Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (61 page)

Soon after we’re airborne I go down to look at the horses. The animals are lined up in six stalls on the right side of the aircraft, the 2,100-pound black Percheron in the first stall with a bred quarter horse; behind them a leopard Appaloosa stallion with a bred Appaloosa; and behind them, downwind in the flow of air, four stalls of bred and “open” mares, with four fillies and colts. They aren’t sedated, most are dozing. They’ve been left unshod to give them a better hold on the stall floor, and won’t be watered or fed for twenty-four hours in transit. Hemmed in by the usual farrago — aortic valves, poultry-processing equipment, mainframe computers, golf clubs, men’s knit underwear — the horses are strangely peaceful. I can’t hear their breathing or stomach noises over the sound of the engines. I turn the lights out and leave them be.

On the flight deck, a narrow space like a railcar living room, the handlers are slumped with novels in a single row of tourist-class seats toward the rear, the only passenger seats available besides the jump seat. The flight engineer has just brewed a fresh pot of coffee. I settle in behind the captain to peruse the freight manifests. I gaze out the window. Every few minutes I look at the instrument panel in front of the copilot and at the hydraulic, fuel, and electrical panels in front of the flight engineer sitting a few inches to my right.

The 747 is not the biggest freighter in the sky, but in every other way — making long hauls economically on a scheduled basis — it is unrivaled. The biggest plane in regular service is the Russian Antonov 124, a fuel-guzzling, hulking beast of an aircraft that works at the fringes of the world of airfreight, hauling unusual loads on a charter basis. The only way to move emergency equipment (oil-skimming boats, fire-fighting trucks) or large quantities of emergency supplies (medicine, food, gas masks, cots) quickly around the world is on airfreighters, and the Antonov 124 ferries such material routinely and many more unusual things: French fighter planes to Venezuela; 132 tons of stage equipment for a Michael Jackson concert in Bucharest; a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, complete, to Buenos Aires; a 38-ton bull gear to repair an oil tanker stranded in the Persian Gulf; 36,000 cubic feet of cigarettes per flight on repeated trips between Amsterdam and Moscow in December 1992.

Once we gain 18,000 feet, the flight engineer sets our altimeters to read against an atmospheric pressure of 29.92 inches of mercury. We will measure altitude against this pressure until we descend on approach into Anchorage, a standardization that ensures that planes all over the world will figure their altitudes on the same basis once they leave the air space around an airport. We’ve also left local time behind. Now all our communications are based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, formerly Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu time, as it is still sometimes called, the earth’s time zones having once been divided among the letters of the alphabet). Another universal grid we are fixed in is that of degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude. And altitude, of course. (The altimeter shows altitude above mean sea level; if the altimeter reads 7,500 feet over Mexico City, you are 100 feet off the ground.)

These grids provide a common reference, and their uniformity makes flying safer, but there are dissenters around the globe, especially where time zones are concerned. Tonga, along with Russia’s Chukotski Peninsula, insists on occupying a twenty-fifth time zone. When it’s 12:15 on Sunday morning in Tonga, it’s 11:15 on Friday night in Western Samoa, a few hundred miles to the northeast. And against UTC whole hours, central Australia stays on the half hour, Nepal keeps to a three-quarter hour, and Suriname adheres to ten minutes before the hour.
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Virtually everyone communicates over the radio in English, but it is often heavily accented English, and outside customary requests and responses, English is of limited use in areas like China or in what pilots call Sea Asia. Russian pilots, for their part, are unique in insisting on the use of meters per second instead of knots for airspeed, and on meters instead of feet for altitude. In addition, Russian commercial planes don’t use the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, which warns of approaching aircraft, nor do they send out a signal so that planes with the system know they’re there. Pilots learn of the presence of Russian aircraft only through air-traffic controllers. To politely register their disapproval of these tenuous arrangements, European pilots flash their landing lights at approaching Russian planes and wait for a response.

