Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (36 page)

—

Sometimes when I fly to Los Angeles I arrive from the northwest, from over the shadowed mountains of Malibu, and the city suddenly looms into view like a bowl of phosphorescence gathered from the surface of the Pacific. Los Angeles, from a clear night above it, may alone explain why Joan Didion wrote that “the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.” Even when you come to Los Angeles from the east, from over the land, the deserts are all but empty until you overfly the last great crescent of the city’s mountains. In this sense the city approached from any direction is an island, ablaze between two oceans.

It is hard to fly into Los Angeles and not to feel that its cultural and geographic positions are as well matched as those of Plymouth Rock; that human and physical geography are hardly worth teasing apart here. The western flow of a nation’s cultural energy has reached its terminus and, at night, we see how the light has pooled, like the Pacific it meets, against the beaches and mountains.

If, as a pilot, I could listen to music during an approach and landing only once in my career, I would choose a night arrival in Los Angeles. The air above the city is often free from cloud, and there is a sense that it is hiding beyond its mountains, that its location is privileged by its geography, that we must cross over mountains, or all the Pacific, to approach it. My mother’s hometown in Pennsylvania is in the coal country, nestled in a small bowl surrounded by dark hills. When I was a child, each time we drove there at night there was a moment when we came over the last crest of the road into the sudden prospects of the lights of the surprisingly densely settled town below. The view ahead then was as bright an image of a city as Los Angeles is to me now, when, like the starling of Richard Wilbur’s poem that vaults over “the sill of the world,” the 747 I am flying crosses over the San Bernardino mountains and follows the nerves of the gathering freeways to the ocean.

The name of Los Angeles, too, is perhaps the finest of all the world’s large cities, melodic and evocative not only of flight but of a metropolis that to many remains dreamlike. Then there is the scale of the city, the visual oxymoron of its sprawling density, so marvelous at night and from altitude, as if only a city with such a name could be so blessed in light. Turning in flight over Los Angeles after sunset is like turning over nowhere else on the earth. To one side is the electrified bloom of an American-edged night, and to the other, where the wing lifts over the ocean, is a window filled with stars.

A night city may appear after crossing not a continent, but a sea. The East Coast of America, with its large and energy-profligate urban agglomerations, offers singular experiences of night-coast arrival. In the cockpit there are tantalizing hints that a coast is approaching. We may switch from long-distance radios to shorter-range, higher-quality frequencies. The needles on the navigation display that show ground-based radio aids will quiver and spin to life as they acquire the first coastal stations. Shortly after, the first lights appear on the horizon.

Here is a 747, coming to the end of its ocean crossing; here it is tacking high in the ice-wind, making good its steady arc toward the light of landfall. I’m certain that the curve of the planet is apparent at these moments, the land’s bowed edge rotating toward us like some long, elegant face, a horizon drawn from the glowing serrations of cities.

The pull of such moments is caught up in the historical weight of what we are doing—the physical crossing of the Atlantic, in six hours instead of six weeks, to reach America and its gleaming nets of coastal city light. Partly, too, there must be some ancient sense of relief at the thought—and then, of course, the sight—of land after a long absence over open water. But mostly I love the visual pace of an approaching coastline. It’s something about the way in which the horizontal lights, compacted into a distant line by the angle of vision, gradually expand and turn, revealing the liquid of electricity that we have channeled along the open canals of roads, to the cities that have amassed along the circumference of a continent.

Few coasts are as marvelously straight or well lit as Florida’s eastern seaboard appears to be. The boundary between water and light forms a long blade of incandescence that we cross in the last stages of the descent to Miami, all the more striking after six or seven hours of unbroken oceanic murk. For several years my schedule did not take me to Miami, and when I went back at last it was easy to see the city’s ever more Hong Kong–like skyline as a kind of jewel, suspended in the night between Manhattan and Rio on a hemispheric arc of cultural longitude.

