much we identify with the Denver Broncos, no matter how distinctive our clothing, no matter how much we try to assert our identity as individuals, we’re still stuck on the same planet and breath the same air as the people we hate. In DEN, everyone smells the same carpet. Everyone. This airport, like all other large ones on Earth, is a micro-model of the globe, except instead of being sealed into a common environment by the cold vacuum of outer space we’re sealed into our common experience by glass, concrete, steel, and the smell. We think we can escape by getting on an airplane and going home. We think we can escape the smell by trying to forget about it.
My notes from Denver read: JJ – Elaborate on this idea of being bound together into a common experience but thinking we can escape. Such elaboration is not very difficult. Everywhere, every day, every American encounters evidence of a subtle, inferred, and implied sense that we can escape the common experience of being bound together by that cold vacuum on the only planet in the universe actually known, known, to be capable of supporting life. This delusion is the windmill against which Jim Starry, and any who share his way of thinking, joust. When your neighbors down the street seem as far away as the moon, then Starry has a real challenge ahead of him. When this tsunami wave of proximal, self-focused, financial, and immediate information washes across our intellectual landscape, then there’s little hope that an Average American can step back, see the ocean, and act on that broader, more inclusive, vision.
Yet little hope is some hope. My hope is that the very successful businessman sitting two seats away, obviously not a very successful businessman because he’s not in First Class, would turn to me and say something like: you know, just look at all these different kinds of people, from all nations, all races. I can’t get over the fact that we’re all stuck here in a single building. We all smell this . . . this . . . stuff. And I could get on a plane with any of them. Doesn’t that just make you realize that we’re all on this planet together? Doesn’t it? Then I would say: yes, that smell and those people do make me think about our shared fate, and about the symbolism of getting on an airplane, or a planet, together. Instead of saying these words to me, however, he gets out his cell phone and starts talking to someone about money and I return to my study of Denver International Airport.
Wait two hours in Denver International and your world gets homogenized culturally as well as chemically. Wait two hours in any international airport and you experience a mental reuniting of Laurasia and Gondwana—what God has rent asunder [continental drift], man has joined [by technology]. That television unites us is by now cliché: Bernard Shaw watching, and transmitting from, the target area as we opened the Persian Gulf War erased whatever vestige of intellectual isolation we may have clung to for various nostalgic reasons. Clothes, accessories, books, magazines, the languages softly spoken, often into cell phones, in the terminal seats around us, the languages on seat pocket safety cards, coffee names, and presumably sources, “Made in ___” labels on gift shop merchandise, names on hockey jerseys, headlines on the USAToday tossed in disarray over a seat, and, if you could see like a hawk, and knew the code, everything conveyed by a 4-letter company code in the Wall Street Journal being studied so seriously by that man who is probably a doctor from Calcutta.
Ecuadorian roses brought to DEN by a yuppie driving his BMW to meet a lady from Montpellier wearing Chinese silk and carrying a Japanese cell phone in her Argentine leather purse. They kiss. He smiles, wipes off a touch of Taiwanese lipstick with his Egyptian cotton handkerchief. Omaha and Timbuktu are now equidistant. “Timbuktu” once meant “as far as you can get from anywhere.” Now Timbuktu is only a 3-letter abbreviation on a luggage tag. None of this globalization of our minute-to-minute lives is very new, or very shocking to those who are aware of it. Most of us are not aware of it. Most of us never, or rarely, think about it. Jim Starry would shrug. Unless we’re in a certain business, we don’t think about globalization of commerce any more than about globalization of energy consumption and globalization of chemical pollution. So what’s new.
