Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (60 page)

For a long while I stood there on the bluff in the summer sunshine, staring into the transparent blue water of the Atlantic. I was acutely aware of history here at Bartolomeu Dias’s Cabo Tormentoso (the Portuguese navigator’s Cape of Storms, a foreboding appellation his king would later change to Cabo da Boa Esperanca, Cape of Good Hope). Cook and Darwin anchored here as did, in 1522, the remnant of that part of Magellan’s crew under Sebastian del Cano. In those days it had taken as many months as it now takes hours to come this far south from Europe, and an indifferent sea swamped and crushed the Dutch jachts and Iberian caravels like a child’s paper sailers. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent so many years, was just to the north. A few miles to the southeast was Skildergat Cave, a 35,000-year-old early human site. All of this was once the country of the Khoikhoi people, long since gone now to Namibia and Botswana, where they are called San and among whom are the much studied !Kung.

My companion was speaking English with a friend. When he lapsed into Afrikaans I recalled how, over the past few days, I had been scrambling to get even the simplest grasp of Malay, Thai, Hindi. I was moving carelessly around the planet. Beneath the familiar jet lag I began to sense something else. I looked up past my shoulder at the quiet oak and pine forests of Table Mountain, da Gama’s defining pivot. It had a peculiar time to it, as indigenous as its rock. I could not take that time with me, nor bring my own time here and drape it possessively over the mountain. In that moment I glimpsed the impunity with which I was traveling and the inseparability of time and space in geography. The dispensation I enjoyed from the historical restraints of immense distance had created an illusion about time: the earth’s spaces might vary terrifically — the moonlight reflecting last night on Shatt Al-Melghir, a saline lake in barren eastern Algeria, was not the same moonlight shining back from the icy reaches of Cook Inlet in Anchorage — but time, until this moment, had seemed a seamless thing, never qualitatively different. Everywhere I went, time continued the same, an imperial present. At most, in these depots and their environs, I was resetting my watch.

As I stood there gazing at Table Mountain, then back at the transparent Atlantic, I knew that the mountain’s time was not my time. I was on this other, no-Sunday, no-night on-time, international commercial time. I sought out my friend and asked, “Shouldn’t we be getting back?” I was beginning to behave as if the present were only a preparation for the future. When I phoned my wife to say that I was bewildered, that it was as though all the rests in a symphony had become threats, she said, “It’s because you’re not going anywhere, you’re just going.”

Two changes in the late 1980s boosted the growth of international airfreight. Up until then, shipping by air meant being assured that your goods would arrive at such-and-such an airport with in forty-eight hours of a promised time. Today, for an average of one to four dollars per pound, a customer expects guaranteed, on-time delivery; and increasingly that service is door-to-door, not airport-to-airport. The largest airfreight operation in the world (though the bulk of what they haul is small packets) is Federal Express. Next, in descending order of tonnage carried, are Lufthansa, UPS, and Air France, then Korean Air and Northwest. (At present, profitability in the industry remains marginal while airlines continue to maneuver for market share.)

Most air cargo, according to an industry forecaster, now consists of “high-value, time-perishable, consumer items.” The business is driven by three things: the growing expectation, worldwide, of having whatever one wants tomorrow, not next week or next month; by frequent changes in fashion and in the design of basic products; and by a great disparity in labor costs from one country to the next. Much of what one sees aboard a freighter is placeless merchandise; except for the cost of employing a person, it might have been manufactured almost anywhere, including the country of destination. A museum director in Los Angeles found it less expensive, for example, to have the museum’s entire red sandstone facade quarried in India, airfreighted to Japan to be dressed, and then flown to Los Angeles than to have it quarried, dressed, and trucked in from Minnesota.

Companies ship phone books from the United States to India to have the names inexpensively keyed in on mailing lists. Automobile insurance claims travel by the boxful from Miami to Manila to be processed by people who are not only cheaper to employ but who make fewer mistakes than the clerks for hire in Miami. And air shippers, exploiting the same small margins that currency traders do, find it less costly to have, say, nine tons of rayon blouses machine cut in Hong Kong and flown to Beijing to be finished by hand than to have all the work done in Hong Kong — before the blouses are flown on to Frankfurt or Chicago.

