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Recently in Salon Health & Body

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That was my experience one afternoon inside a glass-walled smoking room at the Continental terminal of San Francisco International Airport. As with most places I can't imagine going to, I felt a little uncomfortable walking in. But no one paid me any mind. Oddly, pathetically, being taken for a smoker made me feel kind of cool. (Why do I admit these things to anyone?)

I took off my coat and sat down. As I did not then light up a cigarette, but merely sat there looking around and smiling stupidly, the smokers soon began to suspect that something was up -- that they had a ding-dong in their midst, a nonsmoker who didn't realize she was sitting in a smoking room. One summer during college I walked in off the street to apply for a job at what I took to be a bar but in fact was a strip joint. I do not have the requisite equipment or general air of a stripper, and the manager must have suspected that I was a naive ding-dong but did not know exactly what to say. I was getting that same sort of look in the smoking room.

Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

I told the smokers I was writing an article about airport smoking rooms. Amazingly, no one questioned this. People never do. I could have told them I was doing an article on the global impact of wheeled luggage and they'd have nodded agreeably and tried to help. People are great.

"As smoking rooms go, this one isn't bad," said a woman from Idaho named Darla, who reminded me of Michelle Pfeiffer. (I didn't expect this; I expected everyone to look like Steve Buscemi.) I looked around. You could write your name in the haze over our heads. The ashtrays had no sand, and the vent on the ceiling was hairy with dust. It was hard to imagine what bad was.

"Atlanta," offered a woman in a gray suit, whacking a pack of Kents on the back of her hand. "Salt Lake City's is the worst," said Darla. "I mean, OK, we like to smoke, but that place is ridiculous." Another smoker nominated D.C.: "You go in there, you don't even need to light up." (This was a line I would hear three times that afternoon. It's the "Hot enough for you?" of airport smoking rooms.)

Most of the country's worst smoking rooms were built in the early '90s. "The early ones were almost set up as punitive to smokers," says George Benda, CEO of Chelsea Group Ltd., a ventilation consulting firm in Itasca, Ill. "They just sort of walled things up and said, 'Let's make this as obnoxious as we can, and maybe they'll just go away.'" These days, with funding from tobacco giants Philip Morris and Brown & Williamson, airports and their concessionaires are working with firms like Chelsea Group to build properly ventilated bar-restaurant smoking areas. Denver has a popular one (the Aviator's Club), as does Richmond, Va. (the Hitching Post). Says Benda, "It's a major trend. Airports are waking up to the fact that smokers are people. And not only that, smokers are people who eat."

Within five minutes, Darla had left. The typical stay in a smoking room, I realized, is equivalent to the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Somehow I had imagined that smokers spend their entire stay at the airport inside these rooms, just as they spend their entire meal in the smoking section of a restaurant. But this was stupid. Of course they leave.

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