Synapse to Synapse

Ghost Ships & Empty Airports

From the air at least, L.A. appears to be vastly overrated. The “City of Angels,” as it is sometimes called, is not much more than a hazy, gray mess of smog and soot and buildings, buildings everywhere, and the coastal plain on which it lies is a never-ending series of street grids and building complexes that yawn from the Pacific to the smog-obscured San Gabriel Mountains. The hills to the north of the city looked quite beautiful and rugged, but they were also covered with suburban developments that appeared from an aerial view to be red-roofed leeches contorted into “S” shapes and slowly sucking the life out of the raw, red earth.

Once we landed, the view from the ground didn’t serve to improve my opinion by much. LAX is a writhing cacophony of gas fumes, concrete buildings, and automobile traffic, designed architecturally to revolve around a “modernistic” café which fits perfectly the definition of “modern” people would have held around 40-50 years ago. As it stands now—a rude, peeling-white mess of legs which rather resemble a squid with its legs proceeding from the top of the head rather than the bottom—it is a rather sad remnant of an airport built by architects intent on creating the future, rather than planning for it. (The futuristic café is now dwarfed by gargantuan concrete parking garages.)

Nevertheless, there are good things to write about. For one, I had the pleasure of changing about $500 U.S. into Japanese yen. The current exchange rate is 106, which means that I am walking around with around with a bizarrely high denomination of money in my pocket. As Paul Musgrave remarked when he visited Japan a few years ago, it feels empowering to be able to discuss dropping 10,000 in a day without discussing terms like “equity” and “prime rate.” For another, I am feeling strangely fine despite my having gotten only two hours of sleep last night.

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After 12 hours in the air, our plane landed in Osaka at around 9 p.m. local time. Around 500 of us deplaned and walked through a very long hall of the strangely empty Kansai airport down to customs, where we were met by an elderly Japanese officer dressed in a royal-blue uniform accented by white Mickey-Mouse style gloves, whose sole job description seemed to be to direct us with deft and gracious hand movements to the next open desk as though he were choreographing the flow of rush-hour traffic.

While we waited, I thought of how well the heater was working and how strangely empty the walk to customs had been. I read long ago that Kansai is built on an artificial island in Osaka Harbor made out of an enormous amount of fill-dirt borrowed from the mountains that surround the city. Although it is truly a marvel of modern engineering, its architects didn’t count on the effect that gravity and the ocean current would gradually have on the enormous amount of dirt they had just deposited. As a result, Kansai sinks into the ocean at a rate of something like 2 1/2 inches every day, and to counteract this, an enormous (and enormously expensive) maintenance project goes on around the clock underwater, buttressing the island by placing steel girders at the weak points.

Add to this knowledge the spotless, gleaming emptiness of the hallways and the strange, empty silence which accompanied the train ride to the main terminal—broken only by the mechanically cheerful voice of the intercom—and the airport felt like a ghost ship gone adrift in the middle of the sea, its hallways lying empty by some strange spell until the stroke of the clock. At this, the curse was broken as automatic doors hissed and peeled themselves back to allow a wave of people to spill through, preceded by the roar of shoes tapping and suitcase wheels rolling on the linoleum floor—and the sounds of happy people saying, “It’s so good to be home!” and unhappy ones cursing the length of the flight or the fickleness of the attendants—and succeeded by the resulting quiet of their departure and the strange, mechanical ignorance of the cheerful intercom voice, welcoming the walls to Osaka Airport and wishing the void a pleasant stay.

posted by John Adams @ 9:25 PM