Flight, part one: airports

This is for personhead frogs of war, who asked for descriptions for a story she's writing. Comments and additions welcome.

This trip I was in two international airports, one large regional airport, and two small regional airports. I flew in a couple of very large planes and a couple of medium sized planes and one so small that tall people had to hunch over in the plane.

The thing about large international airports is that they are, in fact, very very very large. They spread out over enough land to build a small city on. And yet they are not much like a city. They are very much like spaceports as they are described in old science fiction. Bright, plastic and metal, huge cavernous rooms connected by vast corridors with no place for a shadow. Once you get inside the security gates, which warrant their own description, you're in a self-contained world that has everything the traveler needs except a comfortable place to lie down. Restrooms, restaurants, retail stores selling souvenirs and necessities, bars, horrible slow computer terminals you can rent for exorbitant amounts of money, places you can plug in your own computer if you brought one: and in Las Vegas, immense ranks of slot machines as well. The carpet usually has a bright and complex design with a large repeat woven into it. There are huge windows looking out onto the tarmac where airplanes lie around like oversized sheep without a thought in their heads. They really look like they have no idea what they're doing there. On the tarmac men and women are driving carts around with luggage. Lights on the tarmac go on and off for unapparent reasons.

Most of the time the airport is teeming with people walking purposefully in many directions, dragging wheeled luggage or toting duffels. Used to be there would be large families with more bags -- literal bags, plastic, paper, cloth -- filled with dog knows what they are clearly taking to relatives in exotic places. But now you get one piece of checked luggage, one carryon, and one "personal item" before they start charging you something like ninety dollars a piece. So it's cheaper to mail crap home.

There's abig difference in the conviviality of airports. The big international ones tend to be more low-key and impersonal. At the little regional ones people are more likely to chat with you.

Communication between people in the airport and outside of the airport is really difficult if you don't have cell phones, and sometimes if you do, because reception can be lousy. The only place I saw public phones was at Pensacola, and the ones there only operate with phone cards that cost 22 dollars. You're supposed to be able to call emergency (911) or 800 numbers but it didn't work for 800 numbers so I spent 22 dollars for a free phone call that didn't answer my question. naturally, I complained. And naturally, I got a polite answer right away that missed the detail that the phones don;'t actually work for 800 numbers. They barely work for the phone cards.

Airport stories. When Frank came in from Prague to San Jose, which is a regional airport with international flights, we couldn't find him. His plane came in early but we didn't know that. We couldn't find his flight listed. We talked to everyone. Nobody could tell us anything. Nobody would tell us even what they knew. I had a horrible moment when I realized that it would be just like this if Homeland Security decided to hold him. They could have him forever and we would never know. But he was standing outside the baggage claim door in a spot that looked obvious to him, and he was pretty pissed that he had to wait that long.

But doesn't it just hurt your heart to know we live in a country where this is a legitimate fear?

It used to be airport food was so ridiculously expensive that nobody in their right mind would ever eat in an airport. Now it's only a bit more expensive than the same things outside the airport, so if you're stuck there you might as well eat.

At the Houston airport -- which was the least decorated of any of the airports I was in this time -- there were these carts you could ride in and be driven from one plane to the other. The drivers wore uniforms like old-fashioned bellhops, kind of. One of the drivers was a woman with short blond hair who obviously loved her job a little too much. She practically yelled yippee -- she shouted "cart coming through, cart coming through" with great glee and whipped her cart around the crowds like she was slaloming.

Every ten or fifteen minutes a recorded woman's voice announces that the Homeland Security threat level has been increased to orange (it's never anything else, never, so I don't know how it could have increased) and urges us to be continually alert for threats and to never leave our bags unattended or accept items to carry with us from people we don't know. Only at Houston were we also reminded that tasteless jokes would not be tolerated and would garner us the attention of Homeland Security and make us miss our flights.

Since the last time I flew all the biggest airports appear to have installed "air trains" which are little metro-style shuttles with no place to sit that take you between terminals, or as in my last stop at the San Francisco airport, to ground transportation (that means parking lots, taxi stands, bus stops and subway stations. I opted for the last in that list, which meant I took the BART train north to San Bruno, hopped on a different BART train going south to Millbrae, bought a ticket for a Caltrain train to San Jose, where I waited for about thirty-seven years and six months for a Highway 17 express bus to Santa Cruz which threatened not to come at all because of some bottleneck at the summit). These are really strange. They operate at high altitude, at the top of the airport (most of which is set realtively high off the ground, I suppose so it will be level with the belly of the airplanes), and they have some kind of spacewarpo deal going on so that distances that could easily take you an hour to go on foot are traversed in times better measured in seconds than minutes. Like I said, there's almost no place to sit down. The recorded voice tells you so many times what place you're leaving and what polace you're arrving to that it becomes confusing, and every time the voice announces anything it reminds you to hold on and to put wheeled luggage in the locked position.

Houston had a great view from the airport, or maybe I just thought so because of the rousing sunset giving out dramatic encores to the dazed audience.

Every airport labels its terminals and gates differently. The terminals are not ordinarily arranged sequentially with respect to each other. The gates are nearly sequential within the terminals, though. You just have to know your way around, I guess. There are few maps and the staff give such telegraphis directions they may as well have told you to go to hell, no matter how friendly and helpful they seem to want to be.

Considering how many television screens with lists of arrivals and departures there are scattered around the airport, it's surprising how hard they are to find when you really need them.

None of the airports have benches you can spread out on. They all have curved seats and arm rests to keep you from lying down or plopping your baby onto the seat next to you. The restrooms are huge and the toilets, faucets, soap dispensers, and towel dispensers operate with electric eyes.

Houston didn't have art in it that I remember. The Las Vegas airport is hideous, but it has some good art. There are murals of desert life, which are handsome and unpretentious -- they look like postcards from the 30s, honestly. There was a big, witty statue of a jack rabbit, which is the national animal of the western plains. More so than prairie dogs, definitely. The mural depicting the Strip and all the Las Vegas archetypes was ugly. Either it was executed by someone different from the others or the person just can't do portraits.

Heathrow was cold, but it was February in London after a freak snowstorm. Houston was warm in April. San Francisco was cold, the day after a heat wave broke.

The staff of the airports really reflects the area. That shouldn't be surprising, I guess, but the accents are thick in Southern airports. I'm not complaining. In San Francisco and Heathrow the staff are all kinds of color and accent, and you see the occasional turban or headscarf. In the South the staff is mostly just white or black Southern. It seems to be true what they say about Southern friendliness -- at least in Memphis and Pensacola. I guess Texas is its own thing, not really Southern. Anyway, everybody seemed very friendly and hoispitable and generous. When I was visiting with my friend's auntie, though, I had these flashes of knowing that she wasn't actually agreeing with everything she said she was agreeing with and she wasn't approving of everything she seemed to be approving of. I wouldn't call it exactly dishonest in her case though I suppose it has the potential to be. I said to my friend I couldn't tell when she was being sincere and when she was being gracious, and it made me nervous. I think when people do that you never know when they're going to come to the end of their graciousness quotient and suddenly turn furious.

Thge airport is big like a city and populous like a city but it's not like a city. The shops in the concourse are shallow -- almost like movie sets instead of shops. People's lives happen in the airport, but they don't actually live there.