Numbness and Ennui at Sea-Tac:
With the Mainliners at Airport Nation
Article for The Stranger, 3/22/96
Don’t go to Sea-Tac on I-5. All you get to see is that weird flashing time-and-temperature sign bearing the airport’s name about half a mile from the place, making you think you’re closer to your destination than you really are.
Instead, take 4th Ave. S., E. Marginal Way, and Pacific Highway S. It’s a route fully lined with the homey, rugged beauty that is Industrial America; warehouses, the original Costco, used-car lots, gun shops, a McDonald’s with a kiddie playland inside, strip joints (including the county’s only current male strippers), a church, a cemetary, a Larry’s Market, and a bowling alley.
Then you suddenly enter a world of big bland motor hotels, rental-car lots, and squatty black-glass office buildings. You have arrived at a destination only peripherally connected to Seattle or Puget Sound. Just as an embassy is legally the “soil” of its sponsoring nation, every major airport is a node of Airport Nation.
Some people work in Airport Nation. Some people merely visit Airport Nation–the tourists, family travelers and others who make an increasing part of the flying populace. And some unfortunates live in it–the business travelers, the itinerant scholars, those who go from airport to plane to airport to plane, staying at airport hotels, gathering in airport convention halls, and seldom getting to visit the cities or towns the airports purportedly service. USA Today was created to be the “hometown” paper for Airport Nation; its biggest sales come from discounted bulk copies sold to airlines and hotels.
Much has been written about how jet travel has helped make the world smaller. Not too much has been written about how it’s imposed its own order on the world. Some of the professors who live in Airport Nation, at least part of the year, will yammer endlessly about how TV or fast food is to blame for the blanding-down of society, but air travel, and the numbing aesthetic surrounding it, may play a far greater yet unsung role in the homogenization of America.
And much of that aesthetic, I’m sorry to say, is our own Nor’wester creation. Boeing, its engineers, its designers, and the consultants it shares with the airlines have all spent the past four decades selling their service as something safe, convenient, and pleasant. They’ve done everything to try and get folks to forget they’re stuck in a small chair inside a big aluminum tube for hours on end. From the interior color schemes to the sound of the air-recirculation units, every aspect of the in-flight experience exists to lull people into a passive, semi-hypnotic state. They can’t really control the screaming baby in front of you or the jabbering sorority girls in back of you, but they try.
The airport aesthetic is an extension of the in-flight aesthetic. The air is as quiet and lifeless as can be engineered. Aside from PA announcements, you hear little but real Muzak, mellow adult-contemporary music, or whooshy silence (with one exception, which we’ll get to). It not only muffles the energy of all those people going all those places, it extends the airline trance state as long as possible. Those who go straight from the terminal into courtesy vans sending them directly to the airport hotels may never fully leave the trance state.
The airport aesthetic also helps ease the shock of ending a day in a different sector of Earth than the one you awoke in. Airport terminals look essentially alike. Airport restaurants, hotels, and convention facilities look even more alike. It can take the souvenir stands to tell you where you’re at. At Sea-Tac, the souvenirs range from the ridiculous at the regular gift stands (chocolate slugs, “Sleepless in Seattle” coffee mugs (still), totem pole pencil sharpeners, Space Needle ring-toss snow domes) to the ridiculously “sublime” at the highbrow shops (relentlessly “casual” earth-tone clothes, the ubiquitous glass art).
The outer public spaces at Sea-Tac are all so big and tall and wide and out of human scale. Black everywhere. Not the black of punk or of Johnny Cash, but the black of Nixon’s suits, the black intended to make pudgy businessmen feel powerful in their selflessness.
The oversized corridors are decorated mostly with the big, offensively “inoffensive” work that gives public art such a bad name. (The closest thing to an exception: the comic-strip mural promoting recycling, with our pal Mark Zingarelli trying valiantly to breathe life into a tired detective-parody script burdened with lame latté jokes.)
And don’t bother looking for stimulating creativity in the rotating art-exhibit area either; it’s all Pilchuck Glass. Fortunately, the glass is right next to the non-denominational “Meditation Lounge,” where you can pray for the strength to walk back past it without going mad.
Once past the demarcation of the outer and inner public areas by the metal detectors, the carefully established lull is broken by banks of TV monitors situated right at the gates where people can’t escape, all blaring the CNN Airport Network. Five-minute segments of news briefs and canned features. Ads for domestic cars, tires, and razors. In another sign of the changing airline market there’s quite a lack of businessman-oriented advertising anywhere on the airport premises, compared to the past. The most notable exception comes hourly on the monitors, when CNN Airport is interrupted by an airport-sponsored fake news report about the future of Sea-Tac, in which a half dozen well-dressed white people offer sound bites in unanimous support of the controversial proposed third runway.
The restaurants and most of the retail spaces are run by one company, Host International. This arrangement not only adds to the sameness of everything, it adds to the prices; every meal and trinket includes an unspecified surcharge to defray Host International’s lease fees.
In keeping with the post-deregulation “democratization” of air travel and the “lean n’ mean” spirit of modern business, much of the available food is of the fast variety, served in harshly fluorescent-lit cafeteria settings, including abbreviated Taco Bell and Pizza Hut menus.
But Host International has maintained one refuge for those preferring a more leisurely style of dining. The Carvery is a classic ’50s-style executive steakhouse, completely preserved in its unmodernized state, from the scarlet-velvet walls to the fake British heraldry to the fake fireplace. Cocktails are available, despite the prominent wine list on every table; bourbon-on-the-rocks is recommended. The Carvery’s only concession to modernity is the presence of a few “Healthy Choice” options on the scarlet menu. The Carvery is a surviving remnant of an earlier age in jet travel: an age of stable airlines charging regulated fares, of male sales execs and three-martini politicians in comfy seats sharing naughty remarks about pert stewardesses while watching in-flight movies from real 16mm projectors, of the original Cocktail Culture. Today, The Carvery’s big windows overlook the taxiways of Horizon Air, a low-fare, short-haul, no-meals, express commuter line.
The other big throwback to the days of flying past is the Museum of Flight Store, an extension of and promo for the partly-Boeing-backed museum at Boeing Field. The store offers fun and educational memorabilia of air travel, from nostalgic Pan Am 747 model kits to exquisite reproduction wood propellers to freeze-dried Astronaut Food ice cream. There are even refrigerator magnets with old United Airlines logos promoting its early transcontinental routes as “Coast to Coast Mainliners.”
Back when that slogan was coined, shortly after United was spun off from Boeing, flying was a novelty and an adventure. United still used Mainliner as the name of its inflight magazine into the mid-’60s, when three-martini flying was nearing its peak and “mainlining” gained a new meaning here on Earth. Today, more and more of us are mainlining on the drug-like state of tripping through Airport Nation. And while jet travel, like some other drugs, has lost some of the exclusive cachet it once held, it still holds an ability to entrance and seduce its users, some of whom never quite escape its grip.
The route to Sea-Tac described at the top of this story is that taken by Metro routes 174 and 184. The express route 194 uses I-5, as do the $7.50 Grey Line Airporter (626-6088), leaving throughout the day from downtown Seattle hotels, and the Shuttle Express (622-1424), which will pick you up from most anywhere in town. And while airfares are now deregulated, taxi fares from downtown to Sea-Tac are standardized at $30 a carload.
