1. Airports as Spaceports-Reveling in Civilization

  Los Angeles, California
Friday, November 14, 2008

Airports fascinate and excite me like few other facilities on Earth. They have since I was a kid - nay, from birth - like maybe the instant the doctor slapped my arse I cleared my throat, did my first midair inversion situp and said, "You - knock that off, now. Hi Mom, hi Dad. Hey, where's the gate? We gotta go see the jets, right away."

Mind you, this remains the case despite the fact of what airports have become, victims first of architectural rottenness as universal as it is clichéd - exposed beams designed to resemble airframes, like the building itself needs to be airworthy and its occupants need to be reminded, constantly, "Pssst! You're in an airport"; seats designed in anticipation of alien species with different skeletal configurations than humans, etc. More recent affronts have arisen in the wake of 21st century barbarism, of course - stuff like near-dictatorial powers and immunity to oversight bestowed on an agency known as Thousands Standing Around; compulsory innoculation in communal foot fungus cultures; placebo padlocks; virtual strip searches, etc.

The crowning insult is $8 beers, but spectacularly-priced beer has apparently been a feature of airports since the Wright Brothers.  I've long since conferred upon it the honorary status of a metaphysical given - it's pointless for us to question, it just is. Though I suspect it has much more to do with "sin taxes" and/or some regulation intended to keep life perfectly non-threatening for our coddled, Baby-Boomer-corrupted culture than any immutable axiom of reality.  I take the same general view of beer as did America's Founders however, so...I just grin, bear, pay, and quaff.

No, airports, for all their discomforts and offenses, are magical places, and not just in the fact of being able to walk through a door in one city and emerge a few hours later on the far side of the planet. It's in the whole atmosphere of the place.  Professor Peart captured a bit of that feeling in the unsung preface to the Fly By Night lyrics: 
      
"Airport scurry flurry faces
Parade of passers by...
With a smile or just a sigh
Waiting waiting pass the time
Another cigarette
Get in line - gate thirty-nine
The time is not here yet..."

Maybe it's just me imputing my own attitudes to others, but I don't think so.  Yeah, there're the heavy fliers for whom the experience is visibly mundane and tedious - and yeah, the mundanity and tedium get to me too, even as an infrequent flier.  But beneath it all is that little adrenaline kick and that palpable buzz that swirls amid the ceaseless flux of people coming and going between a thousand destinations - the knowledge that the fact of your being there means that one of them is you.  There's an unmistakable sense that others feel it too.

Airports, beneath it all, are fun. You-are-going-to-fly.

Add to that the whole Sci-Fi angle that colors everything I do, and it's not much of a leap to imagine you're at the spaceport at Asimov's capitol planet Trantor, or the parking garage outside the bar at Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe.


Squint just a little and Boeing's magnificent creations become floating spacecraft; imagine a little and your itinerary is measured not in miles but in AU and light years.


The gauntlet at LAX was surprisingly smooth and simple. We still had to drag our unshod feet across the Who's Who of Fungal Strains at the X-ray gate, but aside from that and the lamentable fact that I could only gaze longingly at those bottles of Caol Ila 12 year at the DFS - any liquid in any vessel of any kind is to be considered deadly, reason be damned - it was alarmingly quick and hassle-free. I'll take it.

Even the TSA people were uncharacteristically civil - though I realized for the first time that the acronym can denote Thousands Sitting as well as Standing Around. I've long since stopped shaking my head in amazement at the unethical folly of that government monopoly (which is a redundancy, really,) yet I found myself inadvertently staring at one of those diligent TSA employees, wondering as to the nature of her actual function. Until she stared back - at which point decorum and the singular unwillingness to be "detained" took over.

Suffice it to say that the position of "Podium-Stationed Window-Staring Daydreamer" is filled by an expert.

My tax dollars at...work, in all its selfless glory.

I suppose I should commit right now to a self-ban on all political commentary or we'll be here all month. Since "There is a Rush lyric for every situation in life" I will defer again to Professor Peart: "It's hard to take the world the way that it came."

Indeed.

But...later. Much later.

So now it's all heady anticipation and long, lascivious looks at that undeniably lovely machine waiting out there... [N.B.: If you're new to Travelpod, remember that you can click any photo to enlarge it.  Go ahead, try it.  'Dare ya.]

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I suppose a little backstory is in order here:

Yes, I failed to heed my own maxim of "The only thing standing between you and your dream vacation is the decision to go," and allowed ten years of...sitting at home to slip past. Arrgh. "Never better than late." Or something.

Nantida and I, Bahtman, had been planning a Thailand trip for well over a year. Tida hadn't been back to see her family or country in over a decade; I needed to dine on some insects by way of lifelong revenge, and to get in touch with my ideological mascot in its natural state, or close to it. Seriously - I can't imagine not seeing family in that long, and for my part the chance to follow in the footsteps of the fearless gourmand Andrew Zimmern - of Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods fame - not to mention doing another life-altering exploration of a far corner of the world, were long overdue.

It was mostly a matter of locking down a date that was an acceptable intersection of factors - a sufficient horde of cash, a relatively cool season at our destination, a decent chunk of vacation time secured from our respective workplaces - and...just making the decision and doing it.

Done.

'Turns out my work situation got dicey - we got the reservations in mid-September for a Nov 14th-30th absence, so of course by early November the pace at work had transformed into a situation one can only describe as "swamped." Or "wetlanded," or whatever the Thought Police want us to say. I expect the situation when I get back will give new meaning to the concept "chaos," but the management encourage time off regardless, so off we go and Mars, for the moment, will wait. Guilt at bailing on what's turned out to be a frenzied workload will be nagging and prodding no matter what, but any and every date possible would have been a crapshoot anyhow. So it's back to Professor Peart: "Roll the bones." (There is a Rush lyric for every situation in life.)

Rolling!

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Lastly, and lest I forget, I owe an instant debt of gratitude - for roughly half of the inspiration to do this journal and for the referral to this site - to "Battlemonkey," whose outstanding 2001 Japan travel journal titled Dreaming Booska (a.k.a. Booska Dreams,) I stumbled onto a few years back. I'd never thought reading a complete stranger's travel experiences could be interesting, much less entertaining, or even less, fascinating, but...that guy can write. If you're looking for something that's orders of magnitude more interesting than what's likely to show up on that screen across the room and if you've got some free time, I can't recommend Booska Dreams highly enough, apparent political differences notwithstanding.

Following Battlemonkey's narrative in Google Earth is key - the vividness of his commentary combined with satellite and photo images of the actual places he describes is the next best thing to having tagged along in person. Just great stuff from start to finish.

If I can create within this journal the palest echo of Booska Dreams, I'll measure it as a success.

[P.S. - This journal is optimized for viewing with Internet Explorer 7 or later, preferably with text size set to Medium and monitor at 1920 X 1200 pixel resolution.  Otherwise, don't freak if some of the photos are a little jumbled within the text...]

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