chapter 11: AIRPORT DAYS

The airport is the only place you can walk around with no shoes, a glazed look on your face, and sleep on the benches and no one judges you
Coriander Woodruff

If someone tried to measure my life in years, they’d get one picture. If they measured it in boarding passes, they’d get another.

There was a time when air travel felt like a proper event. You dressed up a bit, you were excited about where you were going, and stepping off the plane felt like stepping into a different world.

Then came budget airlines and the era of cheap mobility. Suddenly it was possible to be in three eastern seaboard cities in a day, or to have three meetings in two countries in 72 hours. I did both more than once. The romance faded quickly. What remained was a lot of waiting, a lot of tedium, and a set of routines for passing time in lounges and plastic chairs.

I experienced business class, cattle class and everything in between. Sometimes I cared about upgrades and status; sometimes I just wanted to get home. Large airports gradually stopped being exciting. They became something closer to long-distance bus terminals with better branding.

But alongside the big hubs and major carriers there was another side to flying: small, slow planes into remote strips, skimming under the clouds, dodging storms, landing when there was enough daylight and someone had moved the cattle off the runway. Schedules became suggestions, weather and daylight the real timetable.

Those flights kept a sense of adventure alive. You couldn’t pretend you were in a neutral space when the plane shook, the wind howled, and the pilot casually mentioned you’d be taking “the long way round the storm”. A lot of boarding passes got scanned in those years – some forgettable, some that still sit clearly in my memory.