About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (14 page)

Moving forward up the starboard aisle, I finally stand in an eerie place, at the forward edge of the main deck, looking at the backside of the fiberglass radar dome that fills the plane’s nose. I look down into an open bay framed on either side by large jackscrews which push the nose out and up for loading through
the front. The lip of this precipice, which I grip with my toes, is as close as one can get to standing on the bow of a ship. I spread my arms wide for balance, shut my eyes, and lean into the velocity of the plane. The sound of the engines is behind me, inaudible over the scream of air.

C
HIEF PILOTS
, or captains, men in their early fifties “in the left-hand seat,” tend to gaze to some purpose out the windows of the cockpit, while copilots, men (and, rarely, women), in their midthirties, remain focused within the plane.

In the evolution of modern jet flight, there has been a dramatic shift away from the use of navigation references outside the plane, such as rivers, to the use of electronically displayed information within the plane. Some of the copilots I spoke with, in fact, had only hazy notions of the geography they flew over. They were inclined to fly “heads down,” studying a route map, reviewing the flight plan (a sequence of way points, an expected fuel burn, the speed and direction of winds aloft), and watching their instruments and display screens. On the most advanced commercial aircraft, it is the copilots who are frequently caught up in the protracted task of programming the plane’s computers. (“I don’t fly anymore,” they joke, “but I can type sixty words a minute.”)
^*

The chief pilots, many of them, possess a notable, unique knowledge of how the Earth has changed over the past thirty years; how much farther south the Sahara Desert has crept, how much the Aral Sea has shrunk, how far center-pivot irrigation has spread in Saudi Arabia. It’s knowledge that predates satellite imagery and often is more historically integrated. Many of these pilots learned the Earth’s surfaces when older planes held them to lower altitudes, when ground marks like pipelines and lakes were more important to navigation. Today, in advanced aircraft,
they routinely fly high above the weather, on automatic pilot, and descend less often for fuel. A dispatcher in a windowless international office half a world away may organize a sense of geography for them and radio in, even telephone with any changes in the flight plan, due, say, to increased storm activity. There’s little need to watch the weather, or anything else.

Pilots say they “fly by wire” now, no longer sensing the plane’s response in their hands and feet. They refer to “cockpit management skills” more often than their “stick-and-rudder ability.” In the 747–400, they monitor six separate cathode-ray screens, mesmerizing as small televisions. In this kind of self-absorbed travel, built on a dashboard knowledge of one’s surroundings, a sense of both geographic scale and particularity is ruptured. Flights cover huge distances in a few hours; matriculation at a chain hotel, often reached on a crew bus driven down an advertising corridor like the airport’s passenger corridors, is brief. English is spoken everywhere. Anacin, 7-Up,
Rambo
, CNN, Ray-Ban, and
Time
are omnipresent. Reality outside the plane slowly merges with a comforting, authoritative, and self-referential world found within it.

J
ET LAG IS
popularly construed as an affliction of the unseasoned traveler, a preventable distraction. No pilot I talked to regarded it as such but rather as a sort of spatial and temporal abuse which, by the time you reach your fifties, can overwhelm you on a single trip.

Over many days of flying, I fought my own idiosyncratic battle with jet lag, following the common advice of pilots to sleep when you’re tired and eat when you’re hungry. When I got home, after traveling 30,000 or 40,000 miles in ten days, I would fall into bed like an iron ingot dropped in the dust. On the road, like the pilots, I endured the symptoms of a jagged, asynchronous life. No matter how exhilarating a trip might have been, I sensed upon leaving the plane that a thrashing like the agitation of a washing machine had ended, and that, slightly dazed, I was now drifting off my path, a yawing ship. My tissues felt leaden.
Memory seemed a pea suspended in the empty hulk of my body. I had the impression my mind was searching for the matching ends of myriad broken connections and that it was vaguely panicked by the effort. The fabric of awareness felt discontinuous. Time shoaled, losing its familiar depth and resonance. I craved darkness and stillness. I believed that without darkness and stillness no dreams would come and that without dreams there would be no recovery. Once, in a hotel, I slept on solely to dream.

If you drink copious amounts of water, breathe oxygen occasionally while you’re aloft, eat very sparingly during the flight, and decline coffee and other diuretics, you can diminish the effects of jet lag. But the pilots and aeromedical officers I spoke with said the symptoms are so inevitable and intractable, you have to learn to accommodate them.

Pilots get regular checkups, many of them exercise, and most appear and feel fit. The physical hazards of long-term flying are relatively minor—an increased incidence of cataracts, high-frequency hearing loss (beginning in the right ear for copilots and becoming more severe in the left ear with pilots)—or are unknown—the effect, for example, of regular exposure to high doses of cosmic radiation. Pilots more than copilots will tell you that whatever health hazards they may face, they love flying too much to give it up. Many think that jet lag is the principal cause of chronic moodiness, a prime source of tension in their domestic relationships. But they view separation and divorce as grim contemporary realities, and say resignedly that they are very well paid for what they do.

I liked the pilots I flew with. They have a remarkable ability to relax for hours in a state of alertness (pilots describe the job as “hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror”). They seem able to monitor an instrument’s unwavering reading and run technical checklists repeatedly without mentally wandering or reimagining the information. Their hand movements in the cockpit are slow, smooth, direct; they concentrate on precision and routine, on thoroughness. The virtues they admire—dedication
to a job, loyalty, allegiance to a code—are more military than corporate. Some, like generals, carry with them a peculiar, haggard isolation.

