The Ones Who Fly Away from God's Country
There should not be a direct flight between New York and Grand Rapids. This was obvious to me the first time that I set foot on the rickety commuter jet that makes the six-hundred-mile trip. It is one of those planes with small overhead bins that quickly reveal deficiencies in spatial reasoning among the traveling public. It is the type of aircraft that suggests that the airline itself would prefer the flight not to exist. In fact, the enamel pins on the uniforms of the crew usually bear the name not of a recognizable mainline carrier, but of some mysterious regional airline to which the problem flights are delegated.
Before LaGuardia was reconstructed earlier this year, the Grand Rapids flight would depart from a strange and horrible gate with a door that led to a winding walkway and out onto the tarmac. I maintain that the so-called gate was used as some kind of cruel joke, and only for the Grand Rapids flight. Now LaGuardia has been rebuilt and, though the Grand Rapids flight now uses a jet bridge, it still usually arrives at a remote and wretched part of the airport that has somehow avoided renovation and is accessible only by a walkway comparable in length to the flight itself. The rest of the terminal is bright and airy. Artworks and great windows adorn its resplendent concourses. The Grand Rapids flight, however, lets off into an area that looks like a basement.
The airline employees at LaGuardia do not call it the Grand Rapids flight. They refer to its destination as “Grand Rapid” — singular. I have spent considerable time theorizing about why this might be so. The least interesting answer would be that the “s” sound is simply inaudible over the loudspeaker, though no other airport seems affected by this. Perhaps the dot matrix printer under the counter, which always seems to be printing away feverishly a document in carbon copy quadruplicate (and somehow holds its own at airports despite the technological developments of the last half-century) cannot print enough characters and truncates the destination, which the gate agent then reads verbatim.
Though perhaps it is not technical. Perhaps the people of Grand Rapid — and indeed of West Michigan — have done something to offend the people at LaGuardia. Reviewing their assignments at the beginning of a shift, they recoil in horror at the dreaded GRR, knowing that their only recourse is to confuse everyone very slightly by calling it an almost imperceptibly wrong name.
If this is the case, the offense must have been brought on by the peculiarities of group behavior among traveling West Michiganders. An experienced West Michigander can find the gate without any signage by simply following the aura of nervousness and then looking for the gate where people seem least adept at waiting for their boarding group to be called.
The first rounds of Dutch Bingo (the subtle West Michigan art of dropping names to strangers until you find a mutual acquaintance) usually begin well before the aircraft arrives at the gate. (Averse to risk, my people are known to arrive at the gate hours before boarding begins.) On certain flights, a potluck atmosphere develops in small clusters in the boarding area and one gets the sense that ham buns would have been furnished if they did not count as a carry-on.
At the back of the plane, a traumatized family still in mouse ears recovers from the culture shock of their bad transfer on the way home from Orlando. At the front, men in dark suit coats (but not ties — never ties) talk about furniture. On one flight, I sat a row behind two men who spoke for the entire time about the similarities between selling chairs and closet organizers.
The New Yorkers have different habits. A woman next to me once silently read the Wikipedia page for Zeeland, which kept her interested from takeoff until we were over Hackensack about ninety seconds later. “What are we going to eat? Nothing is open there.” is a common refrain on the night flight.
The Grand Rapid flight is neither West Michigan nor New York. It is a mix. To someone with ties to both, this is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. Each is potent and wonderful in its own way, not unlike ammonia and bleach. To go so quickly from one to the other is perhaps like coming up too fast from deep-sea diving, and a person wonders if it might be helpful to sit for a spell in a hyperbaric chamber (or at least the Atlanta airport) so that the rapid change does not kill them.
Most airline tickets booked in this country are round-trip, so it stands to reason that the crowd on the return flight would be nearly identical. It is not.
Some time ago, I started referring to West Michigan as God’s Country. I think it started as a joke. “I’m going to God’s Country this weekend,” I would tell my friends. Eventually, it started working its way into my regular speech. I knew things had boiled over last year when I checked a bag at Ford Airport and the man at the ticket counter asked how I had enjoyed my time in West Michigan.
“It’s always good to be back in God’s Country,” I offered with the mindlessness of a person making airport small talk, realizing what I had said only after the ticket agent’s eyes widened slightly.
“Okay,” he replied, handing back my driver license.
So begins the return flight from God’s Country. People in God’s Country trust other people who are on their way to God’s Country, but not people who are on their way to New York. “What business do these people have leaving here and going to a place like New York? Are they too good for us now?” I, the holder of a New York driver license, ask myself in the departure lounge.
At the other gates, passengers are headed to more righteous destinations, like Minnesota. On school breaks, there are large groups of slow walkers with overweight checked bags on their way to church mission trips. The New York flight boards at the far end of the concourse that its passengers might be kept at a distance for the safety of these other travelers.
