Runway man
I’m supposed to be sleeping because I’m supposed to be waking up in five hours. SFO to YVR to NRT. Tokyo Narita International Airport. You’ve heard about the guy who lives on a farm on the runway, right? Japan doesn’t have eminent domain, so nobody can force him to leave. I wouldn’t eat whatever he grows—all the jet exhaust—but, well, good for him. He’s really showing them. And a friend of a friend says he throws good parties.
In my mind the issue with airplanes is that they take you somewhere and then they bring you right back. You heft your old pack onto your shoulder, you feel both the burden and the lightness of departure, and then you come right back home to your room in San Francisco CA 94131 after six days of PTO. I can’t help but think that a real voyage takes years, and sometimes you don’t come back, and if you do it’s with a big idea and hundreds of boxes of dead beetles1. On a real voyage you ride with the gauchos and stand solemnly before the lofty Cordillera and walk alone under the southern stars… but when I open my eyes my plane is boarding and the imposing grandeur of the past won’t fit in the overhead bin. It never does.
The thing about August 9, 2024 in SFO, the thing about most times and places, is that almost none of them are Sekigahara in the October of 1600. In most times and places one does not have a long sword and a short sword and a lot of angry men to wave them at. It is not always obvious what to do or why to do it. It is not always obvious what to protect and what to let go. Many things matter until they’re out of sight, and some fill the universe only after they’re lost. And sometimes, sometimes you own a small rice paddy on the runway of the largest airport in Japan. Then, if instead of trading it for a condo in a luxury Tokyo high rise you work the field your father and grandfather tended before you and curse the planes when they come and point a beady eye at the flag of the country that let this happen—well, what else is there to say.
Stand proud, runway man.
See The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin.