Denver International Airport Page 2
Back in the bar, televised sports run incessantly. Outside the sheet of plate glass the man with his hand tool looks up into one of our most complex machines; I can’t hear what he’s saying or know what he’s thinking. Behind me is a continuous loop of NBA basketball, NFL football news, baseball spring training, hockey, slamming against the boards, a fight, some blood, a power play coming up. Is this where we’ve finally arrived? Bored, uncomfortable, away from home, we take a video narcotic, swelling into importance by its sheer volume, its metaphorical strength, its ability to model our innate and often hostile nationalism. We don’t give a damn what the man with the wrench and ear protectors is thinking, or doing, to an airplane into which we will walk, hopefully in a few minutes, the fewer minutes the better; just one more, bartender, hey, another shot of Jack. See that shot?! Another shot of Jack and we’re another step closer to being Michael Jordan. Three stools down a well-dressed guy puts the hit on one of Denver’s semi-svelte babes; she’s enjoying it but not buying. Television, sports, and a hint of sex on the inside; man against complex machine on the outside. The plate glass is a symbol of whatever abstract barriers stand between what we’d like to spend out lives doing and what we must spend our lives doing in order to “get to Cheyenne” at the end of the 20th Century.
Something lies ahead and away in Cheyenne, something we’re not going to accomplish this day, something that’s been cancelled with the flight. A business deal not completed. Original signatures not put on some paper document by the hand that holds a glass of Jack Daniels. A dance recital without the daddy. A rehearsal dinner missed. Somebody on a respirator who passes into eternity while four hours of banality and advertising roll across a screen in a DEN bar. A set of potential in-laws who’ve driven a hundred miles to meet you and now must either drive back home or get a motel. What to do in DEN while figuring out how to get to Cheyenne? Study the bronze fossil sculptures inlaid into the floor? Why would there be a bronze human hand print in the floor next to an ammonite shell? And which hand print is this? One of those in silhouette on Altimira’s walls, outlined by carmine sprayed out of some Cro-Magnon mouth and sealed there for 15,000 years by Cro-Magnon spit? Or one of those imprints on a horse’s thigh, underneath a Native American staring out at us from a Charles Russell painting with a brilliant, Cheyenne, Wyoming, type sunset in the distance?
Some architect has decided that the airport floor should mimic a fossil bed—everything in the same stratum, an artificial slice of time, a snapshot of an ancient world, the painted Russell Indian as foreign to us as the cave man. But didn’t this person know that ammonites died out sixty million years before humans evolved? Was that sixty million year hiatus of any importance to a designer who thought juxtaposing the two would be a classy, even intellectual, touch, regardless of its veracity? Or has taking liberties with the natural world become so commonplace it never occurred to this person that a human construct might concede some small, non-functional, victories to real biology, or, more disturbingly, that even a sixth grader might know, outright know, that certain fossils would never be found together unless a human placed them in such a manner? Neither possibility affects the operation of Denver International; only someone who knows about ammonites, and believes what modern science tells us about human evolution, can appreciate the bronze handprint next to the bronze shell beneath his feet. And there’s an excellent chance the sixth grader will grow up into a high school kid who doesn’t remember what he knew, outright knew and thought about fossils and ancient life, five years earlier.
Back home, a two-minute surf through 20 cable channels juxtaposes more disconnected facts and ideas than could be laid into the floor of a thousand DENs. If technology has accomplished anything for humanity, it’s been to open doors into worlds our Cro-Magnon ancestors could not know, while at the same time compressing time and space in ways perhaps only an Einstein could understand. If, as some philosophers and physicists contend, the universe exists only in our minds, then architecture has not offended science very much by putting a handprint and an extinct cephalopod in the same stratum. Yet I wonder, staring at the floor, studying the fake fossils as if they were real, whether technology’s ultimate danger is not the nuclear weapon or the feral engineered gene, but the naiveté, the self-delusion, that accompanies access to the whole universe, on the one hand, and our whole imagination on the other.
