Logistics

I had the rare pleasure of an approach pattern into O’Hare today from the west.  I think something like 90% of approaches into O’Hare come from the east, which usually is a good thing because I tend to fly transcontinental via Chicago east to west, and an eastern approach saves time; west to east, I try to go from one coast to the other because it’s usually a red-eye and you want the longest flight possible in order to get something approaching a normal night’s sleep.  East to west, though, it’s probably going to be an end-of-day flight, and all you want is speed and a short layover.  That means you’re going to go through Chicago if you’re a United frequent flyer such as myself.

Anyhoo, as I say, the prevailing winds mean you normally come in over Lake Michigan, skirting north of the Loop (and if you have an A window seat, you get an extraordinary view of Chicago’s skyscrapers, parks, and infrastructure).  But the approach to the west takes you through a different landscape.  There’s a Liz Phair song about it, starting with an amazing lyric that sometimes makes me smile, sometimes makes me cry:

I was flying into Chicago at night
Watching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke
The sun was setting to the left of the plane
And the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow
In 27D, I was behind the wing
Watching landscape roll out
Like credits on a screen

The earth looked like it was lit from within
Like a poorly assembled electrical ball
As we moved out of the farmlands, into the grid
The plan of a city was all that you saw
And all of these people sitting totally still
As the ground raced beneath them thirty thousand feet down[1]

I’ve seen that view a few dozen times, from seats ranging from 1A to 39F, sometimes alone, sometimes with a beautiful woman asleep next to me, sometimes with an overweight stranger breathing heavily next to me, sometimes with a child more beautiful than any woman asleep next to me.  It takes my breath away; I grab my phone and call up Liz Phair on iTunes, and we share it again together, watching Chicago’s grid spool out below as we approach runway 10R South.

Such was the case today, as the largely empty plane approached from the southeast and, when the seat belt light came on indicating initial approach, we did the unexpected and banked left, to the west, on a brilliant Sunday afternoon.  Those Canadians must be up to something, creating a weather pattern that cleared the cold humid lakefront air out over the prairies of northern Illinois, forcing us out over Rock Island, banking then right to glide in over Aurora and the Fox River and along the straight rail lines of the Burlington Northern, glancing away only at the last minute to drop lightly onto the tarmac of 10R South, past the Lufthansa cargo terminal, the American Airlines terminal with an oddly prominent sign advertising the American Airlines Credit Union, and with the strong winds allowing for a short runway landing, a quick jot to the left and into the C pier at Terminal 2.

My father grew up in Aurora, and spent most of the first three decades of his life there, so it’s fun for me to have the opportunity to at least fly over that flat landscape which allowed me, in a certain way, to exist.  But it also gave me pause to think about just how much the human landscape has been transformed in the last twenty years or so.  I’ve been flying these routes in and out of Chicago – a lot, I mean really, a lot – since I was maybe 19 or so, but the western approach into Chicago is unusual enough that it’s kind of like seeing a young niece or nephew every few years: while their parents don’t notice it, the kids change tremendously when you see them only occasionally.  The kid usually is put off by your expression of surprise, mild or otherwise, but to you, little Arthur or Charlie or Susan looks like a foreign object all of the sudden: they now have pimples and gangly limbs where once was the smooth baby skin of a chubby cheek.  Their cornsilk hair has given way to a kind of freakish bob, their willing submission to a big uncle’s hug now replaced by a shrug and maybe a diffident handshake.  “My how they’ve changed,” you say, while their mother and father give you a shrug themselves, born of familiarity and parental indifference, and quickly turn the subject to how the drive in from the airport treated you.

Suburban Chicago has been growing for awhile, much longer than I’ve been flying to be sure; it was one of the first major metropolises to develop the exurban “execu-park” as growing companies escaped the taxes, traffic, and hassle of a downtown headquarters for a sprawling, gleaming three-story complex with a 10-story pillar in the center to act as a kind of corporate all-seeing oracle in the center, with convenient parking either above ground for the cheap or below ground for those in denial of the fact that the only way any of this made sense was with personal mass-ownership of internal combustion.  Out on the outer loop expressways, with plywood country club subdivisions sprawling in all directions around them, Motorola, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, and other stalwards of mid-American commerce built a pleasant-ish set of oases surrounding the western approaches to the city.  They were scattered, though, like lotus leaves on the underlying pond of Illinois prairie.  In between them lay snakes of two-ribboned highways – this being the Midwest, typically concrete and shiny tan-grey as seen from 20,000 feet on initial approach, not the black asphalt of the roads on the coasts.  It was a Frank Lloyd Wright paradise, a Broadacre City dream.

