Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (40 page)

At takeoff, particularly on a heavy airliner, there is an exquisitely balanced moment of hesitance when, at the stage called
rotation,
the plane’s nose is first raised. This sense of aerial equivocation is not entirely imaginary, not entirely a consequence of any lingering, atavistic disbelief in the possibility of ever taking to the sky. At rotation the nose lifts, which means the tail must fall, and passengers in the rear of the plane may correctly feel that they have lowered in the sky at the moment they expected the opposite to happen. They go down before they go up. Then at liftoff, which comes shortly after rotation, the aircraft’s weight at last leaves the wheels and rests fully into the upturned arc of the more sharply bending wings, which again may give the briefest sensation of settling back.

These effects, which give way to soaring almost before we can recognize them, add up to flight’s most liminal moment, as if the articles of faith, or the numbers behind the physics of the enterprise, must be quickly incanted or calculated again each time we take flight.

Takeoff’s brief pause, that hanging in the in-between, finds its twin at the end of each flight. In the last few hundred vertical feet of our journey from London, as I start to feel the ground effect, I lower the nose slightly, remove a touch of power. The captain calls out the new thrust I’ve intuitively set so that I need not look at the gauges. At about 30 feet above Japan I pull the nose up and begin to close the thrust levers. I feel again that moment of poise: the sense that continued flight is as likely as anything else, that a question has been asked but not answered. Then the hard-won lift runs like water from the wings, and we land.

—

Often I fly over a place that is tied to my own life in some way. Sometimes when I fly to Boston I don’t stay at the official crew hotel; instead I visit friends north of the city. The next evening the climbing airplane passes right over their town. If I see the river near my friends’ home, I will think about the table they laid for me and the grateful pilot who came to their place and felt no sort of lag, until it was time to fly away.

Sometimes I fly over a place I have known in another context or time, and the sight gives a new life to the memory, a depth I might not find even if I traveled there again. When I was a child my family spent a few summers on Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, in a cabin where even in July the mornings were cold enough to require a fire. Occasionally I see the corner we knew of that lake from the sky. To come across it again now that I am three or four times the age I was when I last swam there, in seasons other than the summers I knew it in—to see it frozen and snow-covered, or lined with autumn colors, looking from high up as if the turning trees were mere red lichen around a pool lying in the indent of a rock in a forest—has been a happy experience. In summer, when I see the boats on the lake below, their wakes like the trails of comets on the sky-blue water, and think about the young families in them, it’s not quite that I feel that I am looking back in time. But certainly from above, and from so many years later, the lake takes on a wholeness that is indistinguishable from my memory of it.

Often I hear colleagues say, in a jet over Britain, that they are within a few miles of their own house—or right over it. They say this without looking out the window; sometimes they say it when we are in cloud. They know the bearings and the beacons, the miles to home.

On flights from London to Mexico City I now and then pass over the part of the world that I know best, western Massachusetts, where I grew up. We always spent all the holidays with a group of three other families who were friends of my parents; they are like aunts and uncles, and their children are like my cousins, all the more so now that my parents are gone. Western Massachusetts from above looks like the place they came to and the place I came from. There is not much to distinguish it from the surrounding forested lands. I’m comforted, somehow, that most everyone else onboard would see only trees.

Even the mountain here, Mount Greylock, at only 3,491 feet is hard to pick out, though it is the tallest in Massachusetts. The war memorial on top of it, a tall stone tower beneath which we had many picnics when I was a child, is the best clue. When I find the mountain I think of Herman Melville, looking up at it from his desk in Pittsfield, between thoughts of less landlocked places. Often I overfly western Massachusetts not long after crossing the ocean from Europe. If there is a solid deck of fresh snow or cloud over the land, I remember that it was winter’s obliteration of this countryside that gave Melville “a sort of sea-feeling here in the country,” that he would look from his house on the land as from “a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic” and wonder, as the winter wind howled around, if there was “too much sail on the house.”

