In the Transportation-Industrial Complex

Atocha Station, Madrid

One enters the portal to the wormhole at Atocha Station: the train to Barajas airport. The station is modern and efficient but also has a feeling of realness, with its windows and jungle: not the plastic synthetic feel I get once I am trapped for good in the air travel machine. (Remember the time sitting at a Starbucks at Detroit airport: a plastic tree that somehow had a real brown sparrow in it? The delight and the shock?) Zip, swish, through the city to emerge at Barajas with its undulating wooden ceiling, every trivial part engineered just for this airport.

Barajas 

Relaxed, empty chatting staving off the inevitable on an improbably placed bench with an untidy bunch of backpacks near our feet that turns out to be a sleeping person. Then, diving in for real: bootless through security, trekking though endless vast atria, squeezing onto the shuttle to the next terminal, herded through duty free shops with perfume samples waving like tendrils in a jungle of consumer overload. More long runs past gates without number, part of the entertainment offered to passengers. And then the seats at the proper gate, confirmed by the lighted sign: my flight flashes through a rota of three different carriers, three flights for the same plane.And the Muzak: a perky tune in English, "Let's give thanks to the Lord above that Santa is on his way." !!This time, I didn't talk with anyone in the terminal, too dulled and not really wanting to reanimate.I am thinking about all the people I love, travelling among them all around the world, and being waited for or gently goodbyed by them. I do feel beloved. But still sad. Enough time for a quick drawing and we clamber with our baggage on board.

Did we have a snack? I don't remember. Heathrow was truly awful. We were a little late and everyone was anxious about making their connections. At first, as we unloaded, there was something like a line, but then it became anendless scrum: a space that seemed as big as a football field, shoulder to shoulder with people. If someone had fallen, they would not be able to fall, but propped up by the surrounding mass. There was nothing like a line. People ducked under ropes around the perimeter but then found themselves wallowing in a sea of bodies, with no order and no information and no visible end. But somehow I eventually came into another space and hustled to the shuttle etc, barely making the connection, wouldn't have if it hadn't been delayed. I thought a four-hour layover would be plenty, and it was enough: my flight was boarding as I arrived. Once settled in, the nice hostesses brought wine and snacks around and things seemed more ok--I seemed to somehow have landed in business class. A dramatic sunset followed us for hours as we flew west.

I watched a movie but was still numbish and didn't speak at all to the person next to me, even though he seemed perfectly nice. An American. On this flight to Chicago, many passengers started to look somehow American, though I couldn't say exactly what it was. An openness of the visage, a lack of wariness. Maybe I am also guilty of this.

We arrived a little late in Chicago, a big, ripe, full moon hanging in the sky, and I girded for a mad dash. Customs. Shuttle. Terminal hike. Wait, wait, wait, run, run, run, and worry powerlessly as the minutes tick by with no movement in the lines. Long hallways three feet wide and a hundred yards long, like in some lost dream. Made the gate about two minutes after boarding was scheduled to close-- was it possible I'd make the flight after all? Only to find the flight had been cancelled. I had suspected Chicago would be the point I'd get hung up on this flight, but it wasn't weather, but that the clock ran out on the crew. It was zero degrees, but the free motel and its shower beckoned, so I waited for the shuttle. The motel was 30 minutes from the airport, and the bed was wider than long. A nap, then watery coffee with other disconsolate travelers who had found themselves cast into this motel breakfast room: someone who had missed a flight to somewhere in Iowa for a pipefitting class, a chinese exchange student who had befriended a retired guy: “so proud of you, here all by yourself”, a Chinese American faced with the prospect of waiting ten hours at the motel or at the airport for his rescheduled flight.

Back into the van. The airport parking lot lights  high created the effect of a low sky of starts with dead empty space stretching far above.The airport, the security dance, and another takeoff. Because of the dusting of snow, the town, its rooftops, looked like an elaborate, extensive arcihtectural model, all pristine white angles and dramatic sidelit shadows in the early morning light, complete with spiky conical trees.. On to La Guardia. And after another few hours, a bumpy flight on a little plane to Charlottesville, seventeen hours late. But-- I got to look out the window leaving New York and see the lower halves of clouds rainbowed as we passed over them, a magical sight. A cab ride home, and release from the transportation wormhole to a completely different world. Had I ever really been in Spain? Gone to those places, seen and done those things? Various bits of evidence said yes, but it felt like another life. Two days later I ate the forgotten mandarina in the bottom of my bag and the market, the air, the sounds all came back to me.