Some Observations about Airports

So, recently I had the chance to spend some quality time in three of the South's finest cities or, rather, their airports, and they all got me thinking about how accurately airports reflect stereotypes about their cities. For example, Indianapolis' is small and unassuming - polite, even, if one can refer to an entire building that way. La Guardia is vaguely grimy and bustling with aggressive people worried more about their destination than the obstacles in getting there. I digress, though - let's get to the ones that made me realize this:

Terminal E of Houston's George Bush International Airport is clean and bright and flat and spacious, huge and well-lit in the way that I have always imagined Texas to be. It is a fine enough spot to spend a layover of several hours, but here is the really important part: in the middle of the terminal you look up and all of a sudden you are in great oval ringed with televisions fifteen feet off the ground that project a constant stream of fractals. And standing there, frozen by this bizarre display, you realize that not only are there acid-trip colors floating above you, there are strange noises as well – blips and chimes and croaks bubbling from the ether. It is the pastel walkways and muzak of a thousand U.S. airports chopped-and-screwed, the hazy output of an airport architect after a DJ-Screw-sized cup of promethazine. In short: it is exactly what you would expect of Houston if you only listened to rap music.

New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International, however, is something different altogether: small, poorly-lit, cramped with a slightly brackish quality to the air, like I imagine the city itself. I unfortunately never saw New Orleans during the day (the reason for this whole trip was an ultimate frisbee tournament in Baton Rouge), but driving around on Friday night I got the impression that the whole place carried with it an fog of mystery not unlike that of the eerily abandoned airport terminal, a sense only aided by the myriad one-way streets and fading one-story Spanish houses that we navigated on the way to pick up friends. In sum: if a swamp were a city, it would be New Orleans, and if any airport were a swamp, it would be Louis Armstrong International.

The only thing I have to say about Atlanta’s airport (and this is the one that I can't really pin into my theory because really my thoughts about the ATL are primarily influenced by the Dungeon Family and I would be pretty upset with myself if I tried to relate their music to a glorified holding cell) is that it is extremely well-furnished when it comes to purveyors of unappealing food, that it has a SMOKING ROOM attached to the terminal as if it were still acceptable to smoke indoors anywhere, much less an airport, and that the speakers were playing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” as I entered. Yes: I was Rick Rolled by the Atlanta airport.