyser of boiling, lathering blue foam topped with a thick white fog. And suddenly he realizes what has happened. It was not a block of ice, exactly, that he fed to the toilet. It was a block of dry ice.
To combine dry ice with any sort of liquid is to initiate the turbulent, and rather unstoppable, chemical reaction now underway in front of our unfortunate friend. The effect, though in our case on a much grander scale, is similar to the mixing of baking soda with vinegar, or dumping water into a Fryolator, an exciting experiment those of you who've worked in restaurants have probably experienced: The boiling oil will have nothing to do with the water, discharging its elements in a violent surge of bubbles. Normally, on those rare occasions when the caterers employ dry ice, it's packed apart in smaller, square-shaped bags you can't miss. Today, though, an extra-large allotment was stuffed into a regular old ice-cube bag -- two pounds of solid carbon dioxide mixing quite unhappily with a tankful of acid.
Within seconds a wide blue river begins to flow out of the lav and across the floor, where a series of tracks, panels, and gullies promptly splits it into several smaller rivers, each leading away to a different nether region beneath the main deck of the DC-8. The liquid moves rapidly along these paths, spilling off into the corners and crevasses. It's your worst bathroom nightmare at home or in a hotel -- clogging up the shitter at midnight and watching it overflow. Except this time it's a Technicolor eruption of flesh-eating poison, dribbling between the floor seams of an airplane at 33,000 feet, down into the entrails of the beast to freeze itself around cables or short out bundles of vital wiring. Our pilot once read a report about a toilet reservoir somehow becoming frozen in the back of a 727. A chunk of blue ice was ejected overboard and sucked into an engine, causing the entire engine, pylon and all, to tear away and drop to earth.
And the pilot knows this cataract is not going to stop until either the CO2 is entirely evaporated or the tank of blue death is entirely drained. Meanwhile, the white steam, the evaporating carbon dioxide, is filling the cabin with vapor like the smoke show at a rock concert. He decides to get the captain.
Our captain tonight, as fate would have it, is a boisterous and slightly crazy Scandinavian. Let's call him Jens. Jens is tall and square-jawed, with graying, closely cropped curls and an animated air of fiery, charismatic cocksure. Jens is one of those guys who make everybody laugh simply by walking into a room, though whether he's trying to is never made entirely clear. He is sitting in the captain's chair. The sun has set hours ago but he is still wearing mirrored Ray-Bans.
"Jens, come here fast! I need your help."
Jens nods to the first officer, unbuckles his belt, and moves quickly toward the cockpit door. This is an airline captain, a confident four-striper trained and ready for any assortment of airborne calamity -- engine failures, fires, bombs, wind shear. What will he find back there? Jens steps into the entryway and is greeted not by any of a thousand different training scenarios but by a psychedelic fantasy of color and smoke, a wall of white fog and a fuming blue witch's cauldron, the outfall from which now covers the entire floor, from the entrance of the cockpit to the enormous nylon safety net that separates the crew from its load of pineapples.
Jens stares. Then he turns to his young second officer and puts a hand on his shoulder, a gesture of both fatherly comfort and surrendering camaraderie, as if to say, "Don't worry son, I'll clean all this up," or maybe, "Down with the ship we go, my friend." He sighs, gestures toward the fizzing, angrily disgorging bowl and says, with a tone of surprisingly unironic pride: "She's got quite a head on her, doesn't she?"
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