Flying Home
There are many inconveniences with flying, often enough to make driving most distances preferable these days — but the rush of takeoff is still a moment without parallel. It is one of the few I know which can survive the amount of standardization and regulation that surrounds it. There are a few things that make me glad to have lived after 1903, and flight is one of them.
Things have changed, of course, even since I did most of my flying (much of it to the county fair from across the world, but that is another story). Unaffected, though, by the pesky virus that causes us to all wear masks is the light show at O'Hare: the neon lightway above the connecting tunnel that treats United passengers to what feels like a memory of the eighties (it is). The coruscating ribbons of color, synced with a synthesized Rhapsody in Blue, are straight out of happier days when passing passengers below might expect to see the World Trade Center on their descent into New York. In the holidays, they sometimes synced the light show with Linus & Lucy and it is a wonderful thing to set you in a proper mood for Thanksgiving.
Even be-masked, the cast of characters at O'Hare remains the same. There is the businessman, the first-time traveler, the lost soul, the frequent flyer looking for the lounge, the bored college student, the Hasidic Jew and the white-bearded Hindu, the gormless Midwesterner, the overweight salesman, the muscly former Marine-type nursing a pint at 10AM and flirting with the mildly athletic lady in a new tracksuit and golf visor. It is not a crowd of stereotypes, but a crowd of caricatures; all the more subtle originals, upon which we travelers are based, stay home, content to be there. Only the restless versions wander and are reliably found here. This year features the outlandish masks and face shields, with some folks wearing both. It is the worst sort of necessary evil: a medical one; folks look shifty and suspicious, eyes-only.
The smells, coming through even the medical-grade fabric with fidelity: overworked heating ducts, the popcorn and roasted nut stands, the hash-slingers with commanding griddles of sautéing onions and peppers. I could be traveling to a funeral and it would still smell like going home for Christmas.
The sky is on everyone's mind today, whether it is the blood-red heavens in the West or the memory of a more terrible, intentional firestorm over New York City nineteen years ago. We all keep to our phones and our Airpods. Someone bumps into me with an overstuffed duffle bag as I admire an elaborate catchment for window leaks in the ceiling (the United terminal is perennially cursed with window leaks in the ceiling). They wave me off.
The overheard conversations are the same as always, but the names are different and corporate proper nouns feature heavily. "Nobody said nothin' about catchin' an Uber! She left the AirBnB straight for an Uber!" I overhear one man vent into a phone. "Can you Facetime me when you get there?" another says, voice-to-text. Netflix is doing a brisk business at one delayed flight, with a bored Hudson News clerk looking on from afar with some useless books. Advertisements for ballet performances no one can attend clutter the wall; there has been no rush to update advertisements around the airport, I suppose, as everyone is using the same services here they would anywhere else in quarantine. Over the speakerphone, as in a dream: "The city of Chicago has ordered all visitors from high-infection regions to quarantine for fourteen days as part of its continued efforts to fight COVID19." Ah, yes, that deadly airborne virus.
The whole experience felt dramatically symbolic (as all events do for writers) of the American one: zipping off to go somewhere and wait, infrastructure magnificent at one point in time, a stubborn adaptation of normalcy to reality, a preponderance of corporate names where once were regular, commonly-owned words, bored travelers waiting for flights that would have taken our near ancestors weeks to match in distance traveled. The differences between the technological revolutions of the 20th century and the 21st century is that the first was a victory against nature; the second is a victory against mankind.
And on the way home, driving back from the airport, I notice something ahead on the road: one of those clip-on American flags you place on your car window, the ultimate American salute to the ultimate American freedom: the open road. I swerve carefully around it, as do we all. But no one stops to pick it up.
