Another flight, another airplane: such a miracle!

By an accident of birth, I belong to that generation who grew up with airplane flights and became accustomed to traveling at 600 miles an hour and 35,000 thousand feet in the air, so the 2,200 miles to Indianapolis takes about five hours.

My father grew up traveling by train. As a boy, he boarded those great long trains of the 1920s to make the trip from Philadelphia to San Diego. He slept overnight in the sleeper bunks and after a couple of days, woke up in the fairyland of southern California where flowers grew as tall as trees and the sky was always blue and the sun always brilliant.

During World War II, he became a navigator on a Navy supply plane from the East Coast to Greenland, and for a war fought by air, his stories of the nighttime flights and arriving at the runways surrounded by in fields of ice had a special kind of glamor. He didn’t pay enough attention to tell me much. He was mostly reading Shakespeare.

As. a boy I remember first the propeller planes for our flights from Cleveland to Chicago, and then I remember the first jet that I ever flew on, and my dad explained to me this mystery of how the jet turbines drew air through its jet tube and then forced it out in back with such power that the thrust lifted the plane. I didn’t really believe it was true, and always kept my fear of crashing a secret.

I’m not actually thinking these thoughts as the plane taxis onto the runway, but the feeling of anticipation, the roar and tremble of the engines and then the speeding down the runway, faster and faster, much faster than any car I’ve ever been in, then that gentle tilt, the pressure on the back of my seat as the engines accelerate and we’re afloat, slowly leaving the runway and the houses of Alameda Island behind.

I look down to my right and see the freight cranes at the Port of Oakland lined along the shore like a colony of praying mantises drinking, and then we wheel to the left, flying above the Bay Bridge, a thin grey string across the bay, but I’m tilted up so I can only see the blue sky softened by mist and fog. Are we heading north? Is this the wrong flight?

The plane is wheeling sharply left and levels off where the edge of the coast meets the ocean, and waves of surf are frozen along the beaches  like a fringe of snow. We are going inland now over the slopes of the mountains by Devils Slide and down below, the green mountains are filled with dark furrows. There’s no sign of buildings, no glints of light off car windshields; these mountains are dense and wild. In San Francisco, we drive around on freeways running along the edges of the dark unknown interiors of these mountains, oblivious to our geographic neighbors that now look from the air as if they’re always as close to us as our pillows are at night in bed.

We loop back over the Santa Cruz Mountains, then later, heading east, cross the wild and snowy Sierra Nevada, never before seen from this height so easily, as if they are just below us and yet thousands of feet to fall into the snow drifts that froze the Donner party. The Sierras tumble to an end and between the two ranges is a dried brown pothole with a whitish lake indistinguishable from the dead burned land around it: Death Valley. Then vast stretches of farmland are a checkerboard of green, gold, blue-maroon, each color for a different crop, and soon I’m falling asleep, my head against the window a foot away from the -50°F air rushing.

Here’s a thought: if I was born and grew up on an airplane that was flying endlessly over the years, and someone told me I was actually 35,000 feet above ground and moving at 600 miles an hour, I would think the person crazy. I don’t feel any movement and the aisles and seats seem permanent and solid. Why should I doubt my senses? Why question my assumptions about the reality I’m living in?

 As I write these words, I’m remembering what happened on my flight. These are reflections after the fact. As I  witnessed the real thing, the real mountains covered with real snow, the real ocean, the real coastline, I searched and searched but found no really true words.  How absurd to call the sky blue… a blue softened by white wisps of clouds…. a thin light blue at the horizon becoming almost purplish at its infinite depth toward space… And the farmland…is this reddish… or a dark blackish kind of reddish-green…or …. ?

During the flight, as we were spinning along between sky and land, I recognized I had no words, only feelings. In the presence of the indescribable, it’s best to honor it with attentive silence.

  ‹ ◊ ›