29
September 2001
by Miranda
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Airports and airplanes. How many have I been in? How many cities have I visited in this lifetime? As I sat in Port Columbus, waiting for my LaGuardia bound flight to board, I felt an anxiety I have never known. As the airport TV blared CNN's continuing coverage of America Rising, reminding us brave, airbound souls of the potential for and likelihood of further terrorism in the sky, I forced myself to think of all the travel problems I have endured. All the scary flights in the dead of night with lightening tearing through the sky. All the nauseating turbulence and stomach churning trips in small prop planes over mountains. All the oceans and deserts I have flown over. All the delays, cancellations, gate changes, sprints through airports, layovers, customs, luggage issues. All of it I have endured. What got me on that plane was thinking about that early morning flight I took on September 11th. I was tired, half asleep, dirty, and groggy. I couldn't see straight. But I was completely unafraid of getting on that plane. I didn't think about turbulence or storms or delays. I couldn't imagine the terror that would fill the earth and sky just two hours later. I asked myself why knowledge, or the obsessive realization of what else could possibly happen, would keep me on the ground. I reminded myself of the ten thousand things that could have happened on any flight I have ever taken, while I was asleep with my head against the window in coach. I realized the irony in my anxiety; I was anxious to get on an airplane after flying without a problem on the 11th. But there it was. As we sat on the runway, waiting to take off, I told myself that these are just airplane, not weapons. They are just modes of transportation that take us from here to there and back again, safely. Safely. With only turbulence and weather delays and leg cramps to worry about. "I will see this place again," I thought as I shut my eyes on the world whizzing past my window. "There is nothing monumental about this flight, this visit, the return flight. It will be quiet. Its only achievement will be that I am doing this and thereby ending my fears. It wouldn't do for me to go out in that way, having endured very little in life, having lived very little. No, it wouldn't do at all." "I will fly again and again," I thought as I watched Columbus grow smaller under a chilly newborn Autumn dusk. "I will get stuck in another snowstorm at the Atlanta airport. I will get rerouted to Cincinnati and spend the night there, cursing the whole time. I will run through the Detroit airport again, simultaneously wishing I hadn't smoked so much that day and wishing I had a cigarette. I will fight off nausea as my plane hurdles through a cloud that never seems to end. I will waste more time waiting for flights to take off, more hours of my life spent sitting on the LaGuardia runway waiting to take off. I will lose fear. I will conquer this anxiety. I will survive." We flew around New York City and it looked so small from so far up. The buildings stretched up to the sky, and at the end was smoke. Smoke where there once was skyline. A spotlight tore through the night, searching, always searching. The city needs a spotlight to see now, as it is shrouded in smoke. The horizon spread out before me as we landed, and I saw it with new eyes. "Can I smoke in your cab?" I asked the driver, who had taped two American flags to his dashboard, as we left the empty cab stand. "Only if you give me one," he smiled back at me, and we smoked together in silence, listening to the Mets Game on WFAN. We got on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge, not mentioning the strangeness of the once familiar landscape, not speaking of the sudden change in our society and world, not speculating on the scrutiny the world had suddenly turned on New York City. We just smoked and listened as the Mets rallied to win it in the bottom of the 9th. He whistled along to the radio jingles - the same ones they played when I used to listen to WFAN in the backyard on summer afternoons with Dad when the world was more innocent and so was I. I shut my eyes on the new skyline of my City and tried to remember the first time I'd seen it as it used to be. In searching I found only that it had become embedded in my memory as if it were a part of me. There was no beginning to it; it was always there. When I was little, we would drive from Long Island to our house in upstate New York. We'd leave at some ungodly hour of the morning to beat the city traffic. My mother would wake up my sister and me and we'd stumble downstairs, bundle up, climb into the station wagon, and promptly fall asleep. I'd sleep through the incessant chatter of the talk radio station, not hearing the repeated weather and traffic on the eights. But without fail, I would wake up when my Dad paid the toll to cross the bridge. I'd force myself to sit up and stay awake as the city came into view. The green sloping lights on the graceful bridges, topped by tiny red lights. Beyond it, the twinkling lights of New York. It would take my breath away every time. "Daddy, what's that building called?" I'd ask. "What building is yours, Daddy?" I came out my memories as the cab stopped. I opened my eyes. We had crossed the bridge. The skyline was no longer in the distance; we had become part of it. A man living out of a shopping cart had draped an American flag over the side. Saks Fifth Avenue advertised sparkling denim, white collared polos, and red turtlenecks set against a backdrop of red, white and blue. The pulsating lights on Times Square winked, unaffected, to half-deserted streets. The humbleness, the way that people looked each other in the eyes with understanding and silent resolve. So many American flags surrounded Rockefeller Center that I could hardly see past them, and they became a wall of flowing and blowing patriotism. Stars and stripes, red, white and blue. Atlas with the world on his shoulders. Buildings shrouded in thick, black scaffolding on Hudson and Varick. Policemen, fire trucks, ambulances headed downtown, always downtown. Broadway now ends in sky. Funny how people complained about not being able to see the sky in this city. To me, there is now too much. New York has always thrived on its pride. The City looked at itself as an independent entity. Now, there are flags everywhere. Everywhere. America has suddenly become so New York, and being there again, I realized that New York is remembering how American it really is. It's a backwards, crazy mixed up world. And that City that I once knew is the same, yet so different. It seems like we have gained a perspective on life, faced with the reality of our own mortality. And sometimes we worry so much about what could happen, what has happened, that we don't make the most of our lives, wasting it all just trying to survive. The cab ride ended outside my swank hotel. I paid my fare, rode the softly glowing green elevator up nine flights, found my trendy room, shut out the incessantly blinking lights of Times Square, and pretended I wasn't there. Pretended I was home,
that home that I call mine now. Pretended that I was safe, ignorant
and innocent in Ohio. I slept, but I dreamed of long car rides,
of views from the jump seat of the Pontiac. "Which building
is yours, Daddy?"
The notify would like you to join Miranda on The Road Taken.
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