Distractions by Martin Royackers SJ, Volume 14 #5

I Can't Seem to Live in an Airport

This past summer I spent a full day travelling from Jamaica to Omaha, Nebraska, where I took a two-month course in spirituality. The cramped and uncomfortable airplane trips were broken by stops at various airports, all depressingly identical: long, carpeted and cold corridors whence I would try to break away from the herd to find an outside door for a cigarette between flights. In Des Moines the hydraulics broke on the passageway they wheel against the plane door. After waiting, meekly imprisoned, until things were fixed, I made a dash for a cigarette to sustain me for the final leg of the journey. I only got a half-mile down the corridor before I heard peremptory calls on the p.a. that the flight was leaving. I turned back, defeated; Christian forbearance used up for the day, I snapped at the flight attendant, who looked genuinely surprised that a patron was not enjoying the American Airlines experience.

Finally I reached my residence in Omaha, a house that was freshly carpeted, climate-controlled, and nonsmoking. I naïvely thought airports were universally disliked. No, it turns out that they represent a preferred lifestyle. I went to my room where I smoked a cigarette as I unpacked and lit another one as I sat down to read the printed instructions for guests. "No smoking in bedrooms. Smoke outside only," they instructed. Apparently I had been away from middle-class North America for too long. Restricted and begrudged toleration had moved to zero-tolerance. I gave a panicked look at the air conditioning vent. Was it already blowing chilled second-hand smoke into someone else's room? I hastily closed the vents and opened the windows, which also allowed me to warm up.

An orientation meeting that evening produced more house guidelines. Don't close the vents on the air conditioners: bad things will happen to them. Don't open the windows: more bad things will happen. I went up to bed that evening, closed the windows, opened the vents and threw a blanket on the bed, praying that the air conditioners would survive the unexpected hardships they had been subjected to.

Other directions for living included intricate instructions about recycling involving various bins to receive various species of debris. I ventured the comment to a confidant that ecological consciousness, meritorious though it might be, might better be directed to turning off the air conditioning system, which must be soaking up megawatts of electricity, than to fussing around with a few aluminum cans. My mild criticism evoked a hostile response. My spewing of cigarette smoke into the atmosphere, I was told, disqualified me from speaking of ecology. It's true, I suppose, that the difference between me and a smoke-belching coal-generating plant is one of degree and not of kind, but I had never looked at it that way.

And so I spent a lot of my time in Omaha in parks, smoking, revelling in the weather, and reading historical plaques celebrating the forebears of Nebraskans, who endured multiple hardships (not to mention the ones they inflicted on the hapless Indians) so that their descendants could enjoy the prairies unbothered by heat, insects or cigarette smoke.

I dislike myself when I complain like this. After all, I took full advantage of all the perks I miss in Jamaica: washing machines and hot water, fridges full of soft drinks, pantries full of snacks, shelves full of books. I wallowed in plenitude, in the midst of comfort, and couldn't understand my discomfort. I sat in a neat, well-appointed, almost sanitized living room, and felt shabby and awkward. I listened to intelligent, well-bred conversation about sports, movies, politics, the Internet, and felt ignorant. I breathed cooled, filtered air and felt suffocated.

I felt like l was living in an airport. It could be Omaha, or Des Moines, or Miami or Toronto. The outside particularities of weather and geography and people don't matter any more. The temperature is a constant 70 degrees Fahrenheit; everyone sees the same movies and reads the same books and has the same liberal moral standards.

I tried hard to conform to the North American middle class, but I can't seem to do it. Some sort of visceral claustrophobia made me want to open the windows and say, "F___ the air conditioner." But I didn't. Instead I longed to return home, to the constant and oppressive heat, the kitchen with its rats scrabbling in the roof, the ubiquitous mosquitoes, the neighbours who engage in loud domestic disputes every evening. I'm not so comfortable in Jamaica. But like the morning's first drag on a cigarette, the noise and heat and insect bites remind me, with an occasional rush, that I'm alive.

Martin Royackers SJ works in a rural development project in Annotto Bay, Jamaica. He was Compass's managing editor from 1990 to 1994 and is now its Jamaica correspondent.