S
TANDING BETWEEN
the pilots on the Singapore flight, my neck bowed beneath the overhead instrument panel, I could take the most commanding view possible of space outside the plane. From here, still over the South China Sea, I could see outlying islands in the Spratly Archipelago to the southeast. To the northwest were the distant mouths of the Mekong: Cua Tranh De, Cua Dinh An, Cua Ham Luong. A while later, Indonesia’s Bunguran Selatan Archipelago loomed off the port side, the translucent sea turquoise over its reefs. Afternoon light from the bare orb of the sun filled the clear air at 37,000 feet with a tangible effulgence that made the island of Subi and the water seem closer. We looked down from the keep of our own wind, through layers of wind, to wind on the water; below that, the surface current ran at an angle to currents still deeper. Toward Karimata Strait, between Borneo and Belitung Island to the south, a single layer of thin stratus cloud cast its shadow over a hundred square miles of water. Beyond, the sea was brightly lit once more. Because detail on the water resumed there again with the same brilliance after fading in the foreground, the huge shadow’s interruption created the illusion that the distant water was lit by light from another kingdom.

Ending a long silence in the cockpit, the captain said, “The Earth is beautiful.”

On our approach to Singapore smoke began pouring out of the window vents—warm, humid air from outside condensing in our dry interior. The pilots enjoyed my alarm.

On the ground, while the plane was unloaded, and then reloaded for Bangkok and Tokyo, I strolled through mown grasses in an adjacent field. Two common mynah birds landed on the plane’s port wing.

T
HE HOTEL IN
Seoul was just west of Mt. Namsan Park in Yongsan-Ku, in the city’s southwest quarter. The crew bus would not leave for the airport for four hours, and I had risen before sunrise to take a long walk. I wanted to see things that couldn’t be purchased.

I walked north from the hotel through a cramped residential district. Seoul is a city of granite hills, of crags and pinnacles. On this winter morning it filled gradually with a diffuse gray light under heavy, overcast skies. As I wandered the narrow streets, I endeavored not to seem too curious about what was displayed on the shelves of small stores attached to small two-story houses. Instead I observed what sort of bicycles people rode, what kind of clothing they wore against the cold—indigenous solutions to common problems. I studied the spines of books displayed in a window, the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean titles mixed, their ideograms so clearly different in comparison. I could not see past a street reflection in the window glass whether a companion volume was in Arabic.

Some Westerners traveling today in the Middle East may experience what they take for irritation over religious differences; in Seoul—or Bangkok or Wuhan—the look a Westerner may get walking through residential streets seems more often one of resentment or bewilderment at the imposition of economic change. You are the one responsible, the looks imply, for swift, large-scale painful alterations to my culture; you see them as improvements, but they are designed really only to make business—your sort of business—flow more smoothly. It is you, they seem to say, who define, often and titanically, what is of value.

What I felt—the discomforting gospel of world-encircling consumerism of which I was an inadvertent symbol—I could have felt as an indictment in a dozen other cities. It needn’t have been here, where I only wanted relief from the impact of culture I felt every time the plane landed.

Early in the morning in a city like this, you may see several hundred years of history unfold in just a few hours. The earliest people out are those packing fish up from boats on the Han River, people selling charcoal to shopkeepers or transporting food in handcarts, a manner of life relatively unchanged from 1750. Appearing later are factory workers, headed for parts of Seoul where the smoke and grit ash of nineteenth-century Pittsburgh still cling. Then come department store clerks and employees of large firms, the lower and middle levels of white-collar work. Last out on the sidewalks are expensively dressed men, headed for the Samsung Building or for other corporate offices.

Some in the West see in such rearrangements net gains, others net losses. I do not lean strongly either way, though I’m saddened, as a traveler, by the erosion of languages, the diminishment of other systems of aesthetics, and the loss of what might be called a philosophy of hand tools. It is easy to rue the lack of restraint in promoting consumption as a way of life, but we daily accept myriad commercial solutions to our own discontent—the assuagement of new clothing, new investments, new therapies to ease our disaffections. Some who endure such accelerated living (our advertising presumes) find it a relief periodically to sweep everything into the past, making room for less obligating, more promising products or situations.

It is not difficult to disparage the capitulation in such manic living; what is hard is avoiding the impulse to blame, or the instinct to exempt oneself. Getting dressed at the hotel, I had to smile at the labels in my clothing: J. Crew, Gap, Territory Ahead, Patagonia. My shoes, dark brown suede wingtips, had been made in Korea.

Once, suspended over the North Pacific, I held the image of a loom in my mind. If these flights back and forth across the Pacific are the weft, I wondered, what is the warp, the world already strung, through which my shuttle cuts back and forth? And what pattern will the weave produce?

I picked my way around rain-pocked mounds of snow back to the hotel, down tight alleys backed with fishmongers’ crates.

T
HE PLANE
I boarded out of Seoul was a passenger flight with lower-deck cargo for Narita. There I boarded a freighter bound for New York via Anchorage. In the Jeppesen Manual that most United States pilots carry—a two-inch-thick ring binder of tissue-thin pages containing detailed information about airports—Anchorage is described as a consistently dangerous place to get in and out of. The nearby area experiences a lot of wind shear and turbulence; icing is common in winter.
^*

Pilots recall with little prompting the details of commercial airplane crashes going back many years. Each one is a warning. Their interest is almost entirely technical and legal, not macabre. While I was flying in the Middle East a freighter crashed in Kansas City, killing the three pilots aboard. Although the crew I was with read the story in the
International Herald Tribune
, no one commented. The pilots presume such reports are always confused and therefore misleading. They wait instead for the National Transportation Safety Board findings to appear in
Aviation Week and Space Technology
.