Now, though, the dream has been shattered.  It’s not as though there’s been any densification – Wright would have spun fast enough to generate electricity in his grave had that been the case.  Rather, the spaces have been filled in with the spectacular new visions of logistics.

At 20,000 feet you start to notice both the quantity and the size of the warehouses which are being built and which surround most major cities, particularly those with major port facilities.  Logistics is the art and science of moving things; it could be military hardware – that’s where the word originated – but it could be people, it could be stuff.  Mostly, though, it’s stuff[2], because stuff gives you the most options.  Stuff – boxes of inanimate objects – doesn’t much mind how it is moved, in fact it has no opinion about how it’s moved.  Therefore you can use whatever movement method you want, so long as it’s timely for the joint function of producer and consumer, and doesn’t do anything overly stressful for the stuff involved in the movement.

Three hundred years ago, not much stuff moved very far at all.  Most stuff that had to move had to be worth a lot of money in order to be able to justify the movement; as a result, storage of stuff was limited to (a) preserving the value of really expensive stuff, which mostly involved security but also involved some consideration of environmental factors (don’t let it spoil, etc.), and (b) storing things that almost by definition had some decent shelf life to it, because the movement speeds weren’t that fast and therefore really perishable stuff was never even going to survive transport, let alone storage.

Over the past three hundred years, though, clever beings that we are, we’ve developed incredibly fast ways of transporting stuff.  We’ve invented things which are both durable and transportable and valuable, like, you know, electronics.  We’ve also developed incredibly efficient ways of transporting stuff, with trains and trucks and airplanes and container ships and bulk dry carriers and PANAMAX sized vessels.  We’ve also developed really good ways of storing stuff that otherwise might be perishable, up to and almost including people (think hub-and-spoke airline systems, which store humans at the O’Hare Hilton or the YYZ Fairmont as they wait to go from Europe to North America or vice versa).  That means that logistics has gone from a specialized art – mostly devoted to figuring out how to mobilize armies quickly once you’ve decided to invade Poland – to a generalized need for everything done all the time.

Logistics is the amazing, wonderful, terrible, terrorizing art of pulling every atom of the planet into tight embrace with every other atom of the planet in the service of human desire. Indeed, the logical endpoint of logistics is the creation of an infinitely complete map to allow for the construction and onward delivery of any object at any time that can satisfy a given human desire, said map also taking into account the related variables of cost to transport, time to transport, and value of said human desire.  It is, really, the quintessential human thought experiment – even more essential than my personal obsession, banking, which is the human thought experiment which expresses the instantaneous relative value of human desires.  Although they are related, clearly, and maybe that’s why I find both so fascinating: our desires are, ultimately, limited by physical realities (the time required to move object A into our sphere of desire; the time Z which represents our time in this reality; the space between object A and ourselves).  Banking’s function of instantaneously expressing relative value is thus intertwined with logistics’ ability to deliver those objects of value – of desire – more quickly or more efficiently towards those who derive said value.

Isn’t it amazing, though, how selfish – how self-serving – all of this is… it’s just about our desires.  No one has attempted yet to create a system which incorporates non-human value into the system of money; similarly, no one creates logistics networks to meet non-human derived desires.  Sure, we sometimes may talk about it – “let’s save the whales” – but it really only expresses a human desire – “oops, we might kill the whales and that seems to us like a really awful thing to us oh no”.  We only create logistics networks – and only create money and banking expressions of value – because of us.  We don’t really care about anything else.

What was stunning to me, coming in on slow descent from the west into O’Hare, on a 737 coming into approach on 10Center next to an MD-90 coming into 10L, was how logistics now dominated the landscape, the actual physical footprint of the earth as viewed from above.  No longer were the lilypads of execu-parks and suburbs separated by fields and ponds of, you know, non-human stuff; now there was just continual infill of endless warehouses, using the thin threads of concrete to hook into the movement ecosystem of O’Hare and its cargo terminals, the bulbs of railyards, the loops of interstates.  These buildings are flat, featureless, and enormous: larger than anything that came before, larger than the terminals of O’Hare, larger than the sprawls of Woodfield Mall.  The semi-trailers and stepvans which surround them are not even ants next to their scale: at 20,000 feet, where Soldiers Field would seem like a tiny beetle, these logistics centers still felt large.  Even at scale, they took up meaningful space of one’s visual arc.

