On the first flight, which we boarded at 11:15 pm in Seattle, there were two wired and delirious kids in the row behind us, clearly relishing the rare opportunity to be awake so far past their bedtime. The older one had ridden a plane before, and so graciously allowed her younger brother the window seat. On takeoff, she knowingly remarked, “In a minute you’re going to see lots of tiny lights,” and so my night-time view of Seattle from above was accompanied by the delighted chanting of the entranced four-year-old by the window: “Tiny lights, tiny lights, tiny lights!” he squealed. As the reading lights above flickered just before we reached altitude, his sister remarked in a jaded voice, “Oh, I hate it when airplanes do that.” We were then treated to a mercifully brief rendition of a Christmas pop song that was clearly dear to the hearts of both children, but equally clearly not to that of their mother. The poor fellow next to me, who had the luck to score the window seat and the misfortune to be seated directly in front of the blissful 4-year-old, kept jerking alarmingly. I thought he must be having oddly intense sleep-convulsions until I heard the girl behind me explaining to her brother that it’s not nice to kick the seat in front of you.
We’ve just embarked on the final leg of our four- (!)flight trip. That’s one more than they told me about when I bought the tickets, and Sean has gone from mild annoyance at the prospect of two layovers to helplessly amused at the wringer of three. Why, oh, why, was it necessary to send us, in order, to Chicago, Newark, AND Dulles before Sao Paulo? I saw a direct flight from O’Hare to Sao Paulo while we were there. I also saw an arrival from Seattle in Dulles, which landed a neat and pleasant hour beofre boarding began for the flight we’re on now.
But I try not to think of such things. It only makes me more convinced that airport employees get their thrills by watching bewildered and hopeless passengers stumble bleary-eyed from service counter to service counter, trying uselessly to shorten the torture, oblivious to the snickers of bored and sadistic men and women in uniform.
There’s a lovely people-mover in the Chcago airport, though. If I had been a very little younger I would have wanted to step off and ride back through the tunnel that sports oddly soothing rainbow neon tubes twisting over the walkway, lighting up sequentially, and rain-forest music. It’ not like we didn’t have the time to.
That tunnel reminded me of a similar tunnel that I saw in the Frankfurt airport, traveling with my parents when I was sixteen. That tunnel was nothing short of magic. We were making a connection there either very late or very early, and the place was more or less empty. We stepped together into the passage between concourses, and boarded the people-mover in a tunnel that we couldn’t see the end of. Astonishingly for an airport of that size, there was not another soul in sight, and, exhausted by long travel, we rode the conveyer belt in silence.
Just at the point when you could no longer see the entrance to the tunnel when you looked back over your shoulder, the white walls began, very gradually and subtly, to turn colors that changed and shifted as you watched. An eerie, sustained tone that perhaps we’d been subconsciously hearing for a long time was perceptible finally, accompanied by disembodied birdsong. It gave me a funny feeling in my stomach then–I felt as if I was being carried into some frightening but exciting unknown, a place where the rules were different and from which it was possible that I might never return. I was terribly disappointed when the mover deposited us into rows of familiarly uncomfortable-looking chairs. Pretty much every airport since then has been a letdown. But–if you must kill a few hours in such an in-between sort of place as an airport, O’Hare and Frankfurt are pretty good choices.
Has anyone else been re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia since the movie came out? Last week I revisited The Magician’s Nephew, and it strikes me that an airport is very much like the Wood Between the Worlds.