You go barreling through the terminal and ride on those train-shuttle-things and finally come screaming into the gate area just as they're about to shut the door. You run down the jetway, panting, pouring sweat, crap strewn in a trail stretching three miles back because you left a zipper on your carryon open ... but you make the connection and you're gone.
So ... do you then get to count Atlanta as a place you've been? I'm guessing not, because you never left the airport. You didn't actually go into Atlanta.
But what about the state of Georgia? ATL is in Georgia, after all. Do you count it?
I'm interested in how we understand something like an airport in terms of a place. Is it a place unto itself, or more like a membrane between places -- something that we pass through to get to somewhere else?
The airport where I work is small -- nothing like ATL. It has just four gates and one commercial carrier, which operates a fleet of 20-something-year-old propeller planes. The sight of one of these aircraft
causes many passengers to stop the boarding process to take a picture, like they think they're climbing onto a vessel out of the freaking Smithsonian.It's my sixth (count 'em) summer working at this airport, and maybe that's made me a little biased. For example, I don't feel the sense of disconnectedness that washes over me in other airports. On the contrary, I find the smell -- a unique potpourri of heavy ocean air, jet A fuel, hot cement, and pine -- familiar, almost comforting. The sounds, a symphony of sea crow caws, cricket chirps, frog croaks, and the intermittent screams of small jets from the general aviation side across the runway, are familiar as well. I've seen, smelled, and heard this place at all hours of the day. I've slept on the equipment (we used to be allowed to do that, between flights (new management put a stop to that awesomeness) and woken up to droning cicadas as well as droning turboprop engines.
Airports, generally, are outside the community both geographically and figuratively. They're set at a distance from towns because they require a lot of room and create a lot of noise. And they're often at odds with the citizenry because they demand things. Case in point, the long, bitter, ongoing battle between the airport where I work and a local church. In a sense, it seems that to back the airport is to oppose local history and culture, and probably to trample on some of that Constitutionally protected "right to worship" stuff, as well: "Our Father, who art in heavVVVVRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOMm evil. Amen."
But today my airline colleague showed me where some blueberry bushes are, off to the right of the ramp next to w
here we park the out-of-commission tugs and carts. Apparently some of the crew have been tending them for years, watering them with the hose from the equipment garage. "I've been eating these since last summer," he said. "Whenever we get a break between flights, I come and get a handful -- they're good for the heart, you know."The blueberries had only just started to ripen, and hanging on the bushes were scores and scores more. The few dozen we picked and ate were sweet, syrupy, and hot from the midday South Carolina sun. Some were split apart, others stretched taught. I fiddled the seeds out of my molars with my tongue as bags poured out of the chute.
Now, in a way, I've tasted the airport, too. Another of my senses became engaged, and I felt even more connected to the place than I already had been.
