The Airport Blender
A place where we are neither here nor there
Airports are strange places. At an airport, you are neither here nor there. You are in a state of transition, moving from one location to another with thousands of other people, preparing to board an airplane and travel faster than humans ever did prior to the 1950’s. After a while, airports start to blend. It is a strange feeling when you arrive at an airport and need to look out the window to remember if you are at LAX or SFO. The jet bridges look the same. The architecture, built for airplanes, has the same basic elements: lights, gates, carpet, Starbucks, small convenience stores, another Starbucks, shoe shiners, large atriums and carts moving everywhere.
Airports have no sense of time, yet everything within them is timed to the minute. They are open longer than most stores, they have more restaurants than most malls, with more drunk people than most bars, and they never sleep. When they are down for the night, the gate agents and shopkeepers hand off to the thousands of maintenance and janitorial workers who keep our airports going. These are the people who are under appreciated, who clean up our messes and keep us going as we are bouncing between cities across the globe.
With the amount of money airports spend to be unique, this goes away with enough travel. I don’t think when I’m walking around SFO or DEN or ORD. I know to take the underground train from the A gates to the B gates to catch my next flight in Denver. I can hear the music and the “doors are closing” announcement in my sleep. I know when the plane has pulled up to terminal two instead of terminal three by the feel of my luggage being dragged along the carpet in San Francisco. I know when I’m arriving at ORD based on the taxiing of the plane.
Airports have become places where I glide through, rarely caring exactly where I am now, and only focusing on where I will be next. I no longer think about how I’m moving through the airport or even what airport it is. They are all the same after a while. The differences are subtle and less important when I have another place to go, another flight to catch or a hotel to check into. There are always more gates, more flights, and more Starbucks at the next terminal whether it is in my current airport, the next or the airport after that. I will see them all before I return home.
