Surviving solo flights

Flying Solo
By Wayne Curtis, for The New York Times

I saw my first iPod vending machine a little over a year ago at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. It looked pretty much like a vending machine from which you buy Skittles and Doritos, except boxier and you stick in your credit card and out comes a $250 iPod. I’ve since seen a few more of these at other airports. I’ve never seen anyone actually buy anything from them, but I often see people gathered around them, the looks on their faces saying, well, here’s more evidence that America has finally gone off the rails.
But they’re wrong. Those vending machines are not a curiosity catering to mad, impulse-buying American consumers. It is a public service, vending a surprisingly effective antidote to the tumult of air travel. Of all the technologies that have smoothed out the flying experience for consumers — Wi-Fi in terminals, large flat screen monitors that tell you your flight’s been canceled in high-def — I believe that the chief advance has been little machines and the vast stores of music and words available to fill them.

A music player is, basically, a very large tablet of Valium. It provides almost instant ease, carving out a private world around you, and allowing you to move through thickening crowds wrapped in your own version of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, and endure flight delays and boarding areas with no seats with unexpected equanimity. I now consider my own iPod as essential a part of air travel these days as a one-quart, Ziploc bag. (Note: music players are most effective for solo travelers. Parents traveling over the holidays with small children should take actual Valium.)

While I wholly agree with my colleague on this blog Pico Iyer that the Golden Age of air travel was actually more of a Pyrite Age, all glittery at a distance but not so rich up close, many brand new annoyances crop up daily to which we must adapt. And simply not knowing what new small horror will be next adds to the stress of flying. For instance, for past several months, many of us have been very concerned about accidentally tapping our feet to the piped in music when patronizing airport bathrooms.

But heading to my gate on a moving walkway with “The Girl From Ipanema” blaring in my ears and all manner of people streaming by, I find everything soothing and vaguely cinematic, like watching a film made by a forgotten French filmmaker.
Generally, though, I prefer words to music. Audio books and podcasts create an even more impenetrable carapace around me. The only thing I have to compare it to is the feeling of dislocation upon emerging from a movie theater in a small and poor foreign country after spending two hours watching a George Clooney movie. Out on the sidewalk, amid donkeys and unfamiliar aromas, you blink, then blink again, but to no avail. It takes several minutes for your mind to race back and find you.

The same thing happens when you pack your head with the spoken word while in an airport. You get seduced away from the gummy food-court tables and squawking announcements about unattended luggage and into a far more appealing parallel universe. Thrillers and mysteries are good, but so are free downloads like “This American Life” and Harry Shearer’s “Le Show.”

The most powerfully sedative free download I’ve discovered is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Times,” a BBC show. Each 42-minute weekly episode involves the host and three academics discussing topics of riveting obscurity. Here are the subjects currently in my queue: “Discovery of Oxygen,” “Antimatter,” “17th-Century Print Culture,” “Prime Numbers,” “Diet of Worms,” “The St. Peterloo Massacre of 1819” and “The Fibonacci Sequence” (Teaser: “An infinite string of numbers named after, but not invented by, the 13th century Italian mathematician Fibonacci.”)

I don’t know why, but these discussions always take me to a galaxy far, far away from the airport — it’s like a vacation nestled within my vacation. The more obscure the topic, the more relaxed I become. For the first time in years, I’m looking forward to holiday travel.