I'm a Yokel and I Love The Airport.

I like the airport. I know this is an unpopular sentiment. Or at least I know that I am supposed to act jaded. I’m supposed to act like I’ve been here before, as the cool kids say. But until I was an adult, I hadn’t been to an airport before. At least not inside. I do remember going with my mom and sister to sit in a parking lot at the end of the runway to watch the planes take off. We, and many other poor, untraveled families in desperate need of free entertainment, would bring a cooler full of snacks and lawn chairs out to this flat pad of pavement that sat on the other side of a fence and right in the firing line of planes taking off from Lambert airport, usually right around sundown. Twilight, what movie people call golden hour, really brought out the drama of a great big jumbo jet lumbering straight at you like a slow and listing missile and then suddenly lifting into the sky with all grace and speed. What was really amazing is that the feeling of building tension that swells under a plane right before it achieves liftoff felt almost as enveloping from where I sat on the trunk of my mom’s Chrysler Cordoba as it would be when I actually started going into the airport and getting in the airplanes. I always ended up on the trunk because we only had two lawn chairs.

What’s odd is that no one in my family ever seemed to make the leap to think, 'Hey, we should be inside one of those things sometime!' Perhaps flying was completely out of reach for us financially, or we simply thought it was, or if it just never occurred to anyone that it might be exciting to go somewhere further than we could drive to. But eventually I would go inside. Lambert would be my first airport, and I loved it immediately. The high white ceilings, the bustle, all the people being funneled into this complicated maze of processes all toward the singular purpose of getting them through to the right gate, the right plane, and into the air, hopefully pointed in the right direction. Lambert has these big arched windows that dominate the terminal, so you are always kind of awash in the sight of the planes coming and going and taxiing back and forth, building to take off or coming to rest at the jetways. I was irrationally enamored with the airport from my first flight out of Lambert  and I am unashamed to admit my yokelness in this regard. 

Flying is never truly casual, no matter the pretense. It wasn’t when people wore their best jaunty fedoras and it’s not now that they show up in crocs and a hoody. Being thrust into the air, carried either away from your home or back to it, is emotionally high stakes no matter how much we try to play it cool. But I also recognize that you kind of have to play it cool. An airport is a very regimented system where a lot of complicated things have to happen in a synchronized fashion. There really isn’t space for you to give yourself over to either excitement or hysteria. That is why the latter is an entire genre of social media shame porn all by itself. This is a tightly managed system of interlinking parts and movements, and then some jackass gums up the works because being asked to stow her personal item under the seat in front of her is a reason to go on a screeching rant full of F-bombs and racial slurs. And beyond offense or rage, you more find yourself embarrassed for them that they didn’t understand the assignment, which is to go where you’re told to go, sit where the ticket tells you to, pretend to pay attention to the safety demo, and above all, keep those burbling emotions in harness from security check to baggage claim. In short, act like you’ve been here before.

So, I do get it, but, I also can’t get past the magic of being in one city in the morning and in another country or continent by the afternoon, or whatever time of day it is where you wind up, and landing in a place that feels like an extension of the last, no matter how exotic the location outside. Because in the end, all airports are variations on a theme. They are richer or poorer, cutting edge or dated, the carpets smell like cleaning products or tracked in manure, but they are all arrows pointed at the same aesthetic target. Every airport is trying to communicate the same message: that this is a place of enough sleek, futuristic order that you can trust the people here in to do the impossible, to make a bunch of cumbersome, gravity bound, un-aerodynamic mammals soar through the air and land somewhere, more or less in the same condition they took off in.

Lambert was my personal first airport, but writing this, made me wonder what everyone’s first airport was. It seems Newark airport was the first true commercial airport in America. This might seem like a hard thing to pin down, but it was the first one with a paved runway and since that is the best kind of runway to try and land a couple hundred people and their emotional support animals on, I feel comfortable going with that as a standard. It also had the first control tower and weather station. It might have also been the first to have a Hudson News selling 8-ounce bottled water at $12.50, but Wikipedia doesn’t say. It does say that it had an Art Deco administration building that opened a couple years after the airport came into service and I think that is the bigger indicator. Up until that point, most airports were just purpose built sheds meant to provide a place for people to stand around wearing hats with dramatic brims and coats lined with real fur from actual dead animals, before hoofing it out onto a rutted dirt runway to duck into a hatch that was little more than a porthole. All of this for the option to be strapped to the insides of a bare metal tube and thrust into the air. But Newark’s admin building with its (at the time) cutting-edge design and murals by the abstract painter Arshile Gorky inaugurated the era when flying became an experience that went beyond the harrowing minutes or hours you actually spent in the air – presumably hoping that someone at whatever destination you were headed to had thought to themselves, “Maybe we should pave this landing strip. Make it nice and smooth.”

Speaking of paving the way, if Newark was the city that brought us the modern airport, then doing so also made possible the airport bar. For this, there will be a place for it in heaven. When it finally dies once and for all, as it has been trying to do since the day after LaGuardia opened.

