I've been fascinated with airports all my life. They represent adventure. Because my mom was a flight attendant we traveled all over the world at the drop of a hat. Airports were always hubs of opportunity. I would look up at the departing flight TVs and see the destinations in alphabetical order. I knew, with my airline ID, that I could get on any flight if there was an open seat. I would stand in the international terminal in St Louis and see destinations of adventure: Barcelona, Paris, Cairo, Athens, London, San Francisco, Honolulu, Munich, Amsterdam with flights leaving in the next few hours. I would look at my open ticket and look in my bag and realize I didn't have my passport with me. I was planning only a domestic flight. I knew I could go to those places. They were not foreign. I was scared. At 14 I didn't have the guts/charge/irresponsibility to change my plans and jump on a plane to Rome at the last minute. I dreamt of doing this, every time I was in the airport, but I thought my parents would be worried when I didn't show up in San Diego or John Wayne or Kansas City. Thinking back, I wish I had done that at least once.
When I wasn't traveling I still loved airplanes and airports. I used to go out to the airport at night to watch the airplanes take off and land. The red and green and white lights. The blue lights on the ground. It was magical to me. If I couldn't travel, I could at least watch people traveling. I imagined the people on the airplanes. Wondered where they were going. If they were excited because they were leaving cold Iowa to go on vacation in California or Florida or the Caribbean. Or were they coming home to visit family after they moved away from college to places like San Francisco, New York, Boston, Houston.
Then the roles would swap and I'd be up on that airplane. It would be taking off. My body would be pressed against the seat. I would relax and feel the pressure increase, my delight increasing in measure until the ultimate climax and we were no longer earthbound. The cool release. The game I played with the clouds and sun and earth below. I would think of the my colleagues on the airplane. Wonder about their stories. The teenage girl who sat next to me by the window. Words overhead in SFO at the United International baggage check-in "Raj, I need a thousand dollars" and their accompanying stack of boxes and luggage with a couple women and several children silently waiting behind them. The couple on my left going to San Juan. Was it their honeymoon or their first vacation together? I looked out the window at the blackness of the ocean. I would be meeting my boyfriend in San Juan the next day. He would get off his boat at the crack of dawn and wake me up in my hotel room with kisses. I wondered about the people on the ground. Those box houses, many with turquoise pools that I could see on a clear day in my approach to LAX. Two weeks in a row, I pointed out the Hollywood sign in the Hills. First to a son and dad couple going to DisneyLand. The following week to a college girl and her boyfriend going to her film school interview at UCLA. Both were excited to see it from the air. I kept thinking, this is my town. This is my town.
In an airport, the mundane and everyday mix with the excitement of the unknown. It's what I wrote just a moment ago. It's a magical place of many opportunities. Of places to fly off to. You don't need an open ticket to go to places like business school or rock star or father of 3. It makes it easier. But you'll pay for it some way. You pay for it by making a choice. And once you are in one destination, you can always leave and go to another destination. The ticket is always open, until the destinations cease to exist.
I have the same thoughts when I see planes flying overhead. Everytime I see a 747, I always wonder where that big metal tube is going or where it is coming from since I know it is somewhere far. Every morning on my way into work the incoming Quantas flight comes over my head, it's great.
Posted by: jonah | July 07, 2004 at 07:23 PM