Recently, I
arrived at long-term parking at the Central Illinois Regional Airport. Given the abundance of open, flat space in
Bloomington, Illinois, this lot is free to all travelers. For a young man whose most frequented
airports lie are Philadelphia, O’Hare, and Newark (NJ), this is a financial
boon that never ceases to amaze. Of
course, the price paid for such a fiscal convenience is that one often has
limited flexibility regarding the times of flights. Having purchased a ticket on a 6:45 AM
flight, my day began at 4AM in Champaign, replete with fog-covered highways
without streetlights and a check-engine light which appeared at the ideal
moment to induce maximum terror. The
prospect of immobility in a place where literally, “no one can hear you
scream,” at an hour during which the number of cars passed on the roadways
could be counted using only my carpal and tarsal digits had one fringe
benefit. While typically, 60 miles
through nowhere would induce a level of boredom demanding the most engaging of
music and conversation (even without a passenger…yes…I have spoken to myself
for extended periods in a car to stave off Midwestern-scenery-induced
hypnosis), the adrenaline-soaked concern for missing my flight or worse was
sufficient to fix my attention.
Upon
parking my car, now borderline delirious with some amalgam of relief and
early-morning stupor, as this was still an hour before sunrise, I began to walk
towards the airport. Roughly forty yards
from my car, as is my routine, I touch my hands to the outside of my jean
pockets, to verify that they contain my wallet, my keys, and my cellular phone.
They do not. My phone is unaccounted for. I am now almost as terrified and helpless as
I had been in the car minutes before despite the distinct difference between
the two situations. Firstly, let us note
that I had placed a cell-phone call from my automobile en route. At worst, my phone is located in my car. Secondly, my car is a mere thirty-seconds of
walking away from my current location.
Despite this, my brain processes the possibility of a two-flight journey
followed by a car ride without the opportunity to communicate with my fiancée
or my parents. How will they know to
pick me up? How will they know if I have
made my flight? How can I possibly
prevent their inevitable angst at my perceived inconsideration and
irresponsibility followed by their crippling concern about my welfare? How will I find sufficient pay phones – are
there even pay phones to be found? I
have no quarters on me! I don’t carry a
calling card anymore! Surely someone at
the desk at an airport will know what I can do…
The
proximity of my phone (which was sitting between the seat and the door in the
car) notwithstanding, the true comedy here is that I received my first cellular
phone within the last dozen years, and it has only been within the last six
years that it has become my sole means of communication. My generation has come to view the world
differently. One evening, standing
before perhaps twenty of my students at a review session, I asked, via a show
of hands, if any of them had a land-line telephone in their dorm or
apartment. Zero hands were raised. I, and another teaching assistant were also
present, both of us in our twenties, and neither of us in possession of a
landline. I have been a
financially-independent adult for five or six years. I have paid rent in five apartment buildings. I have never owned a landline phone since my
collegiate dorm room. Thus, to me, to my
contemporaries, to my generation as a whole, the ability to contact and be
contacted by anyone and everyone in our lives is fully decoupled from the state
of “being home.” They are as unrelated
as hunting and cooking – two activities that once seemed inextricably
linked. The fact is, life is wholly
livable in a modern society without cellular phones. In 1995, boarding airplanes and traveling
around the USA was no less ubiquitous than it is today…and only the very, very
wealthy were carrying cell phones. Now,
the notion of lacking communication capacity is foreign, and as is often the
case with foreign states of being, terrifying.
Thus,
in the darkened, foggy, Midwestern parking lot, I stood, like Kurtz on his
death bed, left to hear the voice in my own idiotic head, “the horror, the
horror!”
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