New York to Austin

The sun is setting now – pink and blue and a little hazy through clumps of gray clouds that nearly meet the distant horizon behind the silhouettes of taxiing airplanes.Inside Washington’s Dulles airport, the travelers too are slowing with the coming night. It’s been a long day for them. There have been delays and there has been yelling. Babies have been crying. Ticket takers have been making angry faces. Delayed passengers have demanded immediate attention. Frustrated supervisors have attempted to calm them.People have come. People have gone. Planes have arrived, emptied, filled and left again. Not all of the flights have been on time however. Mine is one of the delayed ones – still yet to arrive.This afternoon, I took off from La Guardia en route to Austin via DC. Two days ago, I arrived at JFK on a flight from Alaska. On my one day in New York, I did a load of laundry. I picked up two paychecks and deposited them at the bank. I exercised. I watched the Greek break-dancers who practice every night in Astoria Park. I rode the subway. I looked at the tall buildings. I walked the streets so crowded they seem to shrink me, turning me into a nameless, faceless statistic marching along with all the others. There’s a feeling you get when in a familiar place, or among familiar people: a feeling of importance, a feeling of comfort, a feeling home. New York, at least for me doesn’t seem to provide that. In New York, no one seems important. Most of the city’s comfort comes from a feeling of anonymity; not the sort of comfort that comes from a pat on the back or the shake of a familiar hand but the comfort that no one will notice you if you fail, the comfort that no one will yell at you for being wrong. It’s a feeling freedom, almost the opposite of comfort.</p> As far as comfort goes, the road is starting to feel comfortable again, perhaps a little too much. All the habits of the long-term traveler have returned to me. I thought nothing of it the other day when I brushed my teeth in the lobby of the Anchorage airport; just as I didn’t think twice when I knocked out some pushups and backbends on the subway platform. The long-term traveler sleeps on any open floor. He worries little about germs. He washes his face and maybe even shaves in the sink of a public bathroom. He works on his business (whether on a computer or in a notebook or on a cocktail napkin) at any spare moment in any available place. I notice other long-term travelers around me. They are different from the vacationers, different even from the occasional business travelers. Long-term travelers treat an airport or a train station, even a truck stop or a Greyhound depot, like a second home. They are comfortable living out of a backpack or a briefcase or a car. I never intended to become such a person. Sometimes I wonder if I make a spectacle of myself by stretching in the airport concourse, or by curling up on the ground for a nap. The woman in front of me is eating a pizza from a brown cardboard box that says “personal size.” She’s dressed in a black pantsuit with a polka dot top. Beside her is a carryon suitcase on wheels, the kind with an extended handle that raises to her hips. She’s going home or going somewhere for a business meeting. She can’t believe our plane still isn’t here yet. But asleep on some benches are a pair of long-term travelers. One’s a salesmen in a suit using his briefcase as a pillow. Another is a tattooed backpacker that looks like he’d be more at home hopping railcars. They’re on the ground by the wall, their phones and electronics hogging the electrical outlets. They’re not eating because airport food is expensive and they’re in airports almost every day. They have other tricks for feeding themselves; complimentary hotel breakfasts and peanut butter sandwiches, grilled cheese cooked with a motel’s iron…. They rest their heads and close their eyes. They know their flight is late. They almost expected it.