All the planes that stay up

A footnote to my column last week about the gray whale experience in Baja California. To the few of you who will ever actually get down to Magdalena Bay to see momma grays and their new calves, I would ask one thing—don't get all hung up about petting the whales.

It was just slightly weird and a bit ridiculous. How many of the whale-loving gringos we saw who seemed to be basing the quality of their whale encounter for the day on whether or not they got to actually put their hands on a baby whale. Look, this whole thing really shouldn't be about touching the whales or not. Yes, it's a thrill to touch one, sure, but it shouldn't be the yardstick by which this experience is ultimately gauged. I mean, if you spend two hours in a small boat and you're seeing 30-35-foot gray whales and you're seeing them from 10-20 feet away, and they're hangin' with you, and you're hangin' with them, you are at that time having a completely bodacious and super deluxe whale watching encounter. At that point, the fact that you did or didn't put your hand on a whale should really be completely moot. You're 10 feet away from one of the great, fabulous beasts of the ocean! And you're going to live to tell the tale. Or, more accurately, bore all your drinking buds as you show them the damned pics on your phone while they slowly glaze over. Bingo, babe. You scored. 10 on a 10 scale. It's all good. Besides, all those grays, even the babies, are encrusted with thousands of barnacles, which aren't all that fun to pet.

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Every once in a while, something very strange happens. Something strange like Malaysian Airlines flight 370. It now appears that this flight will forever be enshrouded in mystery, with no way of knowing what really happened. No way of knowing with any certainty, at least. Some people find this unsettling. Some find it rather thrilling. Thrilling in the sense of, no matter how many gizmos and GPS units and radar stations and satellites and remote cameras on traffic lights are out there, there's still room for somebody to slip through the cracks and defy all the detectives and enter the realm of The Mysterious.

Then again, we do know some things. The plane ran out of gas. It hit the ocean. It exploded. Everybody died. The viperfish of the Indian Ocean that live a mile below the surface were the beneficiaries of a rain of limbs. And so it goes.

Can we learn anything at all from MA370? Only this—since that plane went down, thousands and thousands and thousands of passenger planes have taken off and landed without any problems. I'm constantly amazed and impressed that a culture as jet-happy as ours has so few disasters like MA370.