The wide acceptance of such standardized measurements and procedures can lead to the impression that a generally convivial agreement obtains throughout the world. And when, in one week, you transport the same sorts of freight to Cairo, Melbourne, and Rio de Janeiro, it is also easy to draw the conclusion that people everywhere want more or less the same things. However pervasive, the view is illusory. The airplane’s speed and geographic reach benefit the spread of a European and North American consumer ethic, but not all of the world’s cultures can be folded into this shape. One need only leave the airport in Lima or Calcutta or Harare to see how true this is. It is not merely poverty and starvation you see, the ring of another music you hear, or inversions of Western intuition you observe. It is starkly different renderings of the valuable.

Again and again, stalled in boulevard traffic in hot, choking air, feeling the taxi bumped by a languid crosscurrent of beggars, I thought of the speed of the plane, of how much it could leave behind. If we fled quickly enough, I thought, nothing could catch up.

One morning at KLM’s corporate headquarters near Amsterdam, I spoke with a vice president in his corner office. Beyond us, planes were taking off every couple of minutes like salvos. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I was given my father’s watch. I thought that would be my watch for the rest of my life. But I have five watches now, choose one in the morning to match my suit, my tie. You just buy them.” He spread his hands, a gesture of lament and consternation. In an adjacent office, another vice president told me, “Speed is the word. Air cargo is the answer to speed, it makes speed happen.” I could not tell from his piercing look whether he meant it as a summary or an indictment.

An oceanic expanse of gray-white below obscures a foursquare grid of Saskatchewan grain fields, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the plane freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of Bhiwani, Rohtak, Ghaziabad, and a dozen other cities around Delhi, diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots on peninsular Malaysia and in southern Brazil. One clear evening, at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt once unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. Another night, off the eastern coast of Korea, I arose from a nap to see a tight throw of the brightest light I’d ever observed. I thought we were low over a city until I glanced at the horizon and saw the pallid glow of coastal towns between Yongdok and Samch’ok. The light directly below, brilliant as magnesium flares, were those of a South Korean fishing fleet.

Over Anchorage we slam into severe turbulence at 34,000 feet. The plane seems suddenly to shrink, and we are pitched through the sky like a wood chip for ten minutes before we get clear of it and divert to Fairbanks. When I go below with a handler, the horses appear to have come through the violence unfazed. The handler knows and speaks soothingly to each animal. As we go down the line he recalls their breeding histories. Draft horses like the Percheron, he says, are the calmest breed, and working quarter horses are bred for calmness. He isn’t surprised that they are all right and that they settle down quickly.

If you ask pilots which loads they most remember, they mention either costly objects — a $319,000 Bentley, flying 70,000 pounds of gold into Riyadh — or animals. Most say that Vietnamese potbelly pigs are the worst creatures to haul, their stench so permeating that pilots have to strip off their uniforms, seal them in plastic bags, and fly in clothes that they later throw away. (As bad, they say, is a planeload of durians — pulpy, melon-sized fruit whose scent reminds most Westerners of vomit.)

When large animals — draft horses and bulls — kick their stalls in mid-flight, you can feel the plane shudder. Goats and ostriches chew at whatever cargo they can reach. One pilot told me that he went down one night to look at a white tiger. Believing she’d been sedated, he drew close to the bars to peer in. She charged as ferociously as the cage permitted, sending the pilot reeling onto his back. The animal’s roar, he said, drowned out the sound of the engines and nearly stopped his heart.

Pilots remember animals in some detail — wolf puppies turned loose in the cockpit, a killer whale in a tank — because they are alive and making these formidable journeys. Like the pilots.

We wait in Fairbanks until the Anchorage weather quiets, then fly back, landing in light turbulence. A 747 freighter taking off just after we land hits a wind shear, and in less than two seconds accelerates from 210 to 260 knots. An hour later, on takeoff, we abruptly lose 20 knots of airspeed when a headwind collapses. We’re barely airborne when the departure threshold on the runway passes under our wheels. Two hours later our automatic pilot malfunctions. The nose plunges violently and we are in a rapid descent. In one of the swiftest and most assured moves I’ve ever seen a person make, the pilot recovers the plane and brings us back level before we fall 500 feet.

