Airstream #2

Airstream #2

In the studio at Mass MoCA, early morning sun strikes the Airstream, so bright it causes me to see small suns when I look away.  Something makes me picture this trailer abandoned in the desert, the black markings IAO 128 visible from far away. A marker of some sort in the shimmering heat. The yellow post-it referred to “black with scratches,” perhaps the person who inhabited my apartment room also inhabited this studio.



Footsteps on the floor above and the sound of a small motor echoing through the concrete and brick below prevent my mirage from continuing; I move my gaze to the rusting steel girders and two orange clamps holding the Airstream in place fifty feet in the air. Out of its element, it appears to be a trolley car waiting, waiting for passengers that never arrive.

Wally Byam had a dream, a dream to build a travel trailer that would move like a stream of air, be light enough to be towed by a car, and create first-class accommodations anywhere.  I doubt he would have imagined this location for one of his beloved trailers.

On the other hand, in 1931 when he began designing his dream trailer, he probably didn’t imagine that in 1969, when NASA landed men on the moon, one of his trailers would be located on the deck of the USS Hornet, to become a place to quarantine Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins when they returned from their epic trip. No one knew if they would bring germs of new diseases back with them. 1969 was also the year Wally conducted a major re-design, adding a foot in length and creating the longer, rounder shape of this 1973 version, which the history web site refers to as “a more distinct bullet shape,” a description I resist.

Watching the trailer, waiting for something to happen, I am startled by a sudden flock of pigeons, their coverts flashing silver, swooping over the Airstream to land on the roof ridge of a building nearby. The quarantine is over, life arrives in this otherwise lifeless landscape.