Into the Void
Over on the Oberlin Alumni Facebook page (a dicey place to visit), people are talking about how hard it is to book a flight to Cleveland for a late May reunion. All the flights are either exorbitantly expensive or already sold out. The local news tells me there is some hubbub about the airport in the news—drop-off protocols, drunk employess—but few are talking about what I have experienced to be one of the most significant changes in in NEO over the past few decades: it is getting harder to get here, and to leave.
According to this article, passenger traffic is up 5.5%, the highest in ten years. But what happens if you go back further? In 2018, 9.64 million people flew in or out of Hopkins. In 2000, 13.29 million did, or a decrease of 37% over 18 years (click that article to see the numbers for the years in between).
When my son was younger, we used to bet, when our plane was landing at Hopkins, which gate we would arrive at, crossing our fingers it would not be the “dreaded D terminal,” which required an endless walk from gate to car. I miss those days— having a young son, having the dreaded D terminal as an option. (The D terminal opened in the 1990s, when Continental had a hub in Cleveland, and closed in 2014, after United bought Continental and closed the hub).
I lived in Oberlin in the early noughts, and one of the best things about living in that small town was its proximity to an airport with cheap, plentiful airport parking and a ton of non-stop flights. Easy access to many non-stops is a key amenity! I could visit my sister in Vermont, four hours door to door! I could spend Passover at my aunt and uncle’s in the Berkshires with a single leg! It was easy to leave; it was easy to return home.
None of the above is possible today.
I dream of high speed trains. And more frequent fast-enough ones. Once, my sister decided to take the train to visit me. A great idea in theory, I responded, but all the trains arrive and depart at 3:00 am. “That’s okay, I don’t mind!” she said. “I do!” I replied. “I don’t want to wake up my four year old and drive us to whereever the fuck the train station is in the middle of the night.” “Okay, I’ll take a taxi.” A taxi? At 3 am? At wherever the fuck the train station is?
She decided against a visit.
My no-longer-young son goes to college in Richmond, Indiana, It’s a four hour drive. Getting him back and forth has proven more of a puzzle than I imagined. Once, I decided to book him a one-way frequent flyer flight to Dayton at the last minute: he had a four hour layover in DC. For another break, he took a Greyhound home, with a stop-over in Columbus, during which the driver simply left, never to return. It took Greyhound 5 hours to find another driver to complete the journey.
For the start of this spring semester, I just said screw it, loaded up the podcasts, and drove him down and back again.
***
The FBI raided the County Executive’s office this week, again. About twelve members of the local media, including photographers and camera people, went to cover the event. The WTAM twitter account posted this photo of the scene:
I cannot stop staring at this photo. The men, with their equipment. The goddamned youth of the reporters on their phones. The sterile environs. The quiet. The ennui on the faces a counterpoint to the drama of an FBI raid. Oh, and the ending written on the space-off: the FBI agents took a back staircase so as to avoid the media.
Kyle Swenson’s book, Good Kids, Bad City, published on Tuesday. It is getting a lot of national media attention: yay for Kyle! Locally, I’ve found one Cleveland Magazine piece. This paragraph from the Washington Post review sums up so much:
Keep writing into that void.
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