When I again accompany the handlers below, we find the horses awakened by the fall and spooked by our soundless approach. They glare awhile, then doze off.

In these same minutes the sun has just risen (at 30,000 feet it clears the horizon about twenty-two minutes earlier than it does when seen from a spot on the earth directly below), but the moon has not yet set, and for a while I hold both in the same gaze, in a sky that goes from azure to milk-blue between horizons. We are pushing against a 120-knot headwind, common this time of year over the North Pacific. When I ask whether the pilots have names for these winds aloft around the world, the captain says, “No, we haven’t been flying long enough.”

Far beneath us the winds are calmer. The burnished ocean surface seven miles below appears as still as a slab of stone, crinkled like an elephant’s skin. I see one ship headed southwest against the Okhotsk Current, far off the coast of Kamchatka, its wake flared at the characteristic thirty-nine-degree angle.

When Japan looms I feel suddenly very tired. I haven’t slept for thirty hours — traveling to Chicago, then caught up in events surrounding the horses, anticipating the appearance of the aurora borealis en route to Anchorage, listening to the pilots tell stories, looking out the window at the remoteness of Alaska, at the spectacle of clouds. Beneath us, every day, I’d seen buttermilk, mare’s tail, and mackerel skies, then looked in vain through phrase books and small dictionaries for what they are called in Korean, Spanish, Dutch.

We touch down at Narita International Airport at 12:42
P.M
. local standard time. At 12:45 we set the plane’s parking brake at Gate 211.
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At 12:54 Japanese officials open the door and a quarantine officer boards to inspect the horses. Once he is assured of their good health, he leads us down the air stairs where, one by one, we step gingerly through a plastic basin of disinfectant. The horse handlers, wearing fine-looking western boots, hesitate a moment.

The wood stalls are to be burned. The horses will be in quarantine here for three weeks before being flown to Hokkaido. I remember the snorts of steam and billowing breath on the ramp at O’Hare and wish I could see them now, standing, like us, in the sunshine and balmy breezes outside the plane.

From my accustomed seat, just behind and slightly to the left of the pilot, I have a clear view to the southeast over the South China Sea. Though it is slightly awkward to manage, I often lean into this window; just those few inches closer and my view widens appreciably. I look back at the port wing, the sleek gape of the engines, at a pinpoint of nuclear light opening and closing on a windshield ten miles away. At night, if I rotate my gaze 180 degrees, holding the upper edge of the slanted window against the stars, the world and the plane itself seem utterly still, immobile.

Now far to the south a ribbon of sunlit cumulus towers, fumaroles and haystacks, great pompadour waves of clouds. I never tire of seeing them, the most dominating evanescent form on the planet. We have seen a great range of them since leaving Tokyo. East of Honshu, over the Pacific, the ocean was occluded by a vast sheet of wool-nap cumulus. When that flat plain opened hundreds of miles later into a lattice, the formation appeared serried in three dimensions. These puffs eventually thinned, and I thought the sky cloudless until I looked up to see a rice-paper layer of cirrostratus. Then it, too, thinned to blue space, and for a while there was nothing but an occasional fair-weather cumulus, built up over a distant Pacific atoll, until we came to this rampart of heaped clouds: cumulus congestus. For all their beauty, the impossibly slow tai chi of their movement, clouds are of almost no help, claim the pilots, in anchoring a sense of depth or distance in the troposphere. They accentuate, however, the peculiar and insistent, ethereal nature of the sky.

I need to stretch. None of the three pilots wants anything from the galley,
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so I raise the smoke door (which would give us some protection in the event of a maindeck fire) and descend the stairs to take a turn around the cargo. Unlike the pilots, I cannot resist a look each time the plane’s contents change. I am drawn by the promise of revelation in the main hold. “Used clothing” might refer to a boutique-bound consignment of East German military uniforms. A fabled rumor of cargo might be confirmed. But the pilots, who speak animatedly about circus tigers, Lamborghini Diablos, and small wooden pallets of gold bars, each in its own burlap bag, seem uninterested or vaguely embarrassed by the bulk of what fills the space behind their heads.
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