One Year In

Exactly a year ago I was sitting in a crowded restaurant talking to my brother on the phone about my upcoming plane trip to visit him in Denver. We were discussing which live theater tickets we wanted to get while I was there. Those two sentences seem totally ridiculous now. I never took the trip. About 36 hours before my flight, Tom Hanks got the virus, then the Utah Jazz and then President Trump went on television to announce that maybe this thing wasn't quite as contained as he made it seem just days before.

It's not like we didn't know about the COVID-19 when I made plans with my brother, the news out of Italy was undeniable. The party line then, though, was that we were in for a rough couple of weeks and Ben and I were clear that we would be sure to wash our hands thoroughly before and after the theater performance. What children. As it turned out, I should have just gotten on the plane. New cases in the US back on the day of our conversation were 259. Yesterday, they were more than 50,000.

When I cancelled in March, the airline said it would give me a credit until November 2020 and I remember thinking that if this thing lasts that long we've got bigger problems. It's been 14 months since I've been on a plane and 17 months since I've been in a different timezone. Typing that sentence and realizing that its true is one of the bottom five moments of the whole pandemic for me.

Of course, I'm lucky. Yes, because I'm alive and I have my health and a beautiful family and a stable job and blah, blah, blah but I'm lucky just for ever having been on a plane in the first place. Only 5% of the planet has. A third of the entire world's airports are in this country, nearly 44,000 of them. Poland has more than 10 times as many people as Iowa but Iowa has nearly 10 times as many airports. There's 122 here. Airports, airports, everywhere but not a flight to catch.

You can't go directly from Iowa to Poland, however. Despite being branded the Des Moines International Airport, the travel hub of the state does not offer flights that cross national boarders. I have been told that the airport can add "International" to its name because it can get you to an airport that does facilitate global travel but if that's all it takes then my garage is an international airport. The true definition of an international airport is one that has a customs office, which Des Moines has had for more than 30 years, it's just waiting for it to make economic sense to use it for passengers. A lot of the airport (and the city, honestly) is trying to make you think it's a little bigger than it is. There are two concourses, A and C, there is no B but they hope you won't notice. "The Des Moines International Airport serves Iowa residents & visitors with flights across the country," reads the airport's website, a sentence that contradicts itself. The Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport in Texas, which won't fly you much further than Houston, is playing the same game. These are international airports in the same way that I am a billionaire—the potential is technically there, we would have thought it would have happened by now but you never know.

Just the same, I've been flying in and out of that airport for most of my life. A by-product of having divorced parents who live in separate states (especially before 9/11) is that you get to learn the ins and outs of an airport at a young age. By the time I was in grade school, my brother and I were like George Clooney in Up In the Air, smoothly making our way from the entrance to the gate like seasoned pros. In one of those truths that people whose parents stayed together think is sad, every airport (at least in the late '80s and early 90s) has a little room where unaccompanied children wait out their layovers. The place is stocked with snacks, drinks, books and toys. There is a television with a Nintendo in the corner but do not be seduced by it, it is a tricksy siren, and you will spend your entire layover blowing into a cartridge that is never going to work. I do not remember any adults supervising these rooms but that can't be right. Certainly adults accompanied us from the plane to the room and back to our next gates (if we were lucky we could ride on the little carts they use to move old people around, a privilege Jerry Seinfeld once joked was the closest we have to royalty in America) and everyone over 30 was always ready to ply us with bags of peanuts and pretzels to allay their guilt that our parents didn't love each other anymore. Bear in mind, my brother and I were far too pragmatic to feel poorly about our parents situation, who had also gone to great lengths to have us understand that the divorce was their issue not ours. We would watch The Parent Trap in disbelief, the very premise made no sense to us—they want to give up two Christmasses? I understand that this may not reflect the experience of every child of divorce (ugh, that moniker) and I certainly know they can be traumatizing for children but that simply wasn't the case for me (or so my therapist wants me to repeat as part of a thinking positive exercise).

It felt very adult to get ourselves from Gate B in Memphis through O'Hare, MCI or MSP and into the terminal in Des Moines. We were trusted with a responsibility and even though we were in no real danger (the trips were never at night and there was no shortage of airline employees to ask for help), how many parents today would wave goodbye to their phoneless kindergartners in one city, only to hope to hear from them again in a different one? The ramifications of what children are increasingly not trusted with is a topic for another newsletter but I relish the memories (and the extra peanut bags) of being independent enough to follow the screens and maps to find our flights and get us where we needed to go (it helped, as is true in almost all things, to have a big brother as a guide). The only time I was ever scared was when the pre-fight safety drill would mention the masks that come down after a severe change in cabin pressure as masks, gas masks, ventilators and other breathing apparatuses have always given me the willies. Even landing and take off, where 80% of plane crashes occur, never bothered me. Nor should it have. You are ten times more likely to be hit by a comet than you are to die in a plane crash. Interestingly, you are three times more likely to die in a plane crash than to be killed by a mountain lion. Plotting plane crashes on a spectrum of things to worry about between being struck by an icy, gaseous space object and being devoured by a puma, you have to admit the chances of plane-borne death seems low. Speaking of animals, planes are much more dangerous for them than they are to us. Tens of thousands of birds are killed by aircraft every year (there's even a word for their remains; snarge) but only a couple of hundred people will die. In fact, if you fall out of a plane, you're not necessarily a goner, about 150 people have done it and survived in the last 80 years. I should note, though, just to bring the mood down a little, that nearly half of all airline pilots admit they have fallen asleep on the job.

Still, I miss it. I miss the romance of it, which makes watching an old episode of Will & Grace on a tiny screen seem like an adventure. I miss the promise of an airport, a pulsating flow of humanity where you can go anywhere and be anything. I miss getting out of here. "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts," said Mark Twain. "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” And I miss calling back the flight attendant after he tosses a tiny peanut packet on my tray and whispering "Sorry, my parents are divorced, may I have another?" Works every time.