Monday, November 11, 2002

Air travel is now a

Air travel is now a part of my regularized life more than it’s ever been before.  Back when I’d only fly every few years, the airport was a semi-magical portal for me. And by the airport, I mean all airports - LAX and Dayton and Charles De Gaulle, all of them different in their details but each sharing critical similarities - broad expanses of concrete gussied up with mystical designs in paint and colored light, and impenetrable but exceptionally legible signage ([H]19R - 1L is one actual example); and that tower, straining skwyard in earthbound imitation of the flights it oversees - the terminals, their downtrodden industrial carpet stained with the grime and tension of travellers from everywhere except exactly there.  If you drop your cookie, keep in mind the five-second rule does not apply. 

And then there’s the smell - aviation fuel and tired sighs, thermal printed forms and sandwiches and sweat - and in the older terminals, a residue of cigarettes smoked anxiously and calmly and incessently for years, those years and smokes and idle anxious thoughts long gone but lingering - in combination , a smell that somehow takes up residence at every airport, crossing lines of politics and climate - all this together heightened in my mind an overarching sense that airports were places of mystery and significance, even when I wasn’t flying, only picking up arriving travellers or delivering them for a trip away from my reality. 

Lately I’ve been flying lots, a couple times a month on average.  Some of these were one-day jaunts just down the coast, a little business, come right home, the other passengers primarily like me, no luggage save a brief or attache case, tired eyes and routinized behaviors.  No magic in the air, just pre-meeting tension or post-conference sour stomachs and weary temples.  But even as the flights became common, the airport still retained some kind of special quality for me.  Je ne sais quoi.

This special quality becomes most tangible and omnipresent in the jetway.  What a name - implying transience and speed, where human feet are almost interlopers.  Even as the airport is a waystation, a pseudo-space on the way to other places, a gateway rather than a destination, the jetway extends out from it into naked empty air, jutting from the terminal like a dash after a semicolon.  I present ID and a boarding pass, and pass into surreality - a tube to a tube to a tube to a whole other world.  The jetway smells more like an airport than anywhere else, the whine of engines audible, the grime and naked face of machinery coexisting with the veneer of industrial decor, flight crew and attendants hovering in readiness, the weatherized canvas accordion of the collar pressed lewdly against the puckered little door of the enormous jet’s riveted fusilage—the jetway is a chamber into which one passes from an almost real place and from which one emerges into a zone removed altogether from space and time, where my wristwatch misleads me and the world rotates beneath my seated ass, deserts and praries and thriving lakes and deadly mountains rolling past my passive gaze… impossibly aloft, disconnected, pressurized but expansive, bestowed with perspective but cheek by jowl with unnumbered strangers, trusting physics and pilot’s acumen and luck to bring me to a destination that still seems imaginary, less real up here than it was in my home though I’m closer by far to it in miles and time - concepts I must for the moment put away beneath the seat in front of me....

And when at last we approach to land, the landscape growing and resolving beneath me, unfamiliar buildings and architecture, landmarks and landforms, highways and neighborhoods and inexplicable emptinesses, my ears filling with thickly pumped air invisibly crushing against the tiniest bones in my body, forcing me to yawn compulsively to escape my own internal pressure… and then we rejoin the earth itself in a rush of wind and flaps and squealing rubber, adding our mark to the black stained runway, each skid a souvenier of hundreds of travellers who shared an embarcation and a destination and nothing else..... we taxi through the same labrinth of concrete and lines and signs and men with cones, and and then the cattle drive to reverse the effects of the jetway, to pass again through to a place that was almost a place, where time stood still as I proceed through it… My watch and gaze reset to an new place and hour, I emerge hoping that I’m oriented but regardless, there I am, still me perhaps but somewhere new and therefore maybe not the me I thought I was or that I was before - a new reality to embrace or to defend myself against - but surreality still haunts my nose and ears, and as the passengers disperse, another airport shunts me through itself, and that which those around me think is life starts daring me to act as if it’s real.