Flight Path: Coming Full Circle and Rediscovering Lost Neighborhoods
“Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.” — N.K. Jemisin
Image courtesy of Unsplash
Airplanes and airports have shaped my life in fundamental ways, functioning as gateways to opportunities and memories that have shifted as I have matured.
When I was a child in the 1970s, my parents tucked me into the backseat of the car with a quilt and a tabletop transistor radio with flywheel tuning and a shiny silver antenna. When we found a field near the Atlanta airport, we parked the car, put our blanket on the ground, and dialed up the Air Traffic Control station on AM radio. We would while away the afternoon (or, even better when we went at night) watching the planes take off and land, drinking our Cokes out of bottles, and leading other lives, imagining the exotic places the planes were headed to or returning from.
Halcyon days, those. Quality family time at its finest.
I grew up less than 10 miles away from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. As a senior at North Clayton High School in 1988, I quickly discovered and reveled in one of Southside Atlanta students’ favorite pastimes: going to the airport and riding the “Plane Train” from the terminal to the farthest concourse. Depending on what kind of fun we wanted to have, we might choose not to hold on as the trains approached or left the station, causing us to ricochet around the train car like pinballs working their way down a game.
Or we might do some shopping and eat dinner at a restaurant in one of the concourses, feeling worldly and sophisticated all the while.
Of course, none of this is possible now in the post-9/11 era. And it’s certainly a pipe dream to recapture those golden memories of our youth. (Plus, I’m positive that at this point in my life, my body would not appreciate the mistreatment of bouncing around a train car.)
My friends have all gone their separate ways now: grown up, married, had children, moved away.
I did the same; I went away to college and found myself living and working ever farther away from the Riverdale neighborhood I grew up in. That community of families was one-of-a-kind, a modest yet idyllic middle-class neighborhood where we rode our bikes unsupervised and blocked off the street for Memorial Day and Fourth of July barbecues.
After my father’s death, I naturally found myself looking backward, leaning in to times I felt the safety, security, and familiarity of my childhood, before age and disease took over and charted a stormy and scary course for us all.
For me, that meant revisiting my childhood home. In an ironic twist of fate, after all my years away from Atlanta, I find myself working less than nine miles away from where I grew up and less than three miles from Hartsfield-Jackson. (I can see the planes take off and land from my classroom window!) I spent the high points of my career way out in the suburbs, and now, after my first “retirement,” I feel like I’ve come full circle.
At the end of this past school year, I felt very keenly this idea of “coming full circle,” and asked my mom to spend the day with me on a trip down memory lane. We started at my current school in College Park and then we headed south into Riverdale. We hadn’t been back in years and years. The changes were drastic and jarring.
My friends’ houses remained, of course, in the same physical space as I remembered, but everything about them had lessened in brightness and intensity. The neighborhood had somehow shrunk into itself; what I perceived as a child to be an expansive street and community space, now seemed somewhat narrow and confining.
We finally pulled up in front of our former home. It has quite obviously not been painted in the 35 years since we moved out, and it looked unkempt, showing a generation of neglect. No matter how badly it displayed its age, the mere sight of it prompted an outpouring of memories between me and my mom as we talked about all of the wonderful times we had experienced there.
We even went to our old church and to both my elementary and my high school. The whole tour was surreal, surprising, nostalgic, and cathartic. A success.
Though my own trip “home” was therapeutic and beneficial, I couldn’t help but think about many of my school friends who might also wish to seek out a tether to their youth in the form of their own “lost” neighborhoods. For so many of them, however, the opportunity to go “home” is now impossible because those reminders of childhood and adolescence simply don’t exist anymore.
In May 2001 construction began on Hartsfield-Jackson’s “Fifth Runway”; it was completed in May 2006. Costing $1.28 billion the runway holds the distinction of being the only existing airport in the country to cross over a major interstate highway - I-285 in this case.
When local governments and businesses first proposed the expansion, they employed a mighty PR campaign to tout the inevitable increase in jobs and revenue and decrease in flight delays; it was an extremely well-executed attempt to justify the enormous price tag of the project and simultaneously assuage the fears and concerns of metro residents, particularly those on the south side of town.
The monetary cost of the Fifth Runway was only the beginning, however, for many businesses had to be relocated, land had to be condemned, and many neighborhoods stretching between Forest Park and Riverdale were completely obliterated.
Local resident Hannah Palmer unearths the rootlessness created by the Hartsfield-Jackson airport expansion in her book Flight Path. Part memoir, part local history, Palmer’s narrative traces the changes in her life through her connection to her childhood homes, all three of which were destroyed to make way for the new runway.
My best friend’s home was a casualty of the expansion. No chance now for her to reconnect with her roots and rediscover pieces of her lost childhood, and I hesitate to share my experience of “coming full circle” with her. Even after all of these years I’m not sure how strong her emotional attachment to her childhood home is (or was).
Image courtesy of Unsplash
Just as author Hannah Palmer’s yearnings for home and roots coincided with transformative events, including marriage and pregnancies, our desire to come full circle and find our foundations often intersects with changes in our own lives: milestone birthdays, new jobs, deaths, divorces, and the like.
The opportunity to return to the physical houses of our childhood may be out of reach for us, but, fortunately, home is more than bricks and mortar. It’s a feeling of security, closeness, and comfort that comes from shared family moments at home, on vacation, or even at the airport. It’s the calm in the storm, the stolen moment of solace amidst life’s turbulence, available within us whenever we need an extra boost of the familiar.
Home is what we take with us wherever we go.
For more information on the Lost Neighborhoods of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, check out Hannah Palmer’s Flight Path, published in 2017 by Hub City Press.