Regardless of whatever else it accomplished, or didn’t accomplish ecologically, paleontologically, or intellectually, the Denver Airport Authority managed to trap, or generate, one of the world’s most idiosyncratic sensory experiences—no place smells quite like the new Denver International Airport. Six flights a day depart for Colorado Springs—B45, B57, B25, B26, and B61, to ultraconservative, ultra religious, ultra moralistic, Colorado Springs. New carpet smell? Wet carpet smell? Muddy carpet smell? Whatever it is, all those six flights worth of people heading 67 miles down the interstate to Colorado Springs via airplane every day carry it with them to church. The Phoenix Shuttle departs from B18. Between B18 and B61 I’m warned repeatedly to watch my step because “the moving walk way is near the end.” Given the pre-Millennial date and the heavy service to Colorado Springs, I’m surprised the electronic voice doesn’t warn me that “the End is near.” B59 is the jumping-off place for hinterlands—Scottsbluff, Durango, Bismark. Somehow these names conjure up fresh smells—wet dirt after a storm, cow manure, flowers hidden in the grass. The flight to New York leaves from B27; exhaust, particulate air, chemical smoke, perfume, spicy cooking, all NYC smells of people and business. No wet carpet at B27, only New York clothes, New York accents, New York attitudes, New York hopes and dreams, and a long commute from LaGuardia over Robert Moses’ pot-holed freeways. But DEN smells only like DEN; it’s the smell of an ultimate contrivance: a late 20th Century airport.
The Denver International smell is not, of course, cigarette smoke. The United States Surgeon General has successfully made the smoker our official pariah. As in all environmental issues, scale and proximity are the factors that control our actions and reactions relative to environment. For most of us, just the printed words on a page—cigarette smoke—generate a measure of disgust, offense, a sense of being violated. As a kid growing up in a smoker’s household, drifting second hand smoke was an irritation instead of a crime. I would sit at the dinner table and wave it away with my 7-year old hand. Sometimes my father would blow smoke rings; I thought that was pretty special. My mother tried to smoke and failed. Today, we are more shocked by the brazen drinking and smoking of period movies (try Breakfast at Tiffany’s) than by the brain-splattering violence of the Lethal Weapon brood and their kin. There is no smoking amid the front range, stylized, commercialism of Denver International Airport. No smoking inside, that is. Outside, beyond the bronze fossil-inlayed floors, beyond the moving walkway coming to an end, beyond the massive plate glass Bierstadt painting face of B Concourse, a Boeing 737 workhorse settles down, touches. In the 55-minute flight between Lincoln, Nebraska, and the prairie outside of Denver, Colorado, this one airplane has generated more air pollution every second than a human can produce by smoking two packs a day for a lifetime.
That pollution is distributed far above us, however, dissipated into the atmosphere instead of pumped directly into our lungs. We’re separated from it, almost like we’re separated from that man with a tool standing out on the runway. Jim Starry would disagree; “dissipation” is a highly relative term when your mind incessantly translates individual acts i
nto global impacts. When carbon atoms swallowed in a shot of Jack Daniels, slugged down in a airport bar before a cancelled flight to Cheyenne, could conceivably have been breathed out by Tyrannosaurus rex whose fossilized remains lie undiscovered beneath Cheyenne, then carbon atoms breathed out by a Boeing 737 now settling into the dusk can easily be breathed in by some human somewhere. Maybe that atom is part of a volatile chemical compound. Maybe that compound is what’s producing the idiosyncratic Denver airport smell. Some chemical is producing that smell. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if that smell is somehow a product of jet engine exhaust?
Such thoughts come easily to those whose business is ecology. Smells are only molecules detected by human sense organs. Molecular movement through ecosystems is the stock in trade of ecologists. Maybe that smell is a signal that humans sealed off inside the Denver airport are not so sealed off after all. Such thoughts come easily in Denver, after, that is, one has looked over Jim Starry’s calculations. No matter how