—

Before I became a pilot, if you had asked me to talk about a city that I had visited, I might have thought first of its architecture, its food, or a memorable event from my first visit there. Now I tend to think first of its geographic situation: what it looks like from above and far away; whether it is on the edge of mountains or the sea or a desert; what ideas of land give way, like distance itself, to the fact of Vancouver or Milan. These are places that feel different to me even when I walk through them, because I know what it looks like to arrive in them from the sky. This is one of the satisfactions of my job that surprised me: not flight itself but this almost anachronistically literal awareness of how cities rest on the physical world.

There is another category of city, though, for which the aerial, geographic sense of a place does not augment other impressions of it, because I have no other impressions. Doha, Athens, Kiev, Ankara, Tripoli, Buenos Aires, Zagreb; I have landed in these cities and then flown away, without ever leaving the airport. Sometimes I have not even left my seat.

In this category of cities it’s Moscow that I’ve flown to most often. I could tell you how unusually round Moscow looks, the metropolitan phenotype that is the privilege of cities born in flat and landlocked places. I might mention Moscow’s multiple, concentric ring roads—one of which roughly corresponds to the city’s medieval boundaries and gates—that glow in the pitch-black winter nights like the rings of an electric cooktop. When I flew the Airbus and went often to Moscow we were not permitted to fly over the city center, nor were we usually permitted to fly around it in a counterclockwise direction, and so we would fly nearly three-quarters of a circle around the city, as if it were an aerial traffic circle. On such arrivals it felt that we were orbiting, caught in the gravity of the city, and that the aircraft’s wide, long turns echoed the purpose and the shape of the ring roads below.

I could tell you more than I ever expected to know about Moscow’s weather, and something about the Muscovites I met who worked at the airport or whom I met on my flights. From above at night, I have seen the whole of the city more clearly than many people who live there ever will, set on the land like some great fired wheel turning on the snow, encircled by the dark forests, under the navigation lights of the airplanes banking around it.

Yet in nearly every other sense I am a stranger to Moscow, and perhaps the worst kind, who may decide he knows something of a place from only a series of brief exposures to the most abstracted and antiseptic of views. What lie within the ring roads, for me, are lights, not individuals. Whatever I might imagine of the lives in the city comes from television and novels and history books.

Perhaps this is only an extreme version of how we experience any place, even one where we get out and walk around, even the one we live in. We will never know more than an absurdly small portion of any city or landscape. But still, when I’m asked if I have been to Moscow, the question makes me a little uncomfortable. No matter how many people I’ve taken home to the city, no matter how many times I have followed its transformation from a distant glow to a circular galaxy of light and at last into the physical sensation of touchdown, I feel that no is the only possible answer to the question of whether I have been there.

The skies of Alaska are relatively busy. There are many airplanes and aviation is important, for good reason—with its residents living in a few concentrated areas and many small settlements separated by vast distances, towering mountains, inhospitable terrain, and water in its least convenient forms, Alaska is a microcosm of the jet-age planet. John McPhee, in
Coming into the Country,
describes how Alaskans, if asked whether they’ve been to a place that they’ve seen from the air but where they haven’t stood upon the ground, may reply with a qualified sort of yes; they may say that they’ve “flown it.”

The question of what it means to fly a place arises not only for cities but for whole lands. I have long been fascinated by Arabia—by its appearance on maps and globes or in old tales encountered in childhood, by the name I saw so long ago, etched on the side of a plane moving slowly over the ice-ridged taxiways at Kennedy Airport. When I fly now over Arabia and imagine and say its names to myself—Jeddah, Medina, Mecca, Dhahran, and Riyadh—and then see something of Saudi Arabia’s present day, its solar panels and crop circles, the cold, sprawling glitter of desert cities in the furnace of summer nights, the coasts and highways shining up like the most perfect map of the country in my mind, I feel that I can say I know something of the place.