If I like a song or two about leaving New York, my preferred aerial song of the city would be one of arrival from far out at sea. The city looks as if a huge vase of pixels had been tipped over Manhattan, stacking and tumbling outward, flattening into the suburbs and gradually disappearing into the dark forests of the continent’s interior, as if in some computer-age myth of its foundation. The city’s bays and rivers glow in this reflected, electric gold; while further out the waters are themselves scattered with the constellated lights of vessels, as if an autumn storm had blown particles of light from the land where they first fell, onto the pitch-dark waters of the city’s maritime approaches.

On an eastbound flight from America, Ireland often appears as both the night and the journey are nearing their ends. Even after the most routine Atlantic crossing the sight can bring to mind the “dawn of their return,” the words for the hope taken from the eyes of Odysseus’ shipmates. The newly sighted land is criss-crossed with creases of illumination, the weave laid over a darkness that looks like history itself. The lights lie most densely around the coast and remain clearly lit even as the horizon above them whitens with dawn. It is a coast that makes me think of half-awoken villages and fishermen already started out from their settlements along the Rorschach-like fractals of the shore. Here is the dawn of return, as simple a view as we will ever have of it; here are lands braided softly with light, and the end of our night’s journey across the ocean they face.

—

Following my father’s death—a year and a half after our flight together to Budapest—the world I saw from airplanes, particularly the world I saw at night, changed. Like many people who lose a parent, especially at a relatively young age, I felt that something about the finite nature of life, previously irrelevant or obscured to me, had suddenly come into focus. A nurse might feel time’s new weight in piled stacks of medical records, a mechanic in rust and repairs, and an architect in an often-renovated old building’s palimpsest of styles. I saw it in what I was spending a large part of my hours above: the human geography of light on the earth.

The patterns we perceive from above—of country lanes and suburban cul-de-sacs, seething freeways, the warehouses storing up whatever it is we will buy tomorrow, the vast pages of parking lots, the steady proud pulse of red on radio masts—is necessarily disconnected from any individual life. We see, instead, the collective infrastructure of all our individual lives, the luminous netting that stands for us but is not us; the lights that suggest a line from Leonard Cohen—“we are so lightly here.” If in a moment everyone vanished from a city at night, for some time it would look much the same. The beauty of a night view of a city, though a city is something made of life, made for life, thus has a kind of distance and fragility, a formal or distracted indifference, like the blinking language of lit windows on an apartment building as evening draws on.

Above the world at night I was struck by the thought that this—distant, cold, busy, unaware of those gazing down—is how the world might look to my father now. Indeed, a common corollary of grief—the bewilderment of other people going on with their business, shopping, driving, walking, laughing—was heightened, perhaps, because I saw more evidence of it than most.

Friends, unprompted, occasionally tell me about a memorable flight—a flight on which they stared from the window for hours, perhaps, in silence or listening to music, caught by something they had not seen or noticed before. I’m struck by how often the flight they describe to me is one they were taking because a loved one had suddenly fallen ill or died. Such journeys seem conducive to a kind of outward-looking introspection, perhaps because we are likely to be tired or jet-lagged, and because in the rush of calls with family, friends, and doctors, the hours on the plane may be the only time for several weeks that we are alone with our thoughts. We are crossing, too, both mentally and physically, from the time and place before we had this news to some new reality. In the first months after my father died I often wondered how many passengers on the plane I was piloting were traveling because someone had died or was gravely ill, and how the lights of the world below the plane might look to them on such a night.

Astronauts have reported that Belgium is easy to spot; on photographs of the earth at night, the country is a continuous splash of white light, as bright as any city. One of Europe’s most densely populated countries, Belgium also has one of the world’s densest and best-lit road networks. From the altitude of a plane, the lights appear not white but yellow-orange. As I see it so often when flying from London, Belgium appears first as a flat sea of illuminations beyond the shadowy contours of the Channel, a land as densely webbed and light-fractured as a cracked sheet of safety glass, that tilts up toward us in two senses, as we simultaneously fly closer to it and climb higher above it.