For the first time in my life, I’ve lived for the past several years in two inland cities – San Antonio first and now Atlanta – and I now realize ports are not just on the coast.  Ports are where we move our stuff, and it is everywhere, anywhere there is a node of travel to contend with and focus the delivery of human desire.  Fly over wherever two digit interstates intersect and you’ll find a knot, a tumor of endless giant flat buildings.  Wherever those interstates intersect there will be a decent sized airport, and that will likely predict where the logistics centers lie.  If it is close to the Mississippi, or the Thames, or the Rhine, or the coast, there will be an obviously expanded set of rail links and highways to ensure connection.

We have created all of this to feed our desire for stuff.  It’s amazing – it’s actually sort of beautiful in its way if one shuts off the ability to see beauty in non-human objects.  There is an abstract beauty in humankind’s ability to knit a pattern of commodity transformation and, really, delivery – the delivery of desire fulfilment.  It is ugly, horrific, when considering the selfishness of the object – but the network created has a beauty on par with Pollock, or maybe more accurately, with the gilded and over the top efforts of Hieronymous Bosch, or the Beach Boys and Pink Floyd’s baroque walls of sounds, or the conflagrations of Beaux Arts absurdistly gilded late 19th century downtown palaces.  None of them work but we still pause and love their, well, beauty… and then we by need move on.  This is the world of early 21st century logistics, though: this world-moving and earth-transforming exercise, none of it directly mandated by a king or a government, none of it shaped by anything other than our greed and lust and desire for stuff.  Stuff cheaper, fresher, faster.

I’m writing this at 38,000 feet, en route to Seattle to pick up my son and bring him back to Atlanta with me so his mom doesn’t have to worry about missing work.  It’s at a time when the human side of logistics is shutting down – we don’t want people to talk to one another – but the logistics of moving stuff is more important than ever.  We need to get stuff to ourselves to survive – food of course, but also masks and aspirin and blankets and the like.  Plus all the stuff we want, like booze and drugs and whatnot.

We are tool-creating animals, I get that.  We are not, actually, self-reflective animals; although we have the capacity for recursive thinking, we use that capability mostly to solve tool-making puzzles.  But it seems like we have approached the moment where that recursion needs to be applied to our own desires, to whether or not our desires make any real sense or not, to what the downstream consequences of our desires are.  Our logistical solutions have changed the landscape of our world, to the point where you can’t ignore it even at distance, height, remove.  But they haven’t done anything to examine our relationship to the world or to one another.

Don’t get me wrong, I also see the hypocrisy of this essay: I’m flying 5,000 miles in 24 hours to get my son, simply because my ex-wife doesn’t have easy access to childcare.  That if anything is what’s making me write this.  Once my son is safe, once we’re together tomorrow afternoon in a house outside Atlanta, once he’s filled his belly and I’ve taken away the iPad and we’ve played our first board game, I’m going to think about those desires of mine.  It won’t be pretty.

My point, though, is to ask us to see the beauty in that which is not human, that which has nothing human whatsoever to do with it.  I’m loosely associated with a group called Renewal in the Wilderness in Maine; it celebrates first and foremost the idea that we become better humans by approaching nature in its own state.  It’s getting harder to see the beauty in solely human exercises, frankly; it seems just narcissistic.  We are clever enough.  I think the ability to stop desiring stuff and simply to observe that which we encounter is more than enough for a little while.  After all we’ll still be human; we’ll still need nourishment and shelter and clothes and, likely, a smartphone.  But I don’t need logistics to appreciate the beauty of the earth without me.  I just need to exist.

[1] I’ll point out that seat 27D is an aisle seat in any plane which would place it behind the wing, but it does work much better musically than saying 27F or 27A, so I get it from a songwriter’s perspective.  She would have been flying from somewhere south (sun settling to the left of the plane) and most likely from Los Angeles or Phoenix, somewhere west enough that you would have that unearthly glow effect late enough at night to still see the grid of the city unfurl below.  And on that basis, she was almost certainly in 27F – right side of the plane, the dark side at sunset.  And probably midsummer; you get this amazing effect midsummer of the sun having set north of the horizon, but the earth below is dark behind the earth’s shadow.

[2] I dedicate this essay to George Carlin, and his “My shit is stuff, but your stuff is shit” routine, which was the first truly profane comedy routine I ever heard and remains one of the most perfect expressions of the failure of human empathy ever composed.  RIP, George, and thanks for speaking the truth.