To Omaha and Back

I went to Omaha yesterday. That's Omaha, Nebraska. I woke up at 5 a.m., when it was pitch black out, got dressed, ambled out to my Skyline car while I was still half-asleep, and closed my eyes all the way to Newark Airport. Newark, because there's only one direct flight to Omaha in the Tri-State area: Continental Airlines, out of Newark. (Yes, C.A.C.A.) The good news? I got there in 20 minutes. There was hardly any traffic.

I slept most of the flight, which was a little over three hours. Occasionally, I'd wake up and look out the window, where, on the ground below, a mosaic of colors and shapes, green and brown and yellow and red, covered the landscape. Here and there, the patchwork was broken by tufts of trees, tiny, isolated, and controlled forests. They looked out of place amid the surrounding flatlands. The further west we flew, the larger the shapes became. Dense, urban centers gave way to open fields dotted by a lonely house or grain silo. I thought to myself, people live here, people live their entire lives in these quiet towns. Then they die and they get buried somewhere, probably not far from where they were born. How many young kids from the small towns I'm flying over dream of living where I live, trying to make it in the big city? How many couldn't care less, and are perfectly happy to stay where they are? How many would rather go west, to California? Then I thought, this is America. How different we are, how different our outlooks, priorities, and goals.

The Midwest is as foreign to me as China. I know it's there, but I rarely think of it, until I'm forced to, like during an election, or when I'm passing over it.

I landed in Omaha. Walking through the airport, I felt self-conscious, like I stood out. I was a strange man in a strange land. Maybe it was the suit and tie I had on. People around wore jean shorts and t-shirts. They looked mellow. Sedate. It wasn't like Chicago or even Cleveland, where you might expect to see a few suits. There didn't seem to be too many businesspeople walking around. I flagged a taxi, which took me to the nondescript building on Pacific Street, that I'd reserved for my deposition. It was 25 minutes from the airport, a straight shot on the highway. There was no traffic to speak of. I thought how nice it must be to live in a place with so much space and so little aggravation on the road. Do they get traffic jams? Can't be. The place was flat. Pancake flat. Did I say that already? I saw next to nothing of Omaha itself. It was small, I know that. I'm not sure I'd even call it a city. But I can't judge because I was there for a total of five hours. Four of those hours were in a conference room, where I deposed a 64 year-old man about why he screwed my client over on his ERISA benefits.

When my deposition ended, I rushed back to the airport. I wouldn't have minded spending the night, just to check the place out and maybe try one o' dem famous Omaha steaks, but I didn't want the client to get stuck paying for it. So I called a taxi (you don't flag taxis in Omaha, you call and wait half an hour for one to arrive). Soon, I was back at the Omaha airport. Less than an hour after that, I was back on another small plane and headed to Newark.

I touched down in Newark after the sun had gone down. The sky was pitch black, just the way I remembered it from that morning. On the car ride back to NYC, I saw this light in the distance, a solid beam shooting straight up into the sky. At first, I thought it was one of those casino advertisements, you know, like at Luxor in Vegas, where they shoot a light straight up to try to get you to drive over and figure out what it is before you lose all your money. Or maybe a UFO was abducting someone. The light looked right out of X-Files.

Further along, I realized that there were actually two beams of light, and they were coming from downtown New York. We drove closer and closer to them, and they got bigger and bigger. Right before the Holland Tunnel, they loomed large above me, two enormous beacons directed to the heavens. Through the tunnel, exit on the other side, and there they were again, right in front of me. To my right was the street where the towers fell. Up close, they were these huge, electric lasers rocketing into the sky. They were the color of a gas flame, right before it catches fire. Outside my car window was the bustle of the city, so different from what I'd left in Omaha, people eating hot dogs, a couple kissing in the middle of the sidewalk, young girls cackling at each other. City noise, something that normally annoys me, suddenly felt familiar and warm. So close to where tragedy struck seven years ago. I thought, how different this city is now from the days and months that followed those cruel moments of death and destruction. How resilient it is, we are. We're back to being happy and carefree, even as those lights remind us once a year of what happened seven years ago and what could happen again. I thought how foreign our lives are compared to those of people who live in Omaha and other parts of the country, the people from small, quiet places where buildings and subways don't blow up, where terrorism is something that happens somewhere else, where foreign policy is more about the word "foreign" and less about the word "policy." And yet, we are all part of the same country. We are all Americans.

I didn't see the lights again until tonight, when I exited the subway on Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg after work, looked up, and there they were, just over the short townhouses in front of me. They loomed so large, it looked like they were just around the corner. I couldn't stop looking at them. That's the effect they have. No matter where you are in New York, they compel your attention. When it's cloudy, as it was tonight, the twin lights hit the clouds with two small circles that look like vampire bites. When the wind shifts, the circles combine together into what looks like a passageway to another world. It's as if those lights took all the people who suffered and died on 9/11, all the people on the planes, all the people in the buildings and transported them to a place without pain, without hate, without physical cares. Those beautiful, ethereal lights remind us of what we are at our core: not mortal bodies that decay and die, but light, spirit, and love, all of which are eternal and live forever.