Belgium’s immediate neighbors survive with less profligate road-lighting policies. This means that on a clear night the sinuous and oft-ignored borders of Belgium are apparent to an aerial observer. The land grows darker beyond their line. I look for the lights of the French city of Lille (or Rijsel, as the once-Flemish city is still known in Dutch), and then let my eye cross northeast, over the frontier of light. This is how I spot my father’s hometown from an airplane; how I found it the night he was sitting in the front of the cabin, not 10 feet away from the locked cockpit of the airplane I was flying.

There are other borders that are visible in light; the line between India and Pakistan is one of the brightest and most famous of these light-drawn frontiers. But the sight of my father’s homeland marked out in light was dear to me for a long time after he died. So much of someone is where they are from; and my father’s past was a different country in more than the usual ways. He told me once how curious it was to return to Belgium and not know the Dutch words for technologies, for example, that were invented or became popular only after he left. In the months after he died, when I climbed out from London and saw Belgium turning toward me on the night eye of the planet, I thought of what lights a pilot in 1931, the year he was born, would have seen from where I was in the sky, and about my aunts and uncles and many cousins, their ordinary evenings passing in the lights ahead of the climbing airplane on this night. Belgium, the land that was most on my mind then, lay before me as the light of memory on the darkness of the past, and the borders of these thoughts were so clear, almost as if, in the nights after a parent dies, everyone’s ancestral lands briefly glowed more brightly.

—

Above the loneliest places on the earth, I’ve come to appreciate another, less personal experience of light below. Typically, over the nearly uninhabited portions of the globe—the Sahara, Siberia, most of Canada and Australia—you will see no lights at all, or a handful at most. But sometimes, in a very remote area, or if clouds are obscuring adjacent parts of the land, you might see only a single light. A vast sea of darkness—indeed, this effect occurs over the ocean, too, when the airplane overflies a ship—and, floating on it, a solitary light.

A solitary light reminds us of something primal: embers, a beacon. From the airplane all we can see, aside from the light, is the scale of the night that surrounds it; in fact, we see the immensity of such an enclosing darkness far more clearly than anyone on the ground could. A lonely light suggests a fragility and intimacy that cities do not, however beautiful and intricate their nights may appear from above.

When I see such a light, I think back to bitterly cold nights in my childhood, when, crunching through the snow, I would carry a handful of logs back to our house glowing from the soft light of the woodstove. The impossibility of knowing who is down there becomes its own wonder. Is it perhaps a generator in a small village powering a light that will soon be turned off? Or is it several lights—bulbs strung together between houses around a dusty square—that appear as one from so far above? From this high up it is likely to be the numerous lights of a small settlement that have been merged together by our altitude. Will someone whose lit evening has called down my eye look up and see a jet blinking across the stars? Will they speculate on where we are going, which two distant cities our racing light connects? And how long would it take me to find them again, on the ground? Days, certainly; a flight, probably two, to a place with a great many lights; followed by a long, surely arduous overland journey to the place that appeared as only one.

—

Alexander Graham Bell once prophesied that planes would lift away from the ground carrying the weight of 1,000 bricks. The weight of 1,000 bricks is a little over 2 tons. On the 747, a typical
pantry weight
—an allowance that accounts not for passengers or baggage but merely for the food, drink, and related supplies carried onboard—is over 6 tons, or several thousand bricks (a 747’s typical
payload
—passengers, baggage, cargo—is 30 to 40 tons). Weight is a constant consideration in the design process of an aircraft. An engineer on the original 747 cried when the new plane was put on a diet and some of his beloved features were removed.

The weight of an airplane changes dramatically during flight, as fuel is burned. The 15 gallons in a typical car’s fuel tank weigh around 90 pounds, roughly one-fortieth of the car’s total weight. A jet that departs from Singapore to London may weigh 380 tons. About a tenth of that may be useful payload, while more than 150 tons, or two-fifths, is fuel, nearly all of which will be gone before landing.