This Is Travel

I passed through the north entrance of the DFW airport. For Dallas at the last part of December, it was relatively warm – about 60 degrees and I was only in a long sleeve shirt. I was to pick up a friend coming in from skiing and I was early. It made sense to drop the windows down.

I like airports and malls and hospitals and big hotels because they are their own, self-sustaining city. For a while, a friend and I talked about having a blog or developing an app dedicated solely to the navigation of terminals and the discovery of great layover cuisine and spirits. Having lived in South Dakota for a few years, we knew the length of unexpected winter layovers and wanted to somehow capture the thrill available to one as they become a citizen, briefly, of an airport.

As I circled underneath the lights of the small city, following arrows to the arrival gates, I would be sandwiched between buses and shuttles. Then, I’d pass through the gates and circle back, taking me by the wingtips of warming planes. Slowly, like waking, I was met with the smell of fuel – the burn in my nostrils. The hazy apparition blurring from the exhaust pipes and turbines that smudges the edges of your vision and the world you see it through. The seepage of form and structure from your eyesight when only the softer lines are left – and the burn of that smell.

Morning, 02-19-10

Here comes the morning
to take away the ghost-tail clouds.

Along the edge
of the large darkness
pushes the first red line, come to
snuff the street lights
and string the cold-weather birds
along their dotted-line flight
toward morning places.

Grey is always first –
the thickening red line
blurs sharp darkness to grey.
Shortly after,
colors come into focus.

Heavy comes the rest.

Mira

I once told a story to a girl. We were riding on a school bus, knees touching – we were training to be teachers on the south side of Chicago before shipping off to different regions of the country for two years.

I couldn’t tell you why exactly I wanted to tell her about Patrick, but I did.

I was in Barcelona, I told her, after I studied in Valladolid, a city northwest of Madrid.

She shifted her weight to her elbow on the back of our school bus seat so she could face me fully.

While I was there, we went to the Barcelona Aquarium right on the Mediterranean Ocean – she placed a strand of hair behind her ear.

I then told her about descending into the blue-black insides of the aquarium and how my friends and I were mesmerized by the moving strokes of the fish. It felt as if we were in a living organism, watching it work.  Standing quietly in front of a pane, I felt an unbalanced gust along my calf and saw a small figure rush past. I soon learned from the exhausted callings of his mother that this knee-high blur was Patrick. He was possibly two and a half feet tall and was wearing a khaki jumpsuit with a belt high and tight around his waste. He had blonde hair combed over like a man 80 years his senior might. His lack of height allowed him to clear the bar separating the crowd from the glass of the aquarium and I watched him, with all the coordination he could muster, approach the strange moving wall, slap his hands palm open against the glass and shout at the top of his lungs, ¡Mira!