On Flight

Looking at the top side of clouds

My earliest memory of flight is seen from the pilot's seat: all knobs and buttons and windows, soaring above the ground, blue sky as far as the eye can see.  Sometimes when I think back, I see little parachuters in the sky in front of me, dancing like fearless ballerinas (although I'm fairly certain that this part was imagined and melded together with the real memories by time).  My Dad owned a little plane and we would go flying together, just the two of us, landing at the tiniest air fields around Oklahoma and Texas, always just in time to enjoy the warm, corn frittery goodness known as hush puppies for lunch.  (On a side note, my now-health-nut-militant-vegan Father probably laments that in addition to instilling in me a love of flight, he also instilled in me a love for all things battered and fried.)

I think that, having less life experience then, I didn't realize what a sheer miracle flight is.  As children, we are so near to a state where everything is totally novel and mystifying that nothing seems impossible.  Even gravity, that magical force that binds our world together, seems less obvious, less guaranteed, less taken-for-granted in those years.

But now that I'm older, I learned to be skeptical and I have so many doubts.  Like why should this huge metal tube be able to go hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour?  Nowadays, this is the thing that seems less obvious to me.  If I had been less resistant to learning physics, I could probably explain to you that the air on top of the wing is moving faster than the air on the bottom and blah blah blah.  But in this case, I'm happy to simply be enchanted by this beguiling trick of movement and matter and lift.  I'm content to remain blissfully mystified.  Because what other emotion can you experience in the face of something as beautiful as flight?

We go up and up and up and the ground gets so small--first the cars look like toy cars and then they disappear completely.  I always picture all my problems and anxieties diminishing like that too.  If only for an hour or two, I see everything in perspective.

And then suddenly a burst and we are inside the clouds and with a second burst, we are above them!  We are seeing something incredible: the top sides of clouds and the landscape below is replaced by cloud mountains and cloud rivers and cloud castles.  This, for me, never gets old.

And for some reason, at this point in the flight, I always start to think about Leonardo da Vinci and his flying contraptions half-a-millennium ago.  And I wonder what he would give to trade places with me, right in this moment, to be able to see the top side of the clouds.

And I remember a particular spot, on the hillside of Fiesole, where there is a plaque commemorating how he would throw his apprentices, strapped into who-knows-what crazy flying machine, sending them tumbling into the valley below.  I especially wonder about those apprentices and what it must have been like for them, thunk thunk thunk down the hill in the name of curiosity.  But I think that surely at some point, one of them must have caught some lift, or at least hit the wind in just the right way and realized that, like anything in life, the thing that makes it scary is also the thing that makes it magnificent.  The climbing, the weightlessness, the nothing between you and the ground, the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of falling.  I hope that for all that they went through, they caught some taste of this breathlessness.

And I think of my own descent on my most recent trip, falling into a startling sunrise sky above Paris.  A layer of solid grey clouds above, a layer of thin wispy grey clouds below and in between the most fiery, passionate, soul-awakening red sky I have ever seen.  And here I am right with them: the weightlessness, the nothing between me and the ground, the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of falling.  In a word: breathlessness.