A Bird, a Plane, and Their Place
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In Terminal B of an airport in a major US city, two sparrows flew close to the ceiling.
I was supposed to be in the air right then, so I thought they might be mocking me. It wasn’t their fault, though, because I had flight on the mind. They were showing me what I was about to do but it came as naturally to them as walking loops around the terminal was to me. They simply picked up their wings and were aloft. There were no delays, no bulging suitcases, no bureaucracy or checklists.
“Yet that tiny bird, that thing measured in grams and centimeters – all it had to do was break out of its shell and survive the process of learning.”
The only one on the passenger manifest was them, along with their feathers, their gullet full of seeds and the song buried in their lungs. But none of those things weighed them down. None inhibited the feeling of air underneath them with their tiny scaled feet curled into soft down. It was a contrast not unlike a metal tube containing the soft flesh of a hundred or so human beings. It was the same and it was not at all the same.
Despite having been a passenger in the air many times in my life, I’m still not sure flight will actually work. It requires the kind of engineering and mechanical effort only possible through the ingenuity and grit of tens of thousands of human minds. Hundreds of thousands if you count everyone working through history to get those massive machines reliably into and out of flight. Yet that tiny bird, that thing measured in grams and centimeters – all it had to do was break out of its shell and survive the process of learning. After that, it could flit left and right and narrowly avoid the ceiling or tree branches or other birds with astonishing depth perception even at speed.
The birds made it seem so easy but their construction was born of centuries of evolutionary refinement. By comparison, the creation of airplanes and the careful manufacturing of parts for jet engines are so very new it’s remarkable how well it works for something dreamed up in the last hundred years.
“Were they trying to get out? I was doing the same thing, I suppose. Trying to get out of that building. It was a place I came to in order to leave. It was a monument to temporary occupation. ”
The birds in the airport were so light, quick, and changeable. None of the rest of the flying objects in that place were, but the birds reminded me of how easy something impossible can be.
How did they get inside? I wondered if their brethren in actual air wondered the same thing about the plane I was about to board. Maybe they thought – what alchemy allowed this thing to be in my airspace? Maybe to them, a metal plane in the sky is just as improbable as a bird in the building.
Were they trying to get out? I was doing the same thing, I suppose. Trying to get out of that building. It was a place I came to in order to leave. It was a monument to temporary occupation. It was designed for me to pass through. Did birds have the same thing? A place they only existed for a bit? Yes, but they may not have been looking that far ahead. How I envied them that, how I wished I could only be focused on dodging obstacles as I flitted through the air.
They would look for an escape eventually. Although there were enough crumbs there to sustain them for some time, they would need to be outside again on a fundamental level. They would need actual air, not only exhaustively filtered oxygen. They would need something more than the sun glinting off chrome pillars and the carefully arranged public art suspended from the ceiling. They would need actual trees, not screens depicting forests. They would need more. So would I. I would go from that metal building to that metal flying tube to a metal vehicle with wheels but in between I would be wishing for air that had a few molecules of pine nestled between the carefully sterilized atoms.
“I hope the bird found its way out. I hope I do too, eventually.”
I hope the bird found its way out. I hope I do too, eventually. To get where I was going but also to understand existence in a place you’re not supposed to be. For them, the building. For me, the air. We exist in comfort in entirely opposite milieus.
The birds and I – we passed each other along the way to wherever we were going next.