I rode in some airplanes again this week. One from San Diego to Portland, Oregon, and then another one from Portland to Atlanta. It had been a while since I had been on any airplanes.
In Portland, a lot of the buildings were boarded up. I remember Portland as a nice green place with parks and people riding bicycles everywhere, but the parks were overgrown and had fences around them. There weren't as many people on bicycles, but there were still some. Cyclists are a hardy people. Especially the commuting ones. I bet there would still be some cyclists even if we had an apocalypse. The stubborn left-over cyclists rode past the boarded-up buildings and the graffiti. On one corner, there was a new mural on a building. It was a giant white painting of a beautiful tree, and surrounding the mural was a lot of graffiti. Two different kinds of paint in a silent battle for the city's soul. There was a guy with a ziplock bag filled with pills on one street corner. He was counting the pills out in his hand to give to another guy wearing a ragged red raincoat. One, two, three, four white pills. A long way off, I heard a siren; it was the kind of a siren an ambulance makes.
In Atlanta, there's a very long way to walk to get to the rental car facility. I walked past a lot of different kinds of people who had places to be, all rushing around. The women dress comfortably to travel now. They have yoga pants and sweatshirts. Some of the women ever have little pillows attached to their roller suitcases, but a lot of the men wear suits. The airport is the only place left where you can still see a man in a suit in the wild.
Outside of the city, there are a lot of green trees – a very Flannery O'Connell backdrop to all of the deep histories and unspoken expectations of the American South. There are Waffle Houses out there with their yellow and black signs, and Chick Fil-a's, and more and more green trees. I started reading the billboards. A lot of them are for lawyers. You don't even have to pay them unless you win. Accident lawyers. Divorce lawyers. There were some billboards for places to buy handguns and a lot of other ones that say how big the lottery is now. People tend to advertise things that are already selling. Somebody has to pay for those billboards. I imagined what court case must have paid to put that big bright sign up there for me to read. Come and get your HUGE settlement, The boards say.
I spent a lot of time inside during the past few years. I got married and made tea and wrote a book and made a couple of albums (one of the reasons my newsletters have been more sparse of late). I played the Legend of Zelda all the way through for the second time. I hid and ignored and felt overwhelmed by the world and the noise in it. When I came back outside again, the buildings were all boarded up, and the billboards were all marketing to desperate people. Desperation has a sound – a white noise like a big wave, but it also has an impact. I'd been hearing the sound, and maybe now I am feeling the impact.
On the second airplane ride, I was in the tunnel to board with all the other people. Yoga pants and suits. I began to feel very claustrophobic. Oh, no – why are we going to do this, to all pack inside this metal tube and fly through the sky. What if everyone has to pee at the same time? What if someone has a panic attack? What if that person is me? I couldn't believe we had all agreed to sit together like this. What an enormous terror flying is. It had nothing to do with Covid. I just couldn't believe everyone was going to shuttle in here like cows in chutes, light it on fire and shoot us to Atlanta, it is an enormous and for-granted chaos – not even the flying itself, but the pure togetherness it requires. Maybe I should stay here forever, I thought. Maybe I will walk home; I have walked a long way before, I thought. But when the plane was in the sky, everything settled into itself again like an afternoon with the slow hum of the oxygen and the soft roar of the jet engines, and everything was at rest. The people were reading magazines. One girl had an Australian shepherd. He doesn't like his head being pet, she told me. It's going to be a nice day when we get there, the pilot said over the intercom. He wasn't worried at all. I'd like to think that if we can trust one another enough to get on an airplane, there must be a lot more hope down there inside of us where the light doesn't shine. The kind of hope that can get covered up in the white noise of desperation like the sound of a big wave.
Written by Tyson Motsenbocker (tyson.motsenbocker@gmail.com)
https://www.tysonmotsenbocker.com/