Only having flown in a commercial jetliner four times before last Wednesday, I have been in and around Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport as long as I can remember. From 1980 to 1995 my father's parents would fly in from New York City for Memorial Day, and for the few Mays they missed they'd make it up at another point during the year. I would almost always be with my family greeting Grandma and Grandpa at the gate, hugging and kissing and then walking as a group of six to baggage claim, and then retracing our steps — up escalators, down escalators, across squeaky moving sidewalks — to our parked car for a ten-minute drive home.
It's not every house that's built nearby a major airport. My father took advantage of it, bringing my sister and I planewatching a dozen or more times in the early 1980s. Before the Federal Aviation Administration got wind of it and shut it down, a bottle-strewn parking lot sat practically across the street from the airport — just a few hundred feet — from the 23-end of Hopkins' old Runway 5-23. Depending on the weather, jets often leapt from or landed on 5-23; or else they'd move perpendicular to us on the airport's east-west runway. It didn't take long for my father to point out every make and model of aircraft, every airline: the 727, 737, DC-10, and DC-9 were most common, with the occasional 757 and an assortment of turboprops and business jets; Northwest Orient, TWA, Republic, American, Eastern, United, and Delta were all represented. I learned them and committed them to memory, where they reside now. These were the days before quiet engines, and in that lot the sound from a jet passing directly overhead, not five hundred feet in the air, was deafening. It was wonderful. In the years after the parking lot, my father and I would sometimes go to the airport, pass through security and stand on an observation deck. It wasn't the same as those summer evenings under the roar of cigar-nacelled 737-200s, but we quickly learned that the howl of a taxiing or engaging jet from one hundred feet away is just as exciting to watch. Our last time on the deck, before the specter of September 11th closed it, was in 2000: unbeknownst to us, a massive thunderstorm crawled over the western horizon and swallowed the airport. It was a storm all the same, but pilots weren't deterred: as soon as the strongest cells had passed, a line of airplanes — including a freight DC-3 — flew straight into the rain and lightning.
Walking into Cleveland-Hopkins on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving 2004, was different than the few times I'd done it since 2001: once my parents and I passed security, we stepped into the airport I knew. The shops, the bars, the eateries, the restaurants; the stands and kiosques; the shoeshiners and the cart drivers; and of course the travelers. I could look in every direction and find a memory. Images, mostly; but each one very clear.
The lit poster advertisements on the wall brought back a flood of times passed. I thought of the ads themselves — if I couldn't name them off the top of my head, you might show them to me and I'd remember which was which. For so many years we'd pass them on our way from security to the gate to baggage claim to the exit. AT&T, IBM, the City of Cleveland; so many. Even old Ray Fogg, the builder, whose posters are still on Hopkins' walls.
Random memories persist. The book in the bookstore — the store still here, after all this time — I noticed over fifteen years ago that portrayed a tiger in a fighter cockpit, something I've since been told might have been a Wing Commander novel. Five years or so before that, I remember a host of waiting passengers settling where they could on a crowded day, some leaning or sitting against walls. A college-aged girl, overalls and backpack, hair pulled back, smoked a cigarette — back when you could, of course — not far from that bookstore. I remember passing her with my family once, then again; the second time, she'd finished smoking and had picked up a book. One of the last times my grandparents stepped out of the arrival gate, I distanced myself from the gaiety for a moment to watch us as a group; catching us third-person through a ceiling reflection, or turning to watch Grandpa talk to my father about the flight and Grandma catch up with my mother and sister. All that time, I made a point to remember it all, that one arrival. And I do.
On Wednesday, I alternated between my new issue of National Geographic and people-watching. A gateway to the world, it would seem, is the best place to see a face from every corner of the earth. Cleveland-Hopkins International isn't the busiest airport, so even on the eve of Thanksgiving people walked by not as a throng or a mass but in threes and twos; sometimes two groups beside one another. Sometimes singly; stewardesses or airport personnel.