And on the plane come germs; small, motile, and catholic; a virus picked up in Hong Kong gets off at Denver. 750,000 pounds of Boeing 747 banks in the crystal air, slowly, majestically, turns; flaps move; engine whine changes pitch; at 300 miles per hour Bernoulli’s hand surely, softly, lowers the flying village. Clunks; landing gear. Smoking yelp of rubber on rubber marks on concrete. Three minutes later, 300 beings, a small library of their printed culture, a representative sample of their clothing fashions, a demographic cross section of humanity, stare out at the mountains, or prairies, depending on their seat assignment. And ten minutes later, they unbuckle their seat belts. Along with every bacterium on every square inch of skin, every fungal spore tucked away in every private place, every viral particle inside any one of the trillions upon trillions of human cells on that Boeing 747, every worm egg under a fingernail, every tapeworm in any of the 300 small intestines, passengers prepare to get off the airplane and walk into concourse. All will notice the smell. A few will look around, maybe wrinkle their noses. None will know they’ve just been a party to the excess consumption of jet fuel, excess, that is, only in comparison to what could have been used. None would feel different had they landed on a 2% upgrade. Yet the unfelt difference in their landings—one actual, the other theoretical—would, if experienced but not felt around the world, scaled up to global, that is honest and real, proportions, have kept their cities in light and heat for a decade.
Airport design has been documented and in a sense glorified in two large coffee-table tomes: Geoffrey Arend’s Great World Airports (1988) and Marcus Binney’s Airport Builders (1999). Arend celebrates aviation history, Binney the architecture; Great World Airports is a passenger’s book, while Airport Builders is an artist’s. Nowhere does either mention the sleeping merit of terminal seats, a feature that any international traveler learns quickly. I have the fondest memories of two nights—one coming, one going—at Sea-Tac, stretched out on a full-length cushion under a Louise Nevelson sculpture. O’Hare’s hard floor and armed chairs prevent true rest, but at three in the morning sparrows come down out of the rafters to pick up popcorn; a custodian pushes his dust mop and smiles at his friends; they got in when the window broke during that storm, he says. What he doesn’t say is that they’ve been breeding in there ever since, eating what humanity leaves behind.
My family lived in Oklahoma City; Will Rogers Airport stirs memories of weddings, funerals, rental cars, and tornados. Oil was discovered at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City; 25% of the royalties from 53 producing wells now funds continued airport development. No need for a 2% grade here. At Chiang Kai-Shek in Taipei, the passenger terminal is 5 stories high, 650 feet long and 394 feet wide, with, according to Arend, “a subtle Chinese architectural style that owes a great deal to Western styling.” Decades ago, on an official junket, I was hustled through Chiang Kai-Shek; I remember very little about Taiwanese aviation beyond the jet fighters hidden away for instant mobilization. Arend doesn’t mention Heathrow. He must have had an experience there similar to mine: laborious hand searches of every luggage piece, a totally disconnected building evidently designed to prevent one bomb from destroying everything, and British Airways employees enjoying the fact you’d missed your plane to New York. Charles Lindbergh took his first flying lessons in Lincoln, Nebraska, using an Arrow Sport built in 1929 in nearby Havelock; of all the world’s great airports, Lincoln’s has the “shortest possible distance from auto to airplane.” In Geneva, a word almost synonymous with peace negotiations, soldiers with automatic weapons watch children sprawled on the floor with crayons and coloring books. I don’t know where SwissAir gets its pilots, but my finest landings have followed postcard daybreaks over the Jura Mountains; whatever connections there are between your rear end in a seat, and somebody’s hands on the controls of a 747, those connections say: if you have a choice, fly SwissAir.
That single phone call from Starry, with his calculations, and suddenly I wish I’d stu
died more carefully the airports I’ve encountered. What do I remember about energy, taxi distances, runway grades? Virtually nothing except tank trucks out on the runway, silent and ethereal as the man with the wrench. Instead, my airport memories are measures of relief, inconvenience, discomfort, reading material, and artistic surprise. Kona is everything it’s supposed to be—open, with a dear friend not seen in decades, and a lei. Hilo is stereotypical Hawaiian—no air conditioning, and no walls. Kansas City has wonderful ceilings; I spent an hour one time just taking black and white photographs of KCI’s ceilings. Although Minnesotans are justifiably proud of their education system, you can’t buy a New Yorker at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. You can, however, get CDs from Altitunes, a Wetzel Pretzel, or a snack from Wok and Roll. Biscuits and gravy is the recommended breakfast at Eugene; an elderly gentleman at the next table has his with a shot of whiskey. Tulsa is asleep; all northeastern Oklahoma is asleep; car rental is easy and the highways are blue.