There were two occasions in my life when I thought I would die in an airplane.

The first time, I was a senior at Plainview-Old Bethpage High School on Long Island. My friend Richard, also 17, had just earned his pilot’s license. He offered to fly one of our classmates up to Brown University in Providence—a distance of about 150 miles—for an admissions interview, and invited me along for the ride.

All went well at first. But when our single-engine Piper crossed the forests between Connecticut and Rhode Island, we found ourselves engulfed in fog. We were flying blind—and Richard did not have an instrument rating. Even skilled pilots have perished in thick fog. Richard was wide-eyed, suppressing panic, but I managed to inscribe a few last words in my journal. “I have no regrets” I wrote, signing my name with a flourish.

The second time was in April 1984, on a Royal Nepal Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Tumlingtar. I was the only Westerner aboard the twin-engine Otter. Again: sudden, thick fog. This time, though, we were locked in a narrow valley between towering mountains, tossed by turbulence. At any second, a sheer cliff might have materialized in front of us. The pilots were whispering in urgent tones as the passengers—all Sherpas— worked their mala beads and chanted Buddhist prayers, preparing for the bardo.

I wasn’t blasé enough to write my epitaph, but I did recall the opening scenes of Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, when Conway’s airplane crash-lands in the Himalaya. It had never occurred to me that the “Shangrila” service offered by Royal Nepal Airlines might be an actual promise of that fabled destination.

But we had a kind of insurance. The previous October, I had watched in horror as scores of goats and chickens were led into Kathmandu’s airport and sacrificed to the wrathful goddess Kali: their severed heads and blood bestowing divine protection upon the parked aircraft. That grisly ounce of prevention worked—and a shot at stumbling into the enchanted valley of Shangrila, hidden among the snowy peaks, was denied me.

No regrets about that, either.