Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (21 page)

I’m in the window seat on the left-hand side of a sky-blue 747. I’m traveling to Belgium to spend the summer with relatives, but I’m flying first to Amsterdam, to stay for a few days with a family friend. I’m fourteen. It’s the first time I’ve ever been on a plane without my parents.

I will come to think of the family friend I am visiting as my oldest friend, in both senses. I remember, even as a small child, thinking that she was not really a grown-up; that she was my friend as much as my parents’. But she is more important to me than that, even. It’s in large part due to her that my parents met. A born-and-bred New Englander, she and her husband spent a year in the late 1960s studying poverty in Salvador, Brazil, where they met my father. My dad already had the idea that America might be the next place for him; maybe even the last place. His new American friends helped him make that decision. They were perhaps the only Americans he knew well—and the reason for his coming to Boston when he left Brazil. My mother met him at a talk he gave in Roxbury about his work in Brazil, on the weekend after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Two decades or so later, I’m flying alone to the Netherlands, where my oldest friend has moved. Last night my parents drove me from Massachusetts to Kennedy Airport in New York. Before we left they took a photo of me in our driveway, standing in front of our green Toyota, clutching my passport, which I now finger in my backpack as we start our descent. We’re only half an hour from Amsterdam. My friend will have parked at Schiphol, she will already be in the arrivals hall; she knows that this is my first flight alone.

I’m listening to my new Walkman as I look out of the window. It’s the first time in my life that I listen to music on an airplane, and for many years afterward this soundtracking, the overlaying of music on the turning world, will accompany every one of my most treasured experiences of flight, particularly at takeoff and landing. I will learn to pause or rewind, to pair the size of the growing trees with the remaining minutes, to ensure that whatever song I’ve saved for this moment is playing, or best of all just ending, as the wheels reach the runway.

This morning I am lucky to have a window seat to accompany my music, but unlucky, I feel, with the weather. When the sun came up an hour or so ago the floor of the world far below was white and without texture. Now the jet is descending into this solid deck of cloud. The blue disappears, and then there is neither sky nor earth in the window, nothing to suggest the distance nearly completed between New and Old Amsterdam or anything at all about the place I am coming to. There is only the noise of the plane in the mist, and the occasional small jolt of physical sensation, to remind me that the structure in which I have spent the night is in motion.

The tops of the high clouds that the plane first clipped and then entered were brilliant white. Now we are gliding through darkening gray, a detuning of day that’s perfectly synchronized with our continuing descent; the altimetry of light. I remember what a science teacher once told me, that the clouds are not as we think. They are not water in its gaseous state. Water as a gas—the humidity in the air—is invisible. What composes the clouds is ice or small droplets of liquid water. Vapor or steam rises invisibly from a cup of tea. Only when it cools again to liquid droplets do we see the cloud that has formed in the kitchen.

A ship appears at some indeterminable distance below. I blink. I don’t understand, because the ship appears to move directly up the windowpane, as if it is sailing vertically through the cloud. A moment later I realize the ship moves this way because the 747 I’m on is banking sharply over the surface of an ocean I cannot yet see. The cloud momentarily thickens and I lose the ship. Then we descend further; we are over a white-capped, churning gray water. I can see the line along which the cloud-sea we have descended from meets the water-sea below; the Dutch coast. From above the clouds, and within them, we might have been over any place, in any age. But below them it is this day, off this country, and I see that the plane I’m on is just one of many ships coming to the Netherlands from far across a generality of water.

—

Flying gives us what’s perhaps the last thing an aspiring pilot would expect: a close experience of water. We think of the conceptual partition of water and air as elemental, as simple as the horizon. But airline pilots see more water than any sailor does. About 70 percent of the world’s surface is ocean; much of the land that long-haul pilots work above is covered in snow or ice. At any given time about 60 percent of the world is covered in cloud. It is an extremely rare moment in a plane when you cannot see water.

Gray waters off Gothenburg lie under close pages of fog, early morning clouds perfectly map in water the roiling seascape of Scottish hills they cling to, subtropical Bahamian seas shimmer in their zoomed-in, blue-boundaried rainbows. Many Arctic lands hide under snow so all-encompassing that their surface is indistinguishable from a solid cloudscape or an ice-locked sea. For many miles and hours in the sky—sometimes for nearly an entire flight—water is the only thing we see.