These days, Newark is known locally as the worst airport. Especially after JFK reopened the old TWA terminal as a theme hotel and LaGuardia spent a billion dollars on not being the worst airport in the New York area.  It should be said, Newark is currently undergoing a major renovation of its own, its first in almost 50 years and it was definitely overdue. It was outdated and felt decidedly frayed and grubby at the edges. People loved to talk about what a nightmare it is or was, but, having flown out of there many times before the renovation, its failings were somewhat exaggerated. Being objective, you’d have to think that Newark airport’s reputation was suffering from a bad association, that association being Newark. Though, I guess it’s telling that I have avoided it for so long that I actually haven’t been there since the renovations began.

I do remember one thing I very much enjoyed from the old airport that I hope survives the renovation and that is their cabinet of confiscated contraband. This is mainly in the form of animal hides, either loose, like a leopard skin rug made out of a real leopard, or sewn into garments and accessories. There’s something about someone returning from some exotic location clutching a giraffe skin duffle bag and then experiencing the raw shock of being hauled off to an airport interrogation room like somebody wearing an “Osama Bin Laden #1 Fan” T-shirt, where TSA agents will regard them with the withering disdain of people who know you should know better but don’t, because money has made you incapable of learning anything or thinking past the phrase “I want…” Or maybe they just think that the airplane will take them back in time to one of those sheds I mentioned, when workmen were just getting ready to pour the hot tar out and fire up the big blacktop roller. No such luck, lady, turn over the penguin skull finger bowl and prepare yourself for the cavity search.

There really is no place like an airport to play out a little class resentment. I mean the whole experience is literally separated into an explicit class system - First Class, Business Class, and Coach. The aristocracy, crass uppity merchants, and shit coated peasants of the air. It is a place where the rich can pay extravagantly for the pettiest of privileges. Board the plane first, sit in a larger tiny seat than the tiny seats the poor will be consigned to, have a hot towel, stand around awkwardly in the exclusive triple platinum lounge for the fifteen minutes between exiting the security check and take-off and have a re-packaged, airline branded Chips Ahoy. This is, of course, sour grapes. I want that Chips Ahoy and I’m a small enough person to admit it.

There was a brief moment after 9/11 where the playing field was leveled for just a brief second by the universal humiliations of the security check. But, before long there came TSA Pre-check and for just $85 you can once again let the little people know that while they are tolerated guests in the sky, you live there.

But, as the cost of flying became more accessible to the masses, the working class has had some measure of revenge, sartorial in nature. I had a girlfriend whose aunt was a Delta attendant from way back in the day and she used to complain bitterly about the demise of the days when people dressed up to fly. She would narrow her eyes and look into the distance and you could tell she was dreaming of chucking college age girls in sweat pants with “Juicy” written across their ass out over the Atlantic, and tossing their flip flops out after them. I do not dress up to fly, but I also don’t show up in my pajamas, but that has more to do with the fact that I would never go anywhere in pajamas. Even so, I try to not to get too attached to the past glamours that my girlfriend’s aunt was clutching to her blue polyester bosom. Every once in a while, though, I see something that moves me a little closer to her side. I got on an airplane one time and the guy boarding just ahead of me had a brown neck pillow, one of those ones that are shaped like a toilet seat, with an attached hood that, when he put it up to go to sleep, was revealed to be in the shape of a giant poop emoji. All I could think was, “If this plane goes down and I die in the company of someone wearing shit on their head, I am going into the next life really pissed off.” I would of course, never vocalize that anger, or make a show of it by pulling the foam stuffed crap off his head and smacking him with it as many times as it took to draw blood. I keep such emotions in check. I am acting like I have been here before.

This brings me back to those early near visits to the airport. The ones in the parking lot with my family. And that brings me to the first ever air related, near fatality I witnessed. An old couple was getting their lawn chairs and coolers out of the trunk of their car. They had pulled in and parked directly in front of us. They were a couple well into their 70s. At seven, I didn’t have it in me to contemplate the sad poetry of these people spending their retirement watching other people fly off to exotic locations. Also, this movie wasn’t a tragedy, it was slapstick. The old guy bent over the open trunk of their car. He was one of those guys who is large all over except in the ass and his plaid shorts were sagging precariously. He pulled out a cooler which he sat on the gravel, then he pulled out a lawn chair which he handed to his wife. His wife was a short but stout woman. She looked like a lifetime of washing this man’s main sails worth of boxer shorts and undershirts and hanging them out on a line to dry had given her thicker shoulders and a broader back than you might have expected from a woman of her height. As her husband bent over the open trunk to retrieve his own lawn chair, his wife, without looking, put all of that upper body strength into closing the trunk’s lid. Closing it on her husband's head. She closed it hard. The best you could say about it was that his hairless skull probably broke the impact it had on his spine. A little. The sound was kind of this bump-ka-thunk, followed by a muffled “Damn it, Peggy!” from inside the trunk.

At that same moment, my mom said, “Oh! She got him!” and then clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter.

Peggy for her part, turned back just as her husband was raising up out of the trunk, rubbing his head and staring daggers at her, and said, “What are you doing? Come on.” As they walked away to find a good viewing spot, they proceeded to have a whisper shouted debate about who needed to explain themselves. My mom turned and looked at me and smiled, hugely. It was like she was saying, come to the airport and see all the wonders of the world.