Air Travel

Enjoy your flights. Enjoy the security line, enjoy the frustration of needing to look up your confirmation code yet again while printing your boarding pass. Delight in the rote familiarity of the flight attendants’ two-fingered gestures slipping into uncanny kabuki – no one really listening while the zoned-out attendants indicate the fuselage door through which you will frantically exit in case of water landing. Enjoy scanning the dense lines of text on the arrival and departure screens. Enjoy these moments though they be occluded by N95s and provisioned with measly half-sandwiches at triple price and beset by hellish corporate customer service. Be sure to savor your remaining encounters with air travel despite all this. For these are the final years of that world. 

Your children will not know how to believe you when you tell them about the ways it was. Partly because you yourself did not know. The charmed first days of leather and chrome and velvet, of wide walkways un-conveyored, the pace of movement breezy; attendants starched and ironed, cigarettes and courtesy. Meals and refreshments a given (how could the pilots and crew, as humane custodians, deny the animal needs of their temporary charges)? The customer-traveler being of course the center of the industry. But even for you, these are only third- or fourth-hand memories. 

But even early on things there were signs of the coming illness: Single-flight-life insurance policies at the vending machines and the inevitable descent down to Longmont. The initial glamour soon lost (like all things profitable); yielding to a quickening clip as the market blossomed into true commercial vigor; marked by those perennially rotten metrics: Cheap, high volume, enormous margins. Everyone harboring a little private confusion about how it could be so affordable to jump-cut from Saint Louis to Singapore like that… On a whim. 

And then, thanks to all this high-functioning convenience and efficiency, this miracle, like all the other ratchet-teeth before it, became routine. Sanitation crews working fast between flights to scrub the big planes which had started to smell like city buses. Nevertheless, the experience remained mostly invigorating for a while. The airport doors were an effective class-filter, each one excluding-into-being a permanent city of hypertransients who shared a minimum floor of affluence; mostly on vacation or on their way to do business (big business). Brightly-lit duty-free bazaars stocked with booze and chocolate and electronics (in the mad late days, high-end cameras could be had at the vending machines). Walls covered in glossy advertisements of a noticeably higher grade than the workaday billboards left behind in the grimy city. Terse acronyms of financial instruments and software solutions announced in a jargon that elevated the more modest travelers with a feeling of proximity to unseen movers and shapers among their travel companions: The Important. Perhaps you pissed next to Someone in the restroom. Perhaps that was a state functionary suckling her brat in the Lactation Room or an ascendant technologist bowing to Mecca in the tiny worship closet off the main hallway. This spirit of doing radiated even from the anonymous curly-headed and sneakered young man cross-legged on the floor next to you, headphones on, typing loud and fast on his laptop. What wonders on the anvil in these forges! Productivity even in these liminal spaces of long-distance travel — ever-onward the bustling arc of progress.

Will your children believe you when you imitate for them the whine of the landing gear retracting, or the rumble of the engines coming on; the drop of your stomach at liftoff, the complaining pop of your inner ear? Your awe at the city turning slowly below you like a toy scene as the plane banked to meet its flight path? 

Will they understand what you mean when you tell them of the high affect brought on by turbulence and the closeness of strangers watching films projected from the back of each other’s heads – laughing and weeping at films that would hardly raise a chuckle or wrench a tear had they been viewed back back on the ground. Back at home?

The children will not understand because only some of them will have felt so much as the rumble of a diesel engine beneath them. As far as transportation, most of them will only be familiar with the rubbery knees and sore feet that come from walking a long way on broken asphalt and the chatter of un-oiled bike chains and the screech of cracked brake pads against rusted rims. 

Maybe, with effort, some of the more imaginative older teenagers will be able to understand part of what you mean – the cohort who, as toddlers, were passengers on the final flights during the period of chaotic decline and inevitable dismemberment of that tremendously complicated and terminally brittle industry, reliant as it was on a raging metabolism of multiple kinds of fuel – passengers flush with credit, rivers of kerosene, miniature silicon mazes – all these now dwindled to dregs.

But they will not understand the good and excited feeling of a flight. All their flights were of duress; emergency migrations. Whether getting back home or leaving home, in every case trying to reach a safer place with the hope that their guesses had been good and that they would land among the right people with whom to weather whatever it was that seemed definitely to be coming. Some vague monster now nearly upon them.

Some families doubling down on atomization and retreating to long-planned hibernacula (built in secret, larders quietly laid-in for the last decade; Dads opening tins of sardines and bags of powdered milk, sitting down to oil their pistols and read Bible verses, giddy at their own foresight), others regrouping their extended families into ancestral towns, and hoping that although long-estranged, shared blood would still yield some guarantee of cohesion. Others gambling for higher stakes still – mustering for physical roll call with militias they’d been watching only virtually for years. Groups of young people; friends and coworkers turning their backs on their families not because they do not love them but because they are clear-eyed that the color of the near future is Red.

These newly-armed guerrillas, partisans for implausible futures; gathering together in bunker complexes sunk into the wasted former sodland of the Midwest. Thinking to themselves how ironic it was to return after so few generations to the same land where their great-great-great-great grandparents had lived like prairie dogs. And though their ancestors’ black and white faces (relayed across the years on tintype heirlooms) had been dour and creased, they had also been full of resolve, convinced of the fertility of the land. The tallgrass seas in the backgrounds of those photographs now unthinkable.  

Each night in the close quarters of these fossorial barracks, newly-minted lieutenants leading their comrades in prayer: Petitioning their respective Higher Powers to let their parents die soon, that they might be spared the knowledge of the savage season on its way.