Smiles, tears at Yeager Airport

By BOB GREENE

CHARLESTON, W. Va. - The "Welcome Home" signs were the tipoff.

An airport is an airport; at least that's what some of us have come to believe. You fly out of O'Hare, into LaGuardia or LAX or Atlanta's Hartsfield, and you begin to regard yourself and everyone around you as interchangeable parts in the mammoth and impersonal churn of American air travel. You might as well be cargo - the system is designed to move you as routinely and dispassionately as if you were a crate or a bundle.

You even accept that. The world is so big, movement is so endless, that the very meaning of travel has been altered. All of us are nameless, faceless pieces in a board game with no beginning and no end.

Then - in a place like this one - you see the "Welcome Home" signs.

They were visible at the mountain airport here - the field is named in honor of West Virginia-born flying ace Chuck Yeager - both times I've passed through in recent days. Families with signs they made out of cardboard and crayon, families peering toward the sky, waiting for people they love to arrive.

Maybe there are "Welcome Home" signs at O'Hare and the other giant airports, but for all the times I've been there, I've never seen one. The scale of those places is too large, the masses of impatient travelers too intimidating. "Welcome Home" is an emotion best not displayed among tense-faced strangers.

At Yeager Airport there are only four gates. You stand in the boarding area and you can see every other traveler.

Charleston, the state capital, is a town of fewer than 60,000 people. Yeager Airport was carved out of three mountaintops at an elevation of almost 1,000 feet. Travel feels life-sized here; travel feels human.

The men, women and children standing in the airport don't need to check video screens to see if the flight they are waiting for has arrived. They just look to the sky, over the mountains, and seek out a speck that they hope will be here soon. There it is - right there. The speck grows larger, closer, and before long you can see that it's a plane, the one that is due here right now, and then it's on the ground, rolling toward one of those four gates, and the doors open and happy people are running toward those "Welcome Home" signs.

Imagine that at O'Hare - imagine looking at a speck in the sky and knowing that it's the flight you're waiting for. The woman who runs the single security checkpoint at Yeager Airport is like a waitress at a coffee shop who doesn't leave until the last customer has finished; she goes home not at a precise time, but whenever the last plane of the night, a commuter run from Lexington, Ky., comes in (if the plane is on time, she's out of Yeager by midnight; if it's delayed, so is she).

Not that all you see at Yeager Airport is warm and heartening. The other afternoon I witnessed one more wrenching instance of the shameful tableau that has become a part of American summers. A father - absolutely distraught, sobbing - embraced his young son and daughter, saying, "I love you, I love you" to them as they, sobbing too, clutched onto him. Tears were streaming down their faces - they embraced one another until the last possible second, when the children, choking with pain, boarded the plane alone.

Divorce, and custody arrangements, and court-mandated summer visits. You see it all the time - the children who live with one parent, spend vacations with the other parent in a distant city, and then, often by themselves, with airline unaccompanied-minor nametags pinned to their clothes, are sent back to the full-time home. The adults have not been able to work things out; they no longer love the spouses they once loved, so they end the marriages. And one of them moves away.

Leaving the children, who have done nothing to cause this anguish, to be flown back and forth every summer, to feel several weeks of love from a person they may not see again for many months, and then to be put back on an airplane, as if all of this has somehow served them well. The tears of summer - you see it every year.

And you see it most clearly at a place like this one - an airport in the mountains where every traveler has a face, often happy, sometimes sad. Welcome home and goodbye - with an eye toward the not-so-distant sky.

Chicago Tribune