Indeed, it is an offense to all that is right and natural that people sitting in Cascade Charter Township might well ride the E train within the next three hours, but this is the reality of modern life. In the brief intervening time, there will be Biscoff cookies and half-helpings of soft drinks. After the holidays, someone will hiss “I’m free!” under their breath shortly after takeoff. On a good day, the flight crew will give a little tour of the city as the plane flies in. I once had a flight attendant give a brief historical talk on Flushing Meadows as we flew in over the Unisphere in Queens. Absent this, passengers still gaze out the window — Manhattan is a considerably more attractive highlight on an air approach than is M-6.
It is astonishing to think that such a thing happens every single day — often multiple times. Who are all these West Michigan people going to New York? Why don’t they call and ask me for travel advice? The economics make no sense. How could such demand for travel exist between these two regions on any given day? Why would an airline waste a precious LaGuardia landing slot on such a tiny airplane?
These questions are unavoidable on a flight with no TV screens and a charge for WiFi that no self-respecting West Michigander would ever pay. I only managed to avoid them by driving home for Thanksgiving this year.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Why are we still obsessed with Robert Moses?” by Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times.
If the demand for tickets to Straight Line Crazy is any indication, we are still obsessed with Robert Moses. While Taylor Swift tickets took up the headlines in recent weeks, a smaller ticketing drama has played out in New York, where theatergoers (perhaps in search of a more concise answer to The Power Broker) have struggled mightily to get tickets to the limited run starring Ralph Fiennes as New York’s “master builder” of the twentieth century.
Bellafante suggests that star power and “all this yelling in front of maps” alone cannot account for the show’s popularity. “I suspect,” she writes, “that some of the fascination with Straight Line Crazy stems from the politics it refracts to an urban bourgeoisie that is fed up with capital hoarding by the ultrawealthy and what it bemoans as a deterioration of civility — the rise in homelessness, the increasing crime, the mounds of increasing garbage, more and more.” Perhaps that is also part of it.
On a deeper level, though, the question of Moses and his legacy is a question of democracy. “Whatever nostalgia there may be for [Moses’] way of doing things,” offers Bellafante, “comes in part from the fact that the power he wielded has since been given over to the real-estate class and the politicians all too happy to capitulate to it for the sake of campaign contributions. Moses, who never held elected office, didn’t need them.”
The existential question undergirding today’s obsession with Robert Moses, then, is whether we suspect that “more than half the people are right more than half the time” and that “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy” or that it would be best to just let one person run the show and, to quote His Honor the Mayor, “Get Stuff Done.” The former system of beliefs is responsible for a great many unendurable community board meetings. The latter just about unraveled New York’s urban fabric in the twentieth century. But it also gave me an apartment with my own bathroom, so who is to say?
Holland, Michigan: From Dutch Colony to Dynamic City by Robert P. Swierenga.
I came upon Swierenga’s three-volume, 2,600-page tome on a shelf during the week of Thanksgiving and was enamored with it at once. What a miraculous gift that any city should have such a definitive record of its history! Swierenga’s work contains thousands of names, a detailed history of just about every business and notable person ever to live in Holland, and just about any other detail that a person could hope for.
As a service to the readers of the Newsletter, I have taken the liberty of compiling several bits of local history I have had the pleasure of uncovering in Swierenga’s work this holiday.
In 1914, the Common Council established Holland’s own Board of Motion Picture Censors. They were given badges and went to the first showing of every film to decide which particular segments should be omitted. Things began to fall apart when Hollanders figured out that they could catch the full movie if they also attended the first showing before the Censors got their chance to make edits. “It would have helped if the Common Council had passed the proposal of the Board of Education that was brought to the table in 1915, to require the censor board to screen all films before they were shown, not after. But the alderman never could bring themselves to do this.”
Said the Holland City News of V-J Day in 1945, “More gas was probably burned in a few hours in Holland’s downtown section Tuesday night… than during a corresponding period of the last big Tulip Time festival.”
During the great “Flag in Church” controversy of 1917, the various churches of the city started putting American flags in their sanctuaries. Third Reformed installed one in the organ loft. The Episcopalians, not to be outdone, got a silk flag. The Catholics had the Bishop come down from Grand Rapids to bless their flag. Things went downhill, however, after Rev. Hoeksema at the Fourteenth Street Christian Reformed Church, insisted that the flag had no place in the worship service. In typical Holland style, a great fight — including accusations of treason from Holland’s former congressman — played out in letters to the editor.
“Things aren’t getting any better in our city. There is so much sin evident. Not nearly as many people go to church any more but the saloons are patronized heavily. Three more saloons are opening up, so they say. There is also an Interurban train which now runs to Macatawa Park on Sunday… I wish that more would take heed to what is said in the Bible — “Righteousness exalteth a nation but sins destroy it always.”
-Diary of Gezina Van der Haar-Visscher, 1897
The Newsletter regrets the lack of publication on November 14.
The Newsletter celebrates two years with the addition of an audio version.