Sweet, sweet Berber

I love flying.  I love the feeling of being inside a giant monster that can just shoot itself up in the air and stay there.  I love the final moments of anticipation as the plane starts to land and it seems that it is just hovering above the runway.  "It should have touched ground already, it should have touched" I always think in my head as the seconds before the wheels hit the ground seem to turn into minutes.  More than flying I love being in airports and people watching.  I hate buying water for $4 dollars but I love watching other people do it.  There are the business men in their crisp suits and tiny carry-ons, the moms in their cargo capri pants herding kids, girls in their sweat pants and old couples full of gold jewelry.  

But the past couple of times I've flown I've been more uninterested in the people around me and more interested in the different carpet patterns you find in airports.  There are some truly heinous (and by heinous I mean beautiful in an I would never put it in my own house kind of way, but I still respect it) carpet patterns out there right under our feet if we would just take the time to notice. 

Well I have taken the time to notice and document various carpet patterns seen in airports.  All are taken with the same pair of slip-ons that act as a control in this series so you have something to gauge the carpet against.

It's another one of those professions that you never think about like designing ice-skating or wrestling costumes, but somebody is designing these industrial carpets.  

And some of them are fantastic!!!

I'm sure that people around me were a little puzzled when I would stop in the middle of the floor, pull out my phone and take snapshots of the ground.  But they can't see what I see: geometric explosions of color and texture colliding in a symphony of berber cascading through the airport like the creek that used to run behind my friend Carrie's house.  The creek that had sheep bathing and pooping in it with water skeeters and probably leeches that we splashed around in regularly.  Hindsight tells me I was lucky to escape without losing a limb to some horrible flesh-eating disease from that canal.  But who cared anyways?  It was the 80's and you could play in dirty, disease ridden canals without consequence.  And you could also come up with geometric patterns that would rule the world for the next 30+ years and still be gracing the carpet we commute on.  I took a record 35 flights last summer over the period of 4 months (go ahead, I dare you to beat it) and hopefully I will take a couple less this summer but prepare yourselves for some more carpet art from across the country as I travel coast to coast.  Next up: Boca Raton, FL.  That is guaranteed sweet carpet.