The Disappointing Truth about Living in an Obscure Place

Portland International Airport is — let’s face it — kind of shitty. I have an emotional attachment to the place because it’s been the start of so many adventures for me: when I moved to New York, I boarded a plane here; when I went to France, there to live in deep sunflower country outside Lyons, I boarded a plane here; when I went to Ireland alone, I boarded a plane here. And landing here, especially in spring when coming home from the frigid, gray landscape of Minnesota, has always had a certain verdant poetry to it. When I was younger, before 9/11 and the security lines, I used to come here just to hang out, so taken was I with the romance of the place.

But in truth it’s nothing to write home about. It’s chintzy and ugly, and parts of it are truly grim, especially down by the A gates, where it’s just shuttles to Seattle and all the faces wear sour, stomach-pain kind of expressions. The famous carpet is famous for being ugly. The new carpet that replaced it is just as ugly. Yeah, there are brewpubs and a branch of Pok Pok, but on the whole the place is redolent of the 70s, a time when the city’s population was stagnant and the place was mired in a kind of conservatism of spirit. (That conservatism still haunts the place. I have never lived in a place where people seemed so oblivious to the fact that cities change, or die. I’m looking at you, “Save Portland Homes” graffitists.) The place stinks.

I think maybe I notice this now because I’ve been in so many airports, so many of which are built in a modern, monumental style that seems to befit the purpose of such a place better. I mean, for the love of God — this is a place where you go to fly. To fly! This is as close as most of us will ever get to experiencing a miracle. The space should be miraculous. The Denver airport feels that way. Sky Harbor in Phoenix — though it services a city that is notably lame — feels that way, especially as the sun goes down over the desert horizon. SeaTac, SFO, JFK. These places feel right.

PDX is more of a piece with LaGuardia, which inspired a fantasy I once had, one which has gripped me ever since: under New York, there are portals to hell, and they manifest as horrible places on the earth’s surface, places like LaGuardia, and Union Station, and the Atlantic Avenue branch of the US Post Office. It’s not as genuinely horrible as LaGuardia, but it shares with it a similar sensation of having been forgotten about forty years ago, and then buried in the collective subconscious, so that none of us ever think about it except when we’re there. Holy shit, I used to think whenever I got to LaGuardia. This is still here?

I realize that part of the reason PDX remains small and dingy is that it’s not a hub of any kind. SeaTac and Denver and Phoenix have flights spidering out of their many terminals all over the country and the globe, all the time. I am, for instance, flying north from PDX in about 45 minutes, so that I can change planes at SeaTac and go to Los Angeles. There’s no reason, practically, for my local airport to be anything but a weigh station. But I wish it was. I come from generations of cynics on one side and pragmatists on the other — I haven’t believed in a political ideal since John Kerry defeated Howard Dean all those years ago. Normally I’m not suceptible to this kind of thinking. But an airport should have, if nothing else, grandeur. This is where we go to FLY.