If I were a synaesthetist, I could see the black mushroom cloud from miles away — miles both horizontal and vertical, a line with a slope, my airplane coming in high and fast on short wings and loud jets, dipping into the cloudy foul mood that clings to the coast like an irritable smog, a million frowning faces stopped at a street corner, a chance glance to the sky, and my aluminum shuttle tosses a sharp glare of razor-thin photons through their pupils and I make their day incrementally worse, just for sake of showing up.
An airport is a feedback loop of bad moods, where everyone is hurried or hurrying, everyone is far from home, and nobody has time for the rest of us. Planes run late, luggage gets lost, and the black cloud has wispy fingers that stretch out and envelop the arriving craft.
A four-hour flight can get from the Midwest to the West Coast, and there’s a solid three hours there where we’re all blissfully disconnected from the hurry and bluster of the world below. We can sit in our cramped window seat and stare out at the cotton-top of cloud cover, white or grey or black. We soar through sunlight, though the ground may be ripped and hammered by storms or tornados or floods. We’re given a magic carpet ride above it all, and while we suffer through the drone of jet engine noise, we’re all sure that the fabled silver lining is actually a topcoat.
The captain comes on the PA and the tray tables go up, the seatbelts click, and we begin our descent. The black smoke reaches up and our plane is covered in it; I can see it coming through the windows in filtered form; it wraps around us like a veil, a turban, a gauze bandage. Brows furrow, eyes narrow. A middle-age woman bares her slick teeth in a snarl while she wrestles her laptop back into its case. Children begin to cry, the light goes out, dozens of muscles tense into headaches.
We blame it on the change in pressure or time zones, but airports are black holes of happy, and we’re coming in high and fast, caught up in the exponential bad mood of the global traveler network, ready to land and bark and growl and rut.
Three-point landing, rubber on tarmac, heads loll on tight necks, slow taxi ride and the entire cabin stands at once, digging through overhead storage compartments, bent at the shoulders and waiting. Hands want to grab and shove; feet want to kick; teeth want to bite and kiss and lick. I can feel the moods of the people around me, but if I were a synaesthetist, I could see it, the black smoke exhaled on a wind of stale air, a red tinge for the wispy, half-considered thought that would turn this flying bus into an orgy of pinstripe and open-toes sandals. Instead, a hundred cell phones flip open in unison, and nothing’s as important as telling someone, somewhere, that we’ve arrived.
The smoke leads us out, one by one, out the door, down the jetway, and into the airport, then back on another plane — maybe a bigger one, maybe a smaller one — or out into the real world for a taxi ride to an anonymous hotel. For me, a smaller commuter plane takes me on a second, shorter trip.
My final destination, as the steward calls it, is Monterey Municipal Airport, and I emerge from a hundred-seater prop-plane onto the tarmac directly, hoof it over to the terminal building. I haven’t any luggage, so I don’t need to hang out in the glass-walled room that serves as the community baggage center. Instead I cross the empty space of the place, out to the Pacific air, into a musty cab, and I tell the man “Cannery Row,” and he knows just what I mean.