Every day, more than 3 million Americans take 44,000 flights across 29 million square miles of airspace. We put little bottles of lotion into quart-size zip-top bags, call a car on our phones, print out a ticket at a kiosk, send all our belongings through a chute, and stand shoeless and jacketless with our arms raised above our heads. And then we are there, in the terminal, at the mercy of the airlines and the airport itself, enduring a space where we have very little control, feeling time pass.
Airports are places of both tremendous urgency and punitive boredom. They are places where we feel adjacent to death—some studies report almost 40 percent of us fear flying—and they also make us feel subject to the whims of banal bureaucracies beyond our control. Almost 20 percent of all flights each year are delayed, so we spend many hours we didn’t plan for waiting in terminals across the country eating candy we’ve bought on impulse and searching for a place to plug in our phones.
The first place where I ever sat waiting for a flight was the Detroit airport in the 1990s, then a dingy hell of low ceilings, humming fluorescent lights, and hard plastic orange seats. Like so many airports, it wasn’t a place designed for enjoyment or proper rest, but instead it was a place that made you want to flee, a place that needed to be endured. Or at least that’s how I remember it. When I was growing up, my family rarely flew, but my parents, who were children of the Detroit suburbs, regaled me with stories of kids they’d known who rode the luggage carousel or tried to board random airplanes for fun. For them, the airport still had a whiff of the magic of the early years of passenger flight. The very fact that anyone could fly anywhere felt like a miracle.
My own dominant memory of that airport is of leaving for a high school trip to London—a financial and emotional stretch for my family. As I sat on the tarmac, grateful to finally be away from the russet chairs, a flight attendant barreled down the aisle and handed me a prayer card. My Sicilian grandmother had driven to the airport and begged him to give it to me, terrified I wouldn’t survive the Atlantic crossing without divine help. At that moment, I felt like I’d never be able to get out of the place where I grew up, like someone would always be clinging to the wing.
The feeling I had then—of being trapped between places, unwilling to stay and unable to go—is one that airports physicalize. They are quintessential liminal spaces, an architectural term borrowed from anthropology, where liminal means the middle part of a rite of passage. The liminal phase is the stretch between an identity you’ve left and the one you haven’t yet become, the time when a couple is engaged but not yet married, when the pilgrim has left on their journey, but not yet reached the holy shrine. These parts of our lives are anxious ones. We don’t know what will happen next, who we will be. The stability of both our past and our future is just out of reach.
Airports, too, are places where identities dissolve and uncertainty abounds. The anchors that hold us to ourselves—our families, our homes, our jobs—can feel far away in an airport. Will we get where we are going? Who will we be when we arrive? Spending time in the space between departure and arrival is disorienting. We cure our anxiety with cocktails at Margaritaville and trashy novels bought at the airport bookstore, trying to bear the middle space of unknowing.
This liminality can also be thrilling. Although nothing is certain, anything is possible.
But this liminality can also be thrilling. Although nothing is certain, anything is possible. It was this feeling of possibility that I began to have about the Detroit airport in the early aughts. The terminals had been newly renovated to have high ceilings, plentiful seating areas, and enormous picture windows that made the gray Michigan skies seem somehow bright all winter long. In the main corridor, a fountain sprayed colorful jets of water high into the air and a live pianist played classical music and show tunes. An underpass between concourses offered a laser light display and an Eno-esque minimalist soundscape that I found both bizarre and soothing.
Sometimes, I’d ride the moving walkway through that tunnel back and forth for a half hour as I waited for a flight, my mood mellowed by the light show like a stoner in the 1970s. An indoor tram helpfully, and quietly, shuttled passengers from one end of the terminal to the other, passing the enormous bookstore stuffed with bestsellers and bloated magazines, the high-end duty-free shops that sold designer perfume and MAC cosmetics, and the sushi restaurant that everyone swore was actually good because the fish came off flights from Seattle and Japan. This place which I had once loathed, which used to feel like it was holding me down, had become beautiful, aspirational, and grand.
In college, I drove to the airport with friends, picking up roommates returning from study-abroad or dropping off others boarding flights to see places that had once seemed to exist only in novels and movies: Los Angeles, Dublin, Vermont. Once, my best friend Jane, fresh off a year-long program in Aix-en-Provence, parked the car and came in with me to the ticket counter to see me off on a trip to visit an old high school friend in Manhattan. When I asked why she had bothered to come in, she said, “I love being here and seeing all the places people are going. It makes me feel like we could all just leave.”
Every time I’m at the airport I think of Jane, and I consider the different possibilities as I walk to my gate. Houston. Rio. Bangkok. London. Cincinnati. What version of life would take me to each of these places? Who would I be visiting, and what would I be leaving behind? And maybe most thrillingly of all: What if I walked up to the counter and bought a ticket? What if I just left?
Last Christmas, I was stranded at my beloved Detroit airport for eight hours on the way to my parents’ house with my husband and two-year-old daughter. We’d flown out of New York City, where we live, and our connecting flight to Traverse City, Michigan, had been canceled. When the alert popped up on my phone about the cancellation, I felt all the usual airport feelings: I fretted about my daughter’s sleep schedule and felt the crush of the hours we’d have to occupy, bored and unsure if our next flight out would depart.
After we’d looked at the fountain, taken the tram, and gone through the tunnel, I walked my daughter up and down a corridor in her stroller, hoping the motion would lull her to sleep. Between Cat Cora’s Tap Room and the golf supply store, I saw a sign for a nursing room—one of the new amenities that came with the airport’s renovation, but one I’d only noticed now that I had a baby. I knocked on the door and when no one answered, we slipped inside. It felt like we’d pulled a book on a library shelf and a hidden chamber had popped open, only visible to me now that I was a mother. The room was dark and quiet, with a recliner positioned to look out of a large picture window. We’d found stillness amid the bright lights and blaring televisions.
I lowered myself into the chair and held my daughter close to me, rocking her and softly singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” willing her to sleep. As I sang, I looked out the window at the runway and watched the planes take off, one by one, their little red lights ascending through the clouds, full of passengers finally leaving the temporary dissonance of the terminal where all air travel begins. I held myself very still on the gray vinyl recliner, unable to do anything besides wait—for my daughter to sleep, for my flight to be called, for the chord of the day to finally resolve so that I could find out what would happen next.
