More Than Flying

{The Longest} Day 2.1

AJ sat in a hard plastic shell of a chair at gate 8 in the United terminal at O’Hare Airport, reluctant to peer into the world around her. It was 6:30 a. m. in her mind and the atmosphere was still a brick wall of sensory overload. B and the boys had run off to find breakfast. She sat by the luggage as the previous few hours caught up to her in foggy, groggy fragments.

It started with the early morning darkness of a hotel that wasn’t ready for life, loosing themselves from the tangle of bed and blankets … brushing, dressing. The family yawned during  a crowded shuttle ride to the airport, then lugged rolling, tipping, falling suitcases through check-in, followed signs, flashed IDs, stuffed shoes, bags and jackets into bins and slid them through the security x-ray machines.

Everywhere, somber people filled the landscape, arriving only to leave again in airplanes, taxis, shuttles, trains or busses. Everyone, employees and flyers, gave off an anxious, sad and worried mood. 

With a volume a little louder than the TV behind her, a furry voice over the loudspeaker brought AJ her presence of mind with a call for some passenger on a waiting list. Little by little, her immediate surroundings came into focus. Just a few feet away, outside the gate, luggage-laden people moved like traffic on a highway. Real voices floated like specters in the crowded audio forest. The blaring beep warning of a trolley pushed everything and everyone aside.

When the time and airplane came rolling into the gate, the family joined the mass of passengers gathered around the door, trying to be polite through a weird, panicked urgency. 

In the plane, settled in her seat, AJ watched as passengers walked down the aisle, eyes raised to the numbers above. They stuffed carry-ons and settled in, some faster than others. 

The people who stood out to her … didn’t. It wasn't the man's clothes, size, appearance or voice that drew her attention this time. The young man in unremarkable clothes settled in front of her, across the aisle. He had brought a salad on board, but that wasn’t what made him different. It was the light he carried; he had a cheerful demeanor, a genuine smile on his face despite the funereal atmosphere of the airport. He had survived the miasma, you could see his contentment and subtle joy. He was happy to be there, and wasn’t ashamed to show it.

AJ smiled and silently thanked him. She put in her earbuds and turned on her tiny iPod shuffle.  

John Muir

The problem came when she realized that the narrative of her audio book was slipping by without comprehension. John Muir was making The Yosemite come to life in his beautiful experience-backed narrative, but the words were dead and sterile, nothing made a mark. It was as if she had passed through the actual Yosemite Valley without a reaction, without looking up from the back of the seat in front of her. 

On the backs of all the seats were little television screens less than 20” from passengers’ eyes, funneling messages to flyers whether they liked it or not. Since stepping out the door of the hotel room that morning, her senses were bathed in messages: along the highway, in the airport, on shirts, hats, bags, on the TVs in every gate. Always messages, everywhere advertisements, rhetoric clothed in news or “announcements”.  

The happy young man had shut off his screen. 

“How much am I missing when I’m entranced in the world’s messages, when they scream so loud I can’t think, hear or see the real world?” she wondered.

AJ had to make an effort to shut them out. On the chair arm there was a panel to control the little message dispensers: channel, volume, back, guide. A person had to search for the off button. It was hidden underneath the brightness button. You had to hold it down. 

There was something sinister, yet innocent in the endless, omnipresent messages that blared randomly in hopes of hitting someone.  “I hate them,” was her immediate reaction, but was without a reasonable argument against them in a dog-eat-dog world. 

The screaming hush in the cabin permeated the short silences between words pouring into her ears. When she paused the audio, the noise engulfed her, grew insider her head, penetrating to the very marrow of her bones. Human voices pierced the aural fog like bird calls in a windy wood, the sound was clear, but indecipherable.

She paused her verbal audio trip through Yosemite and dug The Itinerary out of her bag. B, who sat across the aisle flanked by One and Two, had painstakingly printed and collated it a few days before. In so many ways, the trip would not be possible without him. 

The impetus for traveling to photogenic vacation spots might have started decades before, when B had inherited his grandfather's 35mm camera, but exploring the Sierra Nevadas was an idea sparked a few years earlier when AJ and B were watching a History Channel program on the national parks. 

The program featured John Muir, the man who played a large part in the preservation of Yosemite as a national park. His love for the parks and whole-life, consuming passion for the natural beauty of the place infected them with the desire to experience the same.  

Since then, B would sometimes stay up late researching and exploring the possibilities. The trip was the outcome of hours of dedication and planning, of which AJ had little comprehension, but much admiration. 

All the years of ideas and dreams had built up to a reality that was printed out in a day-by-day fashion, with destinations and hotels, reservation receipts, times and alternate activities. Minute by minute, word by word, that plan was coming to fruition, as the plane hurtled through the air.

AJ leaned her head to the side and dozed off to sleep for what she thought was hours, but upon waking discovered that mere minutes had passed. The flight was supposed to be about 3 hours long, but because of the brief dip into slumber, it lasted somewhere between 5 hours and eternity.

In that eternity, she counted the times a man with either a bladder, bowel, musculoskeletal, vapor-cigarette, alcohol or drug problem walked past her to the bathroom. Five times.  

When the couple sitting next to her apologetically excused themselves to the bathroom, she welcomed the chance to uncrimp her legs, swaying in the aisle as they pushed past her. 

Back in her seat, John Muir’s Yosemite was interesting, and picturesque but long, and didn’t fit inside the airplane cabin, so she turned to the written word, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, a collection of essays by Robert Louis Stevenson saved on the Kindle app on her phone. 

The plane landed in San Francisco Airport without incident. There was more waiting, then more rushing, and more of the same weirdly tense airport atmosphere that saturated the air and employees and flyers. The family arrived at the terminal, picked up their luggage, then promptly left in a small, grey rental car.