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This Week:
- From Kitty Hawk to O'Hare
- Places & Culture
- Scrapbook: Stephen King on fear
- Weekly Digest
The first flight of the Wright Brothers spanned 120 feet, or less than the length of Chicago O'Hare's terminal K. Their longest flight on the 17th of December one hundred years ago, which spanned 852 feet in 59 seconds, wouldn't have cleared O'Hare's tarmac. Were they to try it today, they would barely merit the attention of O'Hare's control tower, if not for the jarring sight of those double-decker, muslin fabric wings stretched over a spruce frame, in the midst of a flock of slender silver jets. One wonders what the Wright Brothers would make of O'Hare, the destination of the journey they started on that North Carolina beach.
O'Hare registered a record 922,787 takeoffs and landings in 2002, restoring its status as the busiest airport in the country (and this after a sharp drop in air travel following September 11, 2001). As of this past October, the airport had hosted 50 million passengers so far this year, or nearly ten times the population of the Chicago metropolitan area. Its dimensions, in turn, seem ten times larger than other places people regularly inhabit. Unlike cars and garages, and trains and depots, airports are designed on a scale that makes humans seem tinier than usual—from the interminable terminals and their endless waiting rooms with padded chairs to the vast tarmac, that land of a thousand driveways, to the ultimate act of rising into the air and regarding the toylike buildings and roads below. Although Hugh Grant reminds us in the opening scenes of Love Actually that airports host constant heartfelt reunions, the gigantism is starkly impersonal—even the tram that shuttles passengers between terminals at O'Hare pulls up and disembarks automatically, without a driver.
When the Wright Brothers first starting running experiments in the Outer Banks of North Carolina—enticed, says the New York Times , by "the treeless expanse and remoteness of the place"—it marked a dissolution between transportation and a sense of place. Trains disgorged passengers in bustling city centers, cars tread each foot of road into town, but airplanes send us into the ether, a dreamlike trek removed from recognizable surroundings—and from gravity itself. Airports, too, are utopian, in the sense of the root word outopos, or "no place," with their generic atmosphere, remote locations, and invariable surroundings of hotels and highways that make them all seem indistinguishable. When a friend reports he is coming to Chicago, then clarifies that he is coming via O'Hare (whose code is ORD for Orchard Field, as the place was known before being named for war hero Buddy O'Hare) and staying in a nearby hotel, my heart sinks and I think, "That's not really Chicago."
The most remarkable irony of flight one hundred years after the Wright Brothers is how mundane we have made it seem. "We will be cruising at an altitude of 33,000 feet," a flight attendant rattled off before my last flight, without a trace of amazement. What was the Wrights' wondrous mechanical and poetic achievement in 1903, which caused "silent shock" in observers at the time, as Albert Louis Zambone notes in the November/December issue of B&C, is now a chore to travelers. One frequent flyer told Wired two years ago how he identifies his kind: "The pallid complexion, red watery eyes, deeply furrowed brow, the look of hunger for home, for edible food and a sleepable bed." Cullen Murphy, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, defined the concept of purgatory as "unpleasantness for transients, the afterlife's O'Hare." I fly only once or twice a year, and when I do, I am transfixed by the celestial grandeur outside the window, an evident penetration of heaven's lobby. And I wonder, how is it that racing through the clouds in a massive machine—an astounding possibility furnished by the Wright Brothers—has come to be considered such a tedious task?
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