At our gate was a cornucopia before the passenger compliment was twenty strong. We had a single man in his mid-thirties; two old women, one with an attendant and the other living young, talking on her cell phone and paging through the newspaper before strolling over to a side shop for a strawberry ice cream. There was a hispanic, a little younger than I, talking on a cell phone of his own — a thick accent — in a style of speech slightly too rough for public. But no one seemed to notice or mind. A blond, ruddy, block-skulled man with a buzz and his thin, willowy, olive-skinned wife sat with their two crew-cut boys. Three black children led by the oldest, a beautifully blossoming woman in her late teens with meticulous, shoulder-length cornrows who read a book while her sister and brother played a hand-held video game. "Hey, you're makin' me lose," giggled the younger girl. After twenty minutes, older sister took the three to grab something to eat. Two round-faced brunettes on one side of the gate seating were matched by two spindly, hatchet-faced blondes on the other. A fellow my age, stocky and tall with a shock of black curls, sat down as boarding time drew nearer. Then a portly blond woman. Three more single professionals. Two more families. Others. There we all were.
Work has put me into the sky on a single-engine airplane more often than I ever would have gone otherwise, but in my twenty or so aerial rides I've never lost the sense of the takeoff roll being such an act of brute defiance; that there is no grace in flight without sheer, ugly, forced admission. As soon as that 737-900 turned onto the runway the captain slammed the throttle, mixture rich, and the jet muscled its way down the wet runway; muscled into the air on two-wings' lift; muscled through the clouds, wind and rain. The cabin trembled a bit, jostling us in our seats as nature suggested we stay on the ground. The jet refused and the low ceiling enveloped us — and everything went white.
For all its poetry, the flight was a drag. Nature stopped making polite offers and went to flicking our ear. The seatbelt light stayed on, no refreshment cart rolled out into the aisle, and near ten thousand feet the captain announced that turbulence began at our position and ended at our destination of Baltimore International: we had simply chosen a crumby day to fly. We wouldn't even be cresting near thirty thousand feet — the wind was just too stiff. Indeed, the only horizon we got was a single gap between layers of floating grey slush. "It'll be bumpy all the way in," crackled the captain's PA. "We appreciate your patience." Things never got rough, but turbulence is turbulence. My father watched a graphic data readout on the cabin's overhead monitors; I read more of my National Geographic and my mother found ways to distract herself from nervousness. The stewardesses found a material show of gratitude, handing out cups of water and orange juice as the plane pulled itself out of the early winter rainstorm. Fifty-three minutes passed from our leap into the sky. Twenty seconds before touchdown, we saw ground again. As my father noted, the captain flared a bit too soon and the 737 dropped to the runway with a bump. We taxied. "And here we are," I said, grinning through my headache.
The ride home on Black Friday was majestic. Baltimore was clear and cool; we were expecting partly cloudy skies all the way into Cleveland. Up we went, a bit of turbulence as the 737-700 broke through one deck of altostratus and into another. Soon the first deck looked like the ground, a strange floor of day-old cotton candy. Tiny patches hovered over the rest of the tops; the sun shined everywhere else. For a few minutes, I could make out the contrails of a jet moving away from us to the southeast. It was soon gone. The seatbelt light ticked off, and after a light treat of the stewards' Sprite and pretzels, I unholstered my camera.
Upon descent, there was no partly cloudy sky waiting: as soon as we sunk into the layer that remained below for most of the journey, it was grey and more grey. But moments after the captain announced our position on final approach we dropped beneath the cloud ceiling, revealing white-encrusted suburbs a few thousand feet below and a distinctly grainy, grey haze between jet and ground — snow, the best of Cleveland weather from September to March. "I love this town," I laughed to my father as he craned his neck to see out the window. Final took a few more minutes, followed by a landing impact smoother than the majority of flight on Wednesday. We taxiied as light snow and sleet fell. "And here we are," I grinned, no headache this time.