I'm a Stranger Here Myself (25 page)

I was out for a walk the other day and I was struck by an odd thing. It was a glorious day—as good as a day can get, and very probably the last of its type that we shall see for many a long wintry month around here—yet almost every car that passed had its windows up.

All these drivers had adjusted their temperature controls to create a climate inside their sealed vehicles that was identical to the climate already existing in the larger world outside, and it occurred to me that where fresh air is concerned we have rather lost our minds, or sense of proportion, or something.

Remarkable as it may seem, we have grown so reflexively habituated to the idea of passing the bulk of our lives in a series of controlled environments that the possibility of an alternative no longer occurs to most of us. So we shop in enclosed malls, and drive to those malls with the car windows up and the air-conditioning on, even when the weather is flawless, as it was on this day. We work in office buildings where we cannot open the windows even if we wanted to—not, of course, that anyone would want to. When we go on vacation, it is often in an outsized motor-home that allows us to view the great outdoors without actually exposing ourselves to it. Increasingly, when we go to a sporting event it is in an indoor stadium. And almost all those Dick and Jane things we did as kids—ride bikes up and down the street, run to the park, play hide ’n’ seek or some game of ball—have pretty much vanished. Walk through almost any American neighborhood now in summer and you won’t see children doing any of this stuff because they are all inside. All you will hear is the uniform hum of air-conditioning units.

Cities across the nation have taken to building what are called skywalks—enclosed pedestrian flyovers, climate controlled of course—connecting all the buildings in their down-towns. In Des Moines, Iowa, where I grew up, the first skywalk was erected between a hotel and parking ramp about twenty-five years ago and was such a hit that soon other downtown businesses were getting in on the act. Now it is possible to walk halfway to Omaha without ever experiencing fresh air. All the stores that used to be at street level have moved up to the second floor, where the pedestrian traffic now is. Now the only people you ever see at street level in Des Moines are winos and office workers standing around having a smoke. The outdoors, you see, has become a kind of purgatory, a place to which you are banished.

There are even clubs composed of office workers who change into sweatsuits and spend their lunch hours taking brisk, healthful hikes along a measured course through the skywalks. Similar clubs, typically composed of retired people, can be found at nearly every shopping mall in the nation. These are people, you understand, who meet at malls not to shop but to get their daily exercise.

The last time I was in Des Moines, I ran into an old friend of the family. He was dressed in a sweatsuit and flushed with that glow that denotes recent healthful activity. He told me that he had just come from a session with the Valley West Mall Hiking Club. It was a splendid April day, and I asked him why the club didn’t use any of the city’s several large and handsome parks.

“No rain, no cold, no hills, no muggers,” he replied without hesitation.

“But there are no muggers in Des Moines,” I pointed out.

“That’s right,” he agreed at once, “and do you know why? Because there’s nobody outside to mug.” He nodded his head emphatically, as if I hadn’t thought of that, as indeed I had not.

The apotheosis of this strange movement may be the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where I went not long ago on an assignment for a magazine. The Opryland Hotel is a most extraordinary institution. To begin with, it is immense—essentially, it is a self-contained city—and almost gorgeously ugly, a sort of Graceland meets
Gone with the Wind
meets Mall of America.

But what really sets the Opryland apart is that it is a Total Indoor Environment. At its heart are three stupendously commodious glass-roofed atriums, five or six stories high and extending to nine acres overall, which offer all the benefits of the out-of-doors without any of the inconveniences. These “interiorscapes,” as the hotel fondly calls them, are replete with tropical foliage, full-sized trees, waterfalls, streams, “open-air” restaurants and cafes, and multilevel walkways. The effect is strikingly reminiscent of those illustrations you used to get in
Popular Science
magazine in the 1950s showing what life would be like in a space colony on Venus (or at least what it would be like if all the space colonists were overweight middle-aged people in Nike sneakers and baseball caps who spent their lives walking around eating handheld food). It is, in short, a flawless, aseptic, self-contained world, with a perfect unvarying climate and an absence of messy birds, annoying insects, irksome and unpredictable weather, or indeed any kind of reality.

On my first evening, anxious to escape the hordes of shuffling grazers and curious to see what the weather was like back on Planet Earth, I stepped outside with a view to having a stroll through the grounds. And guess what? There were no grounds—just acres and acres of parking lot, stretching away to an unseen horizon like a great inland sea. A couple of hundred yards away was the perimeter fence of the Opryland Amusement Park, but there was no foot access to the park from the hotel. The only way of getting there, I discovered by inquiring, was to purchase a $3 ticket and board an air-conditioned bus for a forty-five-second ride to the front gate.

Unless you wanted to walk around among thousands and thousands of parked cars, there was no place to take the air or stretch your legs. At Opryland, the outdoors is indoors, and that, I realized with a shiver, is precisely the way many millions of people would have the whole world if it were possible.

As I stood there, a bird dropped onto the toe of my left shoe the sort of thing you don’t normally appreciate a bird’s dropping (to coin a phrase). I looked from the sky to my shoe and back to the sky again.

“Thank you,” I said, and I believe I nearly meant it.

