I’ve never been a big smoker.

Sure, every now and then at the bar I’ll bum a Marlboro, light or medium, depending on the mood. And while I lived in New York, I smoked occasionally because it’s the law that New York journalists sit at their computers with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, spectacles pulled to the tips of their noses and fogged over from the swill of newsroom smoke.

You’re obligated to complain about how early the bars close and your minuscule paychecks, too.

And sometimes I’ll light a couple up when I’m super stressed, like the day I found out someone had stuffed the Daily’s mock election ballot box. This was but a mere few hours after I returned from a 3 a.m. run to our printing plant in Webster City to fix a way-wrong story. The Daily’s loading dock had just a few, probably more like 10, smoked-to-the-butt cigarettes floating around that day.

Never mind the fact that I found the pack in the bottom drawer of my desk. The expiration date had come and gone around the turn of the century. No matter.

At any rate, I really don’t understand this addiction to tobacco thing. See, when I smoke, I have however many cigarettes I want or think I need, and then I go about my business. And when I need them again — whether it’s in a hour or next year — I buy a pack.

No big deal.

So until this weekend, I had always thought that tobacco addiction was somewhat of a poor cop-out, a nice way to blame someone else for wanting a cheap buzz.

Then I hit four airports in two days on my way to and from our nation’s capital over the Easter weekend. I’m sitting next to this lady, Ellen from Alabama, who’s slightly more fidgety than a 2-year-old who’s just drunk a Pepsi Big Slam in the course of 20 minutes.

I mean this lady’s twitching and tapping, tossing and turning. And oh yeah — she’s annoying the hell out of me.

I doze off somewhere over Virginia and wake up just before we land in Cincinnati. Ellen, not her real name, has since told everyone within a 15-mile radius that she needs a cigarette. Evidently, she needs one pretty bad because her bottom lip is nearly chewed raw. That may be a slight dramatization, but not much.

The plane lands, as planes often do, and after breaking the very strict rule of not unbuckling her seat belt before the plane comes to a complete stop, Ellen is lined up at the door. Knowing it would be pointless to argue, the stewardpeople, as they’re now called, let her be.

And being the intriguing young man with 90 minutes before my next flight that I am, I of course follow her.

And what a ride it was.

We dart through concourses, over rivers and through food courts with total disregard for life, liberty or small children in strollers. Our destination, if you had to ask, was this 10-by-20 hole in the wall on the far end of the airport.

I wasn’t sure just what it was at first. As we got closer at near-cheetah speed, however, I began to think that perhaps it was a fire. I soon realized that it was the only area designated for smoking in the airport. I thought for sure this box was the mouth of hell, but for Ellen, it was life itself.

By the time I caught up to her she looked like a million bucks.

She was sitting on a bench with her legs crossed and a cigarette between two fingers. From her facial expression, I thought she might have been smoking a Jim Morrison-style Marlboro, but after a second gaze through the white foam of freedom, I decided she was simply as happy as that 2-year-old who just relieved himself after downing a Big Slam in the course of 20 minutes.

I decided right then and there that if I ever needed something, anything really, as bad as Ellen needed a cigarette, then I probably shouldn’t have it.

As for this addiction thing, I’m still a little confused. Was it the cigarette that made Ellen happy, or could she have gotten the same relief buzz from visiting the bathroom an hour after doing a 64-ouncer?

I must do more research.

See you on the loading dock.

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Chris Miller is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown. He is editor in chief of the Daily.