But airplanes, as I first began to realize when I marveled at that Saudi jet, connect our ideas of place as much as the actual places. From above, it is hard to imagine learning something about Arabia that could not be instantly incorporated into my sense of it from the sky, that could not fit into an aerial viewfinder whose breadth is both its marvel and its weakness. My skyborne sense of a place like Arabia could hold almost anything I half remember hearing about it in childhood or anything I might learn about it elsewhere; and so, I fear, maybe it holds nothing at all.

Sadly, perhaps, this feeling did not change as much as I thought it might, when I went to Riyadh for the first time not long ago. I slept for most of my short visit and made my way out of the hotel only on two brief excursions. When you hear a song you know well on the radio, at low volume in a place crowded with other noises, you can just about follow it; but the unfamiliar song that comes next is something you cannot begin to get traction or purchase on—you only hear the occasional deepest beats. It’s almost just noise. That’s a feeling I associate with my briefest stays in places I don’t otherwise know well, such as Riyadh; that even having spent a night in the city I have still only flown the place.

After many years of flying over Greenland—flying the place that I perhaps most love to fly—I was given a book by Gretel Ehrlich about it. She narrates the story of Ikuo Oshima, who moved from Japan to Greenland many years ago and adopted a traditional hunting lifestyle in Siorapaluk, one of the northernmost settlements of the world. From his new home, Oshima sees satellites pass overhead—satellites, he is told, that can read car license plates. He wonders about one of them, looking now down at Tokyo, then, hardly later at all, down at him in Greenland, “standing at the ice edge dressed in polar bear pants and holding a harpoon.” He wonders how the satellite feels. “Maybe confused and broken.” More than once I’ve flown over Japan and Greenland in the same week. The satellite, I suspect, has place lag.

At the end of
Stuart Little,
Stuart comes to a fork in the road. Unsure of where to go, he stops, then meets a telephone repairman working nearby. The repairman advises Stuart to head north and tells him of some places—orchards, lakes, fields bordered by “crooked fences broken by years of standing still”—that Stuart may find in his adventure to come. “They are a long way from here,” warns the man. “And a person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”

When I spin a globe my inclination is to stop it at Mongolia. Have I been to Mongolia? I would say that I have flown it, and very fast. The border of Mongolia comes not long after the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Then I may see the perfect blue computer-screen circle that stands for the airport named after Genghis Khan. I might have dedicated my whole career to a place such as Mongolia, the name that caught my ear or eye as a child. I might have put my whole life into some subspecialty of its history or geology or linguistics, lived there even. But I long first of all for the name, then the place it attaches to, a place that is pleasing to me to imagine. From above, perhaps, I see this imagined place as much as I do the real land below.

Sometimes when I see the first peaks of Mongolia I think of Stuart, stopping to consider a stranger’s advice, then looking over “the great land that stretched before him” and driving off into the morning. The reality of the place and the morning ahead is indisputable. There is no doubt, this is Mongolia that rolls into view as ordinarily as the day. Again and again I have seen the sun rise on the place itself, on peaks dusted with snow in all seasons, and seen the light descend into the shadowed glow of tawny valleys, where it falls across the occasional surprise of a road. Then, whatever the truth of the place, whatever I’ve gained or lost, the whole of it turns away under the line of the wing. The great eye of the world blinks, and now we are somewhere else.

—

Whenever I am not sure where I am in anything but the most literal, the most what-is-the-name-of-this-city sense, whenever I have to stop and think what continent I was on a few days ago, I try to remember that flying has deepened my love of home.

I don’t mean by this that I appreciate more than I otherwise might the specific advantages of the places where I grew up or have lived. I do appreciate some things about home more but others less. Seeing so much of the world, a pilot can too easily wonder why every city can’t have the train stations of Beijing, the outdoor swimming pools of Helsinki, the cycle paths of Amsterdam, the friendly taxi drivers of Vancouver, or the devotion to public greenery of Singapore.