The last time it occurred to me, in a serious way, that Death is out there—you know, really out there, just hovering—and that my name is in his book, was on a short flight from Boston to Lebanon, New Hampshire, when we got in a little trouble.

The flight is only fifty minutes, over the old industrial towns of northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, and on toward the Connecticut River, where the plump hills of the Green and White Mountains lazily merge. It was a late October afternoon, just after the clocks had changed for winter, and I had rather hoped I might enjoy the last russety blush of autumn color on the hills before the daylight went, but within five minutes of takeoff our little sixteen-seater plane was enveloped in bouncy clouds, and it was obvious that there would be no spectacular panoramas this day.

So I read a book and tried not to notice the turbulence or to let my thoughts preoccupy themselves with unhappy fantasies involving splintering wings and a long, shrill, vertical plunge to earth.

I hate little planes. I don’t like most planes much, but little planes I dread because they are cold and bouncy and make odd noises, and they carry too few passengers to attract more than passing attention when they crash, as they seem to do quite regularly. Almost every day in any newspaper you will see an article like this:

These things really do go down all the time. In 1997, a commuter plane crashed on a flight from Cincinnati to Detroit. One of the passengers who died was on her way to a memorial service for her brother, who had been killed in a crash in West Virginia two weeks before.

So I tried to read my book, but I kept glancing out the window into the impenetrable murk. something over an hour into the flight—later than usual—we descended through the bumpy clouds and popped out into clear air. We were only a few hundred feet over a dusky landscape. There were one or two farmhouses visible in the last traces of daylight, but no towns. Mountains, severe and muscular, loomed up around us on all sides.

We rose back up into the clouds, flew around for a few minutes, and dropped down again. There was still no sign of Lebanon or any other community, which was perplexing because the Connecticut River Valley is full of little towns. Here there was nothing but darkening forest stretching to every horizon.

We rose again, and repeated the exercise twice more. After a few minutes, the pilot came on and in that calm, unflappable voice of airline pilots said: “I don’t know if you folks have noticed, but we’re, ah, having a little trouble eyeballing the airport on account of the, ah, inclement weather. There’s no radar at Lebanon, so we have to do all of this visually, which makes it a little, ah, tricky. The whole of the eastern seaboard is socked in with fog, so there’s no point in trying another air-port. Anyway, we’re gonna keep trying because if there is one thing for certain it’s that sooner or later this baby is going to have to come down
somewhere
!”

Actually, I just made that last line up, but that was the gist of it. We were blundering around in clouds and dying light looking for an airport tucked among mountains. We had been in the air for almost ninety minutes by now. I didn’t know how long these things could fly, but at some point clearly we would run out of fuel. Meanwhile, at any moment we could, in the course of our blundering drops through the clouds, slam into the side of a mountain.

This didn’t seem fair. I was on my way home from a long trip. Scrubbed little children, smelling of soap and fresh towels, would be waiting. There was steak for dinner, possibly with onion rings. Extra wine had been laid in. I had gifts to disburse. This was not a convenient time to be flying into mountains. So I shut my eyes and said in a very sincere inner voice: “Please oh please oh please oh please get this thing down safely, and I will be exceptionally good forever, and I really mean it. Thank you.”

And miraculously it worked. On about the sixth occasion that we popped from the clouds, there below us were the flat roofs, illuminated signs, and gorgeously tubby customers of the Kmart Shopping Plaza, and just across the road from it was the perimeter fence of the airport. We were aimed slightly the wrong way, but the pilot banked sharply and brought the plane in on a glidepath that would, in any other circumstance, have had me shrieking.

We landed with a lovely smooth squeal. I have never been so happy. My wife was waiting for me in the car outside the airport entrance, and on the way home I told her all about my gripping adventure in the sky. The trouble with believing that you are about to die in a crash, as opposed to actually dying in a crash, is that it doesn’t make nearly as good a story.

“You poor sweetie,” my wife said soothingly, but just a little distractedly, and patted my leg. “Well, you’ll be home in a minute and there’s a lovely cauliflower supreme in the oven for you.”

I looked at her. “Cauliflower supreme? What the—” I cleared my throat and put on a new voice. “And what is cauliflower supreme exactly, dear? I understood we were having steak.”

“We were, but this is much healthier for you. Maggie Higgins gave me the recipe.”

I sighed. Maggie Higgins was a health-conscious busybody whose assertive views on diet were forever being translated into dishes like cauliflower supreme for me. She was fast becoming the bane of my life, or at least of my stomach.

Life’s a funny thing, isn’t it? One minute you’re praying to be allowed to live, vowing to face any hardship without complaint, and the next you are mentally banging your head on the dashboard and thinking: “I wanted steak, I wanted steak, I wanted steak.”

“Did I tell you, by the way,” my wife went on, “that Maggie fell asleep with hair coloring on the other day and her hair turned bright green?”

“Really?” I said, perking up a little. This was good news indeed. “Bright green, you say?”

“Well, everyone told her it was lemony, but really, you know, it looked like Astroturf.”

“Amazing,” I said—and it was. I mean to say, two prayers answered in one day.