#458 Dive

Recently I took an airplane trip. And when I did there was one airport where I had to walk across an open area to the plane. I didn’t get to walk through one of those extendable covered bridge-like walkways that they call a “gate.” Airplane lingo is so cool. It’s kind of like nautical language. Those in the know can be really “in the know” by dropping nautical jargon in a condescending manner. What a landlubber would call a set of steps, nautical folk call a ladder. Bathrooms are heads and left and right are port and, I think, muscatel. Wait a minute, that’s homeless lingo. Airplane argot evolved much the same way I suppose. There were numerous things unique to airplanes and they applied words to them that made other jet-setters feel in with the in crowd. Never mind that now people are shuttled through like so many cattle on their way to the abattoir. And that the extendible tunnel airplane gate looks like nothing more than the final loading chute into boxcars destined for the slaughterhouse. Airplane travel reminds me of tubes. A spiral tube on the way up to the parking garage, a tube across the street on the way in to check-in, a bunch of low-ceilinged tubes in the terminal. (That’s what they should call the corral before the the cattle’s final boxcar, the terminal.) Another cattle line on the way to security. Then a walk through a small tube to get your daily dose of radiation while your carryon baggage gets x-rayed till your toothpaste tube glows. Then another tube to the waiting area, the extendable gate tube, and finally the plane itself, which can be described pretty accurately as a tube pinched on both ends with a couple of wings bolted on. When you get off, it’s all in reverse, except you get to watch your baggage shot out of another tube, looking like some tube on the way half digested it. So about the only place that looks at all open before you launch off into the glory and freedom of the wild blue yonder—in a tube— is the area where the plane sits. You never experience it directly unless you go to a small airport and when they tell you to walk across it to get to the plane, they call it by a special aeronautical name: the tarmac. Tarmac. Is that a made up word or what? Was it possible to use a word even vaguely related to its meaning or use? Couldn’t it be walkway, as opposed to where the planes take off, the runway? Or perhaps instead of the route the planes take in the air, the flight path, you could call this area the walk path. Nope, everything that’s not an actual runway is the tarmac. Mac. Like McDonalds designed the modern airport. I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say tarmac is a short form of tar macadam. Which is, I’m pretty sure is, um, asphalt. Pavement. Tarmac. It seems a little uninspired. I mean boatyards upgraded to marinas. How about aero-ina? Sounds kind of like a tube-shaped pasta.
America, ya gotta love it