Airports

End of the world texts almost always feature the end of air travel. My friend loves airports and even goes early in order to enjoy the rushing to and fro, the greetings, and the patina of travel the exhausted people hobbling away from their flight always have. For my own part I am just as happy to get through the experience. It is fun to see the people, especially in Winnipeg where many of them are traveling north and therefore have interesting languages and accents. But the arbitrary security “random searches,” which nearly always pick me, and the pretentions of air travel in these days of wealth and accessible tickets is a bit much.

Today I am going east, into a storm which has blown off the Atlantic into the Maritimes. There I will greet my friends, visit my friend’s daughter now that she is in first year university and all grown up, and then go to the bush. I closed up the cabin in the late summer and came west to work, but now that I have three weeks and little to do with it but write, I am going back.

The cabin is in rural New Brunswick and quite a few kilometres from town. It is even nearly a kilometre from the dirt road, so I walk in and there enjoy the peace of no phone and internet that many can only dream of. The first part of that procedure is this rushing from airport to airport though and surrounded by Christmas musak and flat screen televisions. Nearly everyone around me is on a tablet or a phone, except for the old lady across from me sleeping and some Inuit in the floor relaxing. I wonder if they are looking forward to getting back home. I know I am. Home certainly is a relative term, for at the end of a summer I look forward to the socialization of the university again, and at the end of a term I am more than eager to be out of touch and away from the grasping hands of the internet’s neediness.

I plan to keep you abreast of bush life, although you will have to make do with my updating my blog once a week. When I come out of the bush, however, on my once a week jaunts to the grocer, I will make sure to tell you how life is in a simpler place.

About Barry Pomeroy

I had an English teacher in high school many years ago who talked about writing as something that people do, rather than something that died with Shakespeare. I began writing soon after, maudlin poetry followed by short prose pieces, but finally, after years of academic training, I learned something about the magic of the manipulated word.
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