People, planes, and limitless possibilities
I like airports even though I don’t always love flying. My favorite pastime at the gate is people-watching.
Brazen, warm-weather travelers are costumed in short-short pants and sleeves and jelly sandals as if Concourse C empties right onto Miami Beach. These travelers, likely, are heading oceanside to islands and tropical climes.
Or maybe they’re just exceptionally hot-natured.
Airports are cold. Women in menopause and snowmen control the thermostats. Even on the hottest of summer trips, I wear a button down, long-sleeve shirt with a breast pocket, which is where I put my paper boarding pass. I refuse to freeze.
And, yes, I print my boarding pass.
What if my handheld “device” runs out of juice? If the power grid collapses or we lose Wi-Fi, I’ll survive with my paper pass folded neatly in my front pocket. I’m old school cool.
Technology befuddles me. Travel apps that make sense to my hip children read like coded Cyrillic to me.
I trust paper.
While fellow travelers are glued to their phones, I’m zeroed in on the poetic migration of people gliding over polished floors to baggage claim.
I can’t fathom why some women wear yoga pants or fashions that resemble pajamas. I’m too uptight to be that chill in public. Children sometimes wear actual pajamas in the likeness of Spider-Man or Cinderella. They twirl acrobatically on the carpet by the ticket counter while their parents sag half-awake on row-seats.
Airport denizens are slummed down or dressed up, loaded with bags or traveling hands-free, zippered, hooded, and layered in the tans and yellows of the western desert.
Beside clothes, I notice faces. Some look relieved having escaped security lines. Some appear tense, or catatonic, or happy. You cannot parse the difference between hope and wonder. These faces exude similar contentment.
You see lamentation in the slump and shuffle and also in the faraway look. I wonder about the woman clutching her purse to her chest, furrows rummaging like hills over graying brows. Like John Prine, I find myself wanting to say hello in there, hello.
These pilgrims are hard to read.
Wondering about their backstory is part of the game. Where they are going? What compels this trip? Do they quietly dread what they might discover when their connections are complete?
Once, five of us returning from Cuba dashed at a full gallop through Dallas hoping to catch the last flight to Champaign. People jumped out of our way shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” and, “Good luck!”
We missed that flight.
Disconnected and aloof elsewhere, travelers at airports root for each other.
Usually, I weave unrushed through crowds. I smile at the people queued at the gate for Barbados. I step aside for the crowd deplaning from Toledo in plaid, toucan prints, and pinstripes.
Actual flying is always at least mildly uncomfortable.
I eke out a little more leg room by sitting on the aisle, though I miss peering over the ledge of the world from the window seat. People hemmed in at the window commandeer the shade, as is their right, and often close it. There’s something unnatural, though, about sitting in a dimly lit cabin at 35,000 feet in bright sun. We aren’t vampires.
Drawn window shades aren’t a problem in the airport. Plenty of leg room. Wide windows. Uncrowded views of sunsets or purpled thunder clouds knotting in heaps above dependable runways.
Outside, planes nose into their gates like elderly men parking Fleetwoods at the grocery. Out on the runway, 90-ton 737’s sprint like NFL fullbacks breaking earth’s grasp, and, improbably, lift off, slivering elegantly into the friendly skies.
Inside the airport, children perch on suitcases their parents tow leaning low like jockeys at the Kentucky Derby. Petite dogs in sweaters trot excitedly. Clad in ill-fitting suits, men without neckties, expressions, and sleep line up at the coffee shop. Mellow twenty-somethings crowned in colorful headphones float by as if in another dimension. Only marching bands parade with greater precision.
Every day is a perfect day at the airport. Everyone hopes for seamless connections to their Sacramentos, Torinos, and Cairos. These cities lead to more distant realms still, labyrinthine journeys to places that Origen of Alexandria suggested over 2,000 years ago might require piercing clouds of unknowing. Vegas and Nirvana could be the same place.
But what did Origen know about modern travel?
It’s warm and sunny outside today. There are no clouds. Every seat is a window seat. Every flight is on time.
While you wait to board, relax. Skim a magazine. Sip a latte. Doodle on the back of your boarding pass.
The Rev. Matt Matthews is co-pastor with his wife, Rachel, of the Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese. He may be reached at matt@waldpres.org.
