The Old Hangar at Chamblee Airport

Lyrics

[Intro]
Saturday morning. Ten o'clock.
The fence wire hums a little tune against my hands.

[Verse 1]
A student pilot in a red Cessna 172.
He's doing his pre-flight check.
Walking the wing, touching the ailerons.
I can smell the 100LL avgas from here.
Sweet and sharp, like a memory I don't own.
The asphalt is still cool.
The tie-down chains clink against the struts.
Just another Saturday at PDK.

[Verse 2]
But that hangar... the big one, set back from the fence.
Corrugated metal, painted a faded white.
It's been here since 1917.
Before the airport, before the runways were paved.
This was Camp Gordon.
This was the 82nd Infantry, learning to march where that runway lies now.
Wooden barracks in rows, right where the Gulfstream jets park.

[Chorus]
There's a ghost of an army under this tarmac.
A ghost of a barracks in the shimmer of the heat.
The Old Hangar just stands there.
Watches the Cessnas go up, watches the sun go down.
And the wind through this fence...
sometimes it sounds like boys from Georgia, a long way from home.

[Verse 3]
They say there's a concrete slab under the grass.
Forty yards north of the hangar door.
Just a flat piece of foundation, unmarked.
From a mess hall, closed down in 1919.
I walk over there sometimes when the grass is cut low.
Try to feel the vibration of a thousand boots.
The clatter of tin plates.

[Chorus]
There's a ghost of an army under this tarmac.
A ghost of a barracks in the shimmer of the heat.
The Old Hangar just stands there.
Watches the business jets land, watches the sun go down.
And the wind through this fence...
sometimes it sounds like boys from Alabama, a long way from home.

[Bridge]
I think about the pilots who aren't in the logbooks.
The Spanish-speaking guys who cut the grass runways in the fifties.
All the hands that have touched this fence.
All the eyes that have watched a plane become a dot in the sky.
This was all just pine trees and red clay.
Then the railroad came.
Then the camp.
Then the planes.
Layer after layer.

[Outro]
The red plane taxis to the end of the runway.
Holds for a second.
And then it lifts.
The sound is gone.
All that's left is the hum in the wire.
And the wind.