When I was a kid, I sometimes used to ride my bike with my older sister out to the county airport near our home. It wasn't that I was nuts about airplanes — Gail was the one who wanted to fly one day. It was just that I idolized her and would have tagged along behind her wherever she went.
But I remember standing outside the airport fence, watching the airplanes take off and land, and feeling that an airport was different from any other place. Other places just were. A park was a park. End of story. But an airport was more than that. It was an open door; a beginning. From here, who knew what adventures could be had — where those airplanes might go or what their pilots and passengers might see? It gave the airport a kind of exciting, expectant aura of possibility that hung so thick in the air that I felt as if I could almost touch it.
Many years have passed since then. I, not my sister, eventually learned to fly. But the feeling that airport inspired in me is one I still experience every time I drive through an airport gate.
Airports, like airplanes or people themselves, have personalities all their own. John Wayne Airport in Southern California is the epitome of a modern, shiny, well-oiled machine, with all movement choreographed as carefully as a Busby Berkeley musical. Powers, Oregon, on the other hand, is a beautiful grass strip that could easily blend unnoticed into the wilderness of the surrounding coastal mountains.
Some fields still echo with the ghosts of yesterday. The characteristic triangle of runways and the lingering round-topped hangars at Liberal, Kansas, reveal the airport's origin as a World War II training field. The original art deco terminal at "Sunken Lunken" airport in Cincinnati, Ohio, gives arriving pilots the feeling of having stepped back into the days of Amelia Earhart.
Deming, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty waystation in the southwestern desert. But over the door of its worn, wooden office building is a brightly colored sign that proclaims proudly, "Welcome to Deming: Home of clean water and fast ducks." These are people I wouldn't mind getting to know.
The airport at Cedar Key, Florida, is a rough, 2,300-foot strip that stretches literally from one end of a tiny island to the other. But it is a wonderful remote hideaway where calling a taxi consists of circling the town several times so that the driver knows to come pick you up.
The list could go on and on. Every airport is different, and every pilot has his or her favorites. Yet no matter how unique, interesting, or beautiful any airport is, it is not physical characteristics that give an airport its magic. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince would say, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
To the analytical eye of an outside observer, an airport is simply a strip of asphalt surrounded by buildings and machinery. Indeed, from an objective standpoint, some airports might look more like oil-streaked junkyards than places of beauty or magic.
The airport in Chino, California, for example, is not an inherently attractive place. It hosts a mismatched collection of hangars and has little greenery to relieve its large patches of concrete. It also is located in an intensive dairy farming area that sometimes can be smelled at 1,500 feet above the field. Yet a friend of mine confessed to me that she has sat by its runway in the evening and thought it was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
What makes it so beautiful? The same thing that makes any airport beautiful. It is not the buildings or scenery, but the life within the place — the memories and possibilities that linger in the air and permeate every hangar in every row.
Walking down the rows of airplanes tied down at an airport, I remember the feeling I got while walking down the aisles of the local hardware store with my father when I was young. In and of themselves, the nuts, bolts, and fixtures in the wooden bins were not much of anything. But looking at them, I was filled with a wonderful and exciting sense of possibility. My imagination took off with all the wonderful things that could be made with the items laid out in front of me.
By the same token, it is not just the airplanes themselves that make me content to wander among them for hours on end, but the stories they hold and the possibilities they represent. When I peer into an airplane's windows, I am seeing not only the layout of its instrument panel and the quality of its interior, but the life and personality of the person who flies it. Without ever meeting him or her, I know that the pilot of this cherry Beechcraft has a perfectly ordered garage. The pilot of this modified, stripped-down Cessna 170, on the other hand, undoubtedly has a house in continual disarray but a ready grin and endless supply of exciting adventure stories.
In the hours and miles that have weathered their fabric and faded their paint, these airplanes have also probably counted more adventures, sights, and stories than Rudyard Kipling ever imagined. I only wish I had the skill to understand what they have to say. Sometimes, though, I understand all too well. The cry of an abandoned airplane is a sound that reaches any pilot's heart. Every time I come across one — its tires flat, its windows crazed, covered in cobwebs and sagging sadly from neglect — it cries to me like an abandoned puppy, forlorn and forgotten, and I want to take it home.
Children, of course, see this kind of hidden treasure within things all the time. A box is an impenetrable fortress. A shopping cart can be a patrol boat in enemy waters. But as we grow up, this ability often gets buried under more practical concerns. Amidst the pressure of responsibilities, deadlines, mortgages, and job stress, we sometimes stop believing in anything we can't see, or we forget that those things matter.
Around an airport, however, I see the world again with the open eyes of a child. That piece of asphalt is not just a runway. It's a doorway to other worlds — to things and adventures much bigger than itself. That Cessna tied down by the fuel pumps is not just a metal machine with an engine and wings. It's a means to an end — a friend who can show me the world and take me places where the limits of earth have no meaning.
Sitting by a runway at the edges of the day, I know that from here I can touch the sky. And even if my mind doesn't consciously think about it, my heart remembers what I've found there. It knows I've found adventure, laughter, and a perspective that reminds me that barriers and obstacles are only as big as I let them become. I've found a freedom that unshackles my imagination and lets me believe again that anything is possible.
This is the magic of an airport. Yet to sense that magic or imagine a world without limits, I have to do more than look at a runway from afar. The hardware store would not have seemed exciting from the sidewalk across the street. To feel the possibilities of a place, I have to immerse myself in its elements and sensations. I have to smell the oil and avgas, touch the wings, hear the engines turn over, and feel the energy of an airplane as it breaks away from the earth. I have to wander among the old taildraggers and guess at where they've been and dream where they still might take me. I have to touch those things that are the lifeblood of an airport in order to feel its pulse and understand the magic it holds.
Unfortunately, that pulse is sometimes harder to find than it once was. Too many airports have acres of empty tiedown spaces and cracked tarmac where airplanes full of adventure and possibility once lived and breathed. The heart and life of other fields are almost out of reach behind barbed wire fences and restrictive security systems. We wonder where all the "airport kids" have gone. But how can they wander shyly up to our hangars, willing to work for that magical gift of flight if they cannot even get through the gate? No magic or life force can continue to burn brightly unless people believe and care enough to contribute their own dreams and energy into keeping it alive and within reach.
Dreams, magic, and imagination — and the places that nurture them — are precious commodities that we need to protect perhaps even more than our material possessions, for they cannot be replaced and are much harder to rebuild. We can function without them, of course, but a piece of our hearts goes with them, leaving us a little less alive.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry understood this. And all the people who have ever felt the magic of an airport understand it, even if they can't express in words what they know. For the heart doesn't need words to understand. Without anyone's telling me, my heart knows that in a world where dreams often get suffocated into oblivion, the magic of an airport is that it is a place where dreams and imagination can still be fed. It is a place where I remember that life is not about limits, but about possibilities waiting to be explored.
I sensed this, somehow, standing by the airport fence as a kid. And I still feel it any time I walk among rows of airplanes or sit by a runway at sunset. It is nothing that I can touch with my hands or see with my eyes. But as Saint-Exupéry wrote, it is not with our eyes, but with our hearts that we see what is most important. And whether I am at a grass strip in Oregon or the dairy-scented tarmac of Chino, my heart tells me I am in one of the most exhilarating places on Earth.
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