I walked into the Cedar Rapids Airport yesterday to check on the status of my flight to Boston. Airports have a smell to them. Older airports have a smell that reminds me of my grandfather, the first person I knew who rode on airplanes. I associate old airports with Cold War aviation, Chuck Yeager, Curtis LeMay. Men from the Greatest Generation who came home from World War II and built an infrastructure to protect us from the Russians. It’s a smell that evokes little metal toy airplanes and air shows. Reagan National smells like this. So does Omaha, and the little Iowa airports I’ve been to.

It felt wrong to fight with a computer kiosk and a printout the travel agent handed to me months ago. You used to get actual paper tickets, printed by dot matrix printers on long cards. Now you fumble with credit cards and printouts and try to decipher all the numbers on the page for your confirmation number. It doesn’t fit in an airport that still carries the scent of PanAm and Ozark Airlines.

I asked the ticketing agent for help and felt my age. I felt old. Could she help me find the confirmation number on this printout? I had a Columbo attack, my hoodie morphing into a rumpled London Fog. I could feel my hands wither into desecrated husks as I handed the paper over, my liver spots multiply freakishly, and my back stoop. She pointed to the confirmation number and I circled it for my return visit.

I had walked into the travel agency on a cold May morning, bent on seeing how much it would cost to fly to Boston for the opening game of the Bruins season. Just curious to see what it would cost. I’d priced things on Priceline before I’d walked in. I wanted to see if the travel agency could get me a better price than Captain Kirk. They couldn’t. I didn’t care. The middle aged lady behind the desk needed the commission more than Captain Kirk. I bought my tickets, found a hotel near TD Garden, and declined the help she sightseeing tips she offered me.

I wasn’t going to Boston to see the sights. I was going to Boston to see the Bruins. I was going to Boston to have an adventure. Adventures don’t abide lists. When someone asks me if I travel on a lark I’ll be able to say, yes, one day I just decided to go see a Bruins game in Boston and did it.
The day was months before the game, and I plodded through the preparations for it, but the decision had been an impulse. That’s an adventure, right?

I used to dream about Rabbit Mountain, Colorado. It was a regular companion when I commuted between Fort Collins and Boulder, back when I was tangentially involved in the .com bubble. I found back-ways between Boulder and Fort Collins that were a damned sight more picturesque than dodging spilled pipeline parts on the interstate. Drive north out of Boulder, through the tiny town of Hygiene, and you pass a tiny foothill marked as Rabbit Mountain on MapQuest.

I imagined a little bunk house at the foot of that hill, screened in with old wooden screen doors that didn’t fit properly anymore. I imagined a little grey alien smoking on the front step, waiting for me to drive up and park. I blame Jose Chung and too many commutes for the particulars of my imagination. I’d dream about that bunk house and smoking with the alien on the steps when things in my life went sideways. It was some place I could just relax, smoking with a grey alien. I don’t smoke, never have. I smoke in my dreams, though.

When my life reached low spots I’d get the urge to drop everything and drive to Rabbit Mountain. I knew there wasn’t a clapboard bunkhouse waiting for me, but I still yearned to just drop things and go. I imagine it’s how Roy Neary felt. There’s those aliens again.

Life wasn’t off the rails when I walked into the travel agency to see what it would cost to fly to Boston. Life was pretty good. But I could almost swear I passed a little grey alien in a Bruins Sweater smoking a Marlboro behind the agency as I walked in.