On long eight- and ten-hour trips on the freighters, I often left the flight deck, though it seemed always to be offering me some spectacular view of the earth — Mt. Pinatubo smoldering in the depopulated Zambales Mountains on Luzon, or L’Anse aux Meadows, a stark site on the northern tip of Newfoundland, where the Norse established a community circa 1000
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Leaving these, I’d climb down the narrow, folding aluminum stairs and stroll the perimeter aisles around the cargo load. Containerized or wrapped in plastic, tagged with coded routing labels, the shipments were frequently difficult to identify with out the help of manifests or air waybills. One night out of Taipei: 17 cartons of basketballs for Boston; 5,898 pounds of sunglasses headed for Atlanta; 85 cartons of women’s polyester pajamas for Columbus, Ohio; cameras, men’s ties, battery-operated action heroes variously directed; and 312 pounds of wristwatches for New York. What I saw very often seemed the fulfillment of mail-order-catalogue dreams. The celebrity in air freight, in fact, and the airplane’s ability to gather and distribute goods over huge distances in a matter of hours have made the growth of 800-number stores like J. Crew, Land’s End, and Victoria’s Secret possible. By promoting “just in time” delivery — neither a sweater, a comic book, nor a jet engine arrives until the moment it’s needed — airfreight companies have also 1) changed the way businesses define inventory, 2) made it possible for stores to turn storage space into display space, and 3) forced governments to reconsider the notion of an inventory tax.

What planes carry, generally, is what people imagine they want. Right now.

Back at D. F. Malan International Airport in Cape Town, I watched a six-man crew load Cape wines, salted snook bound for New York, 3,056 pounds of ostrich meat for Brussels, and one Wheaton terrier named Diggs for Toronto.

My guide told me that the fellow shipping ostrich meat, frustrated by a lack of cargo space out of Cape Town, had a restaurant in California interested, but with out the space he couldn’t close the deal. We were looking at the aircraft I had come in on, a 747–400 passenger plane with about 5,900 cubic feet of tower-hold cargo space (passenger baggage might take up only 20 percent of this). Depending on the demand for passenger seating, KLM might occasionally fly a 747–400 Combi into Cape Town, an aircraft in which the aft section of the main deck is given over to seven pallets of freight, while passengers are seated in the forward section — an efficient way for airlines to take advantage of fluctuations in both passenger and freight markets.

Tons of fish, he said, let alone more ostrich meat, could be shipped from Cape Town if only he could guarantee his customers the room. Today he’d be happy to squeeze a surfboard into the bulk-cargo hold, the space farthest aft on the lower deck, a last-on, first-off, loose-loaded compartment, where mail, air waybills, crew baggage, and, today, the Wheaton terrier went. We continued to exchange stories about peculiar things one sees on board — a yacht headed for an America’s Cup race; a tropical-hardwood bowling alley from Bangkok; in San Francisco enough boxed Bing cherries, tied three to a bunch and packed neat as flashlight batteries, to fill one 747 freighter after another (27,000 cubic feet). They’re not supposed to, but one of the pilots told me he liked to sit in the Ferraris and Lamborghinis he flew. “I’ve driven them many miles,” the pilot said, “and very fast.”

Business was good, but strange, I told my guide. Two days ago, on what pilots call the Tashkent Route between Europe and the cities of Karachi, Delhi, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta (via Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia, because the Himalayas are too high and Iranian air space too dangerous), I had seen rocket fire and streams of tracer ammunition in Kabul, Taleban “extremists” and their entrenched opponents. People were being shot dead below, but to the east a full moon was rising rapidly, orange and huge as the sun. It sharply silhouetted the sawtooth peaks of southern ranges in the Hindu Kush. Farther to the southeast, beyond the Khyber Pass and high above the Indus River, a hundred miles of lightning bolts flared and jangled along a storm front. With one glance I took it all in: rockets flaming across the streets below, the silent moon, rain falling in the Indus Valley from a ceiling of cloud, above which the black vault of the sky glittered with stars.

