Attempting Re-Entry
Airplanes have a specific smell, a certain fibrous plastic sweetness that gets into my clothes, my skin, my brain. After a particularly long flight, I’ll brush my hair off my face hours later and smell it on my hand as it moves past my nose. The smell is always strongest at boarding, before the odor of nervousness and boredom from hundreds of people mingles with the meal service and drowns it out. Maybe I just get used to the smell; people who work in chocolate stores always say they don’t notice the sweetness that permeates the air after a few weeks. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t smell it at all anymore – after last year, I think I might qualify as having worked a part time job for all the hours I’ve spent on planes, absorbing that odor. Still, boarding for the first time in 2007, headed for Oahu, I was struck anew by “plane smell” as I crossed the threshold and found my seat. I sat down, settled Ponteuf and realized I just couldn’t stop smiling. I was home.
Oh, certainly, I’ve been home for two months. Sleeping in my own bed, going to work, wearing clothes I’d forgotten I owned. I’ve enjoyed seeing my friends and family, I’ve enjoyed cooking and having easy access to laundry and the internet and books in English. Still and all, the unpopular but honest truth is that I’ve felt out of my element. With my journeys reduced to the twelve minutes it takes me to reach the office, and the fourteen it takes to get home, I don’t feel much like myself. We’ve been investigating restaurants and cooking Chinese food and I’m really honestly trying to make it work, because I know that for now, at least, I don’t have other options, but I feel a bit like a plant that’s been shoved into a closet.
Back in seat 2D, I felt alive. Driving home from the office I’d been crabby (I fear I’m crabby a lot these days) and driving to the airport I’d been carsick, but once I fastened my seatbelt low and not so tight around my lap, it was like I’d been given a new lease on life. Instead of obstacles, I saw possibilities. Instead of drudgery, I saw means to a goal – hell, I saw a goal, felt capable and fulfilled and content. Things were going to be ok. Something in the air? It must have been.
A little more than half way through the flight, the seatbelt sign came on, and I looked out the window. Flights over water leave me vaguely unsettled, and they always seem to involve a swishy kind of turbulence that makes Ponteuf nauseated. Below, I saw not inky ocean but the tops of clouds, knotted and gnarled, cotton balls crammed into a too tight container, spilling upwards in giant lumps. Above was a deep black, sprinkled with pinprick stars. We seemed to be flying in a no man’s land in between. Suddenly the entire sky was purple, and I saw a crack if lightning skitter across the top of the storm, forking in five directions at once and lighting up the clouds from within. Like a pinball machine, this set off another burst, and another, coming one on top of the other. Darkness for a few seconds, then again the sky was glowing. The clouds pulsed violet, the light traveling through the storm, away from the plane. We were above the commotion a good ways, and it seemed more like we were in a submarine, deep beneath the ocean’s surface, watching a prehistoric phosphorescent coral performing its unseen, primal dance.
Most of the passengers, Mike and Ponteuf included, were asleep, and the cabin was dark. I was warm, cocooned in my blanket and feeling oddly safe, cradled by the dull roar of the engines and the familiar smell of the seat. I pressed my face to the window and watched the show play out, a show that could have been for my pleasure, so private did my vantage point feel. Just a tropical thunderstorm, commonplace to the mid Pacific and certainly old hat to the pilots who fly this route, but beautiful. I was entranced. It reminded me of staring at the sky in Africa, knowing that I was seeing constancy, that in the presence of something so large, so elemental, what came before me and what will come after are mere specks of pale faces in an airplane window, inconsequential.
Oddly, I’m comforted by this reminder of my smallness. At real home, I matter. My work, my worries, my needs – they take on the dimensions of the lightening storm. Travel allows me to be inconsequential, to absorb and learn and to merely be. I’m most me once I step onto the plane, the weight of the world falls away. I’m able to find happiness in simplicity, in the sight of a storm, in the touch of a hand, in the odd but somehow wonderful smell of the airplane.
