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The Modern (Air)WorldNow that air travel has created its own universe, your destination is just a point of departure – and the trick is to make a connection.
ILLUSTRATION: STÉPHANE POIRIER Last year, on three occasions, I travelled to cities I never even saw. Because I never left the airport. I did this in Vancouver, Dallas and Toronto. With the advent of the airport as destination – with its own cluster of hotels and restaurants (and citizens) – there are lots of people not seeing the cities they fly into. In Vancouver and Dallas, I stayed in hotels within the airport itself, and in both cities I had to step outside the terminals just to get some relatively fresh air. The hotel in Vancouver is probably well-known to most travellers. I settled into the bar after checking in and spent the evening drinking beers and watching some kind of extreme fighting event with businessmen from across Canada and the U.S. and with one from Japan who found the fight “boring, boring, boring” because the combatants didn’t throw enough punches. By the end of the evening, he had bought me a beer and a whisky and we had forged a friendship that we both knew was temporary, possibly an illusion, but that we were happy to have shared nonetheless. In Dallas, I struck up a conversation with a teacher from Oregon who was returning home after breaking up with his girlfriend. We watched ESPN together and by the end of the conversation, he was offering me some of his popcorn shrimp. We talked golf, even though I know very little about the subject. I was the generous one this time and bought him a beer. It was the least I could do. His breakup was still fresh. During these trips, I inhabited a space that was profoundly connected to the larger world while being completely separate from it. In Vancouver, I walked inside the terminal to the hotel, checked in, unpacked (I always unpack, no matter how short my stay), walked down to the bar, returned to my room, slept, showered, walked to a meeting within the airport, collected my bags and then got on an aircraft again. The only time I stepped outside was for five minutes before the meeting. By the time I hailed a cab back in Montreal, I’d essentially been inside Airworld – a term coined by novelist Walter Kirn – for almost two days. Now this kind of trip is either tremendously efficient or endlessly dreary, depending on your point of view. Either way, it feels amazingly modern. I think Airworld is a pretty interesting place, home to a brand of globalism that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. And it’s one that many people experience. This is the world I’m going to explore in this space every month, casually mapping its geography and culture. Upon my return from Dallas, my son asked me where I had been. I told him, “I went to “No, really,” he replied. I reached into my bag and gave him his present. It was a T-shirt from Texas. A state of mind, perhaps, but not a place I ever really visited. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net Arjun Basu, the former editor-in-chief of enRoute, recently published his first short story |
