Passing Through DFW
After spending much of my twenties and thirties rambling across Asia and the Americas, I find it hard to connect with people who prefer the security of their hometown. After various social mishaps with familiars at old haunts, and aimless conversations in regional airport lines, I think that either fear or love usually keep people in their place.
Recently, on a flight out of South Bend International Airport, an inflamed woman in her sixties in front of me in line began talking about how impractical renewable energy is with no invocation whatsoever. After staring ahead blankly at the empty ticket counter for a few moments, she turned toward me. “My son lives in Texas. He’s out in Dallas. He’s says he’s worried about the windmills turning the power off like they did last year. Give me a break!”
Unprepared to have a conversation about the viability of renewable energy, I said, “it seems to work well in other places. Maybe it’s because Texas didn’t hook their grid up to the rest of the country.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a very Texas thing to do, I guess,” she paused, filling her lungs.
“You know, I don’t get those electric cars. What do you do if you’re traveling across the country and you run out of electricity?”
I sensed that this was rhetorical, but answered anyway. “I think people use the computers on most of the cars to tell them where they need to go next on long trips to get to a charging station. If they’re going across the country, they take certain routes.”
“Well my son says that those new Hummer EVs take four days to charge if you don’t have one of those $30,000 chargers. Who has time for that?”
A man with a fishing pole chimed in from outside of the ticketing line, “And these days, it’s not free to charge your car anymore. They’re charging for it! Ha!”
He threw both hands up and walked toward another line.
Both of these folks did not appear to be frequent fliers. The woman who started the conversation gave off strong Fox News energy. I could see her evenings spent eating leftover macaroni casseroles in a plush but weathered faux-leather recliner, switching her gaze between Tucker Carlson and the empty country road outside her house, buttressed by hundreds of acres of brown cornstalks. She, like so many others, remembers these flights from South Bend to Dallas-Fort Worth as luxurious periods of actions between the fear of leaving home and the love of a son on the other side of the journey. In a week from her departure, a plane will take her back to South Bend where she’ll collect her car and drive an hour into the void where she will spend the next year hooked into the 24-hour news cycle, giving her talking points for the next human interaction she finds.
This is the only picture I have from DFW the last time I passed through. The plumbing broke in the American Airlines lounge, so there was no food. The next day after the trip, a fuel truck caught fire, which delayed many flights. The lady in the line did not mention airplane fuel in her renewable energy analysis.
I don’t hate this woman, but I cannot empathize anymore. After years of travel, I am fatigued by motion instead of boredom. Her and I are both tired. She is tired of waiting for her son to visit if he has time this coming Fourth of July. I am tired from endless to-do lists that result in more to-do lists and chasing a sense of purpose across the world that I have trouble defining. Do I travel to learn, and what is it that I am trying to learn in the first place? I ask myself variations of this question in different exotic locations, wondering, is this effort worth anything? What will become of all this energy spent? Was it worth trading in 8 hours a day, five days a week for the anxiety of risk, adventure, and if I’m lucky, a sense of purpose?
In ten days, I’ll be back in Dallas-Fort Worth for a layover on the way to Cozumel. My energy-concerned travel companion will be long gone from Texas, the stimulus of travel a recent memory that she brings up in line at the Dollar General just five minutes drive from her house in the cornfields.
I’ll be in the Gulf of Mexico for Christmas through Carnival. When the trip ends in three months, I’ll settle down with my wife, we’ll sign a lease in California, and we’ll start a domestic cycle of life and work again. I’ll continue indulging my compulsion to build things— my business, my knowledge, and maybe a family. Perhaps I’ll grow more like the woman in the line, scared of change and protective of what I already have— more afraid of losing it than getting what I want.
But the lady and I have fear in common. She fears the future, while I fear the past.
