Aloft and Ahead
After a thoroughly bureaucratic process that involves line-standing and machines beeping to grant access, we ascend in our airplane. Amid the roaring engine blast and rattling of metal rivets, we are in brushing grasp of cotton candy clouds. What’s happening underneath me is something our great grandparents wouldn’t be missing in order to nap. Seeing the earth’s patterns from above is the fulfillment of childhood wishes to fly. If you raise your thumb in front of your face you can blot out an entire range of mountains.
It’s hard to help but look down at the barely recognizable ground on which our feet are normally attached. From that ground, the circles of green farming fields simply look like a few acres of verdant crops. From down there, we don’t understand how delightful the shapes are from above. Then there’s the mountains. All different kinds, my favorites being the ones that reach high enough to be inhospitable to trees. Whose bare rock sees little but shearing winds, deposits of snow, and only the hardiest of lichens.
“Time is different in the air, also more expansive. It must be something about my body being close to the clouds, about being suspended and propelled at the same time.”
I love flying over those and looking for trails partially because my feet will likely never touch that rock. I don’t have enough life left to walk all the paths, which isn’t as melancholy as it sounds. It’s bittersweet because it makes the trails I do get to walk all the more special.
I love the world from above because it makes me feel small in a good way. The earth feels so expansive. I’ve been lucky enough to travel quite a bit but have still only seen the tiniest part of it. Especially by foot, which is the way to be most intimate with the land. There’s an inherent separation that comes when an engine is in the mix.
Time is also more expansive in the air. It must be something about my body being close to the clouds, about being suspended and propelled at the same time. That state of being pulls me away from the list of things to complete before the end of the day. It allows me to see beyond the next forty eight hours. It makes me ask myself about what I want to do with the next five years and lean forward for the answer.
Climbing some of those mountains might be one of the answers. What I want to do is closely tied to who I want to be, which is slightly scarier. One informs the other, or, I suppose, it’s more accurate to say that they’re having a conversation.
“But with age comes wisdom in the state of our dry, dusty, jagged, orbiting body. ”
So up there - aloft in the sky - I see a little of my future. Or at least the future I’d like. Of course, what’s ahead is fully informed by what I’ve already done: what I don’t care to repeat and what I do.
I fly over the mountains, the forests full of paths not chosen and a few that were. I see the landscape from above, leaving my new mountain home for the plains.
On return, I crossed a divide to a life I thought impossible before. I woke up just as the plains were swallowed by those mountains. The yellow prairie turned to dark green skirts of the foothills and then – and then there were bright white mountaintops shot through with streaks of black rock. If this were a drawing, pencil would be the rock, paper the snow. The mountains stood in full relief, their jagged ridge lines threatening to rip the puffy clouds moving near their peaks.
Those clouds and peaks operated at a détente: the clouds not descending below the an invisible line and the mountains unable to reach higher, at least for the next few thousands of years. The just-past-half-moon watched over that balance. The woman up there watches (they say it’s a man on the moon but something as stark and beautiful and watchful could only be a woman), her eye the crater of a long-dormant volcano, her eyebrows the ridges of the moon’s own mountain range.
Our mountains, the earth’s, being wet and biotic in contrast to the moon’s, lifted in the distance and the prairie fell away below the airplane.
I wondered, for those mountains and for me, what was next.
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