On the Tashkent Route, air-traffic controllers in Dushanbe, Tadzhikistan, pass you on to Lahore, skipping chaotic Kabul altogether. Their voices crackle on the high-frequency radio like explosions of glass, trilling aviation English in the high-pitched intonation of a muezzin. At Lahore, you can see the Pakistani border stretching away south into the Punjab, a beaded snake of security lighting. From here west all the way to Libya (whose air-traffic controllers reprimand you that it is not Libya but “Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Territory”), religious and political tension is pointedly apparent from the sky. Coming up from Dubai, we would swing far out to the west over Saudi Arabia to be wide of Iraq, then dogleg north across Jordan, keeping east of Israel. Leaving Lebanon, we’d enter disputed air space over eastern Cyprus. Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot air-traffic controllers do not play dangerous games with commercial aircraft, but, together with the Syrians, they contest the right among themselves to assign you flight levels and headings. Once across Turkey we’d bear north to stay east of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Every pilot I spoke with had a story of the white-orange flash of lethal fighting seen from above, the named and the unnamed wars of the modem era, fought in Timor, in the Punjab, in what were once called the lawless hinterlands but which are now as accessible as Detroit or Alice Springs.

On the return flight to Johannesburg from Cape Town, I glanced through data comparing this 747–400 with others in KLM’s fleet.
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Each 747, despite being built to the same specifications and being fitted with the same engines, consistently burns slightly more or less fuel, or “performs differently against the book,” depending. Northwest Airlines currently flies eight 747-200 freighters into the Far East; I flew on four of them, trying to gain a feeling for their personalities. (With so much history, distance, and weather, I thought — so many accidents, repairs, and strange cargos — there had to be personality.) Once I stayed with a single aircraft from Hong Kong through Taipei to Tokyo, then on to Anchorage, Chicago, and New York before turning back for Seattle — in all, about 12,000 nautical miles in 56 hours. Reading the plane’s operating certificates (posted on a lavatory bulkhead in the cockpit) and its logbooks, and after marking all its accessible spaces, what I found was distinctiveness, not personality.

It was two-thirty in the morning and raining when we landed in Seattle. After the dehydrating hours aloft, mildly hypoxic, my tissues swollen from undissolved nitrogen, I was glad for the wet, oxygen-rich air at sea level. With a security escort shifting from foot to foot at my side, I drew in the night air deeply and brushed rain across my face. I’d been with the plane through five crew changes, and an uncomplicated affection had built up for all it had done while the crews came and went.

The freighter’s belly was glazed with a thin film of oil. In it, and in exhaust grime on the engine’s housing, mechanics had finger-traced graffiti. (Inside, on cargo compartment walls, ground crews often scrawl insults, some of a sexual nature, aimed at ground crews in other cities. On inaccessible surfaces with in the wings, I was told by riveters at the Boeing plant, some leave declarations of love.)

The fifteen-year-old plane’s thin (.063 inches) tempered-aluminum skin was scraped and dented, and it bore a half dozen aluminum patches. (In an effort to keep the plane on schedule, some of these minor tears were first repaired provisionally with “speed tape.”) Its windows were micropitted, its 32-ply tires slightly worn, its livery paint chipped. Looking aft from a point near the turn of its flat, streaked belly, I realized for the first time that the plane had the curved flanks of a baleen whale, in a scale exact to the extended flukes of its horizontal stabilizer.

I first flew with horses on a Northwest flight, out of O’Hare on a bitterly cold February night.
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Sixteen were headed for lives on Hokkaido ranches among the well-to-do: a Percheron stallion, twelve Appaloosas, and three quarter horses, accompanied by two handlers.

We were delayed getting out. The driver of one of the loaders, a steerable platform used to raise cargo fifteen feet to the rear cargo door, accidentally rammed the plane, punching a hole in a canoe fairing (a cover protecting a jackscrew that extends the plane’s flaps and “fairs,” or tapers, this protrusion into the wing). We also had to replace an exhaust-gas temperature gauge on the number-three engine, the sort of maintenance that goes on regularly.

The pilot made a shallow climb out of Chicago to lessen the strain on the horses’ back legs. He headed out over Wisconsin and Minnesota on a slight zigzag that would take us from one way point to another en route to Anchorage. Planes rarely fly a direct route between airports unless the skies are relatively empty, usually late at night, the time when most freight moves. Freighter pilots, some of whom wear bat wings instead of eagle wings and refer to themselves as “freight dogs,” call it “flying the backside of the clock.”