Within the range of temperatures found on the earth’s surface, only water exists naturally in its solid, gas, and liquid states. Together these three states compose what scientists call the
hydrosphere.
Seen from the sky, the hydrosphere, our round world of water, turns as guilelessly as a wheel, forming a cycle that could hardly be more archetypal. Rumi wrote: “I want your sun to reach my raindrops, so your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud.” On average a molecule of water spends as long in that sky as you, having flown through it, might spend on vacation: nine days.

One of the best reasons to become a pilot, especially if you are from a cold and often cloudy place, is the chance to surface from the world of clouds; to know that sunlight will be present on nearly every day of your working life. An overcast sky now appears different to me on the mornings of the days I am going to fly, because I know I will soon be on the other side, that the clouds, a backdrop of one low scene, are only a curtain drawn over a brighter and more elementary one. Above every gray winter day the cities of cloud are tumbling, rising, migrating, and dying in the torch of the sun. A free world of light and water self-shaping in the most liberated ideas of form, among which we pass our most ordinary hours on an airliner.

A forest or grassland below may reflect 20 percent of the sunlight that falls on it. Some clouds may reflect 90 percent. Typically, it is only when the world below turns from clear land to cloud, or we descend into the tops of such a sun-blasted cloudscape, or on the rare occasions when we are still in cloud at cruising altitude, that I put every one of the sun visors up around me, to curb the headache of so many large windows that are each as featurelessly and brightly white as the frosted glass of a fluorescent bulb. Or I put on my sunglasses, paired shields against the blinding majesty of sky water, which in the sky would be better termed cloud-glasses.

The deserts are so rarely covered in cloud that they predominate among the visible land on a long flight, which can give the impression that the lands of the earth are drier than they are. Then a city appears in such a desert and the water we see near it—lakes, dams, rivers locked in their rolling green frames of vegetation, twisting across desiccation—looks as holy as blood. We turn above the liquid life of the Tigris, the Ganges, and the Mississippi, the sun setting over the shining ribbon on the land, as civilizations flicker to life on the riverbanks like stars for the coming night. Here is the hydraulic shadow of civilization, the up-scattered light of water: Baghdad, Varanasi, Memphis.

In the DC-3, the 747 of a previous generation, pilots would sometimes wear rain slickers or boots in the cockpit, so low in the sky did they fly, with leaking windows. Now we fly above most of the low world’s weather, which is one reason why flying is generally much smoother than it was in the early days of aviation. Most, but not all, and so our weather radars scan the path ahead. The radar’s gaze pierces clouds and
returns
a map of precipitation—of larger droplets, closer-knit agglomerations of sky water—that is then displayed on the same computer screen as our route. A storm rising from the earth appears onscreen as overlaying, fractal pools of color-coded severity, red encased in amber, and amber embedded in green. Such a roughly horizontal slice of a storm is displayed directly over the clean line of the aircraft route and the icons of beacons, forming as well-matched a composition of the organic and the technological as a close-up image of a bacterium that includes the detailed tip of a scientific instrument.

We fly far around storms but at night, even at a great distance, their flashes may still fill the cockpit; we may throw the
storm
switch, which automatically sets nearly all the lights in the cockpit to their maximum brightness, so that distant night lightning will not blind us. The map of so many of my most-often-traveled routes is written in water or its absence; gray clouds over Europe, the clear deep volume of the Saharan dusk; storms strobing in the conurbations of cloud over West Africa, dawn over the flaxen desiccation of the Kalahari.

In daylight, seen with our own eyes, the rain streaming from a distinct cloud resembles nothing so much as beams of light. It is routine from the cockpit to see the storms rising and clouds forming, blistering upward or vanishing in real time, and to see from them the fall of new rain on the roof of the ocean, or to overfly the endpoints of glaciers, where shards of the ancient snow glass shatter in the sun and tumble into the police-light blue of northern seas. Often I look down on a sea that is streaked with white, and I cannot tell if these apostrophes of white-turned water are the work of the wind-whip cracking on the far-below waves, or if these whitecaps are in fact clouds of ice.

—

At most latitudes, the sky over the ocean is more likely to be cloudy than that over land. But even over the ocean a solid floor of cloud can end suddenly. When we cross the coast of such a great country of cloud, we emerge between the earth’s blue mirrors. Sunlight scatters through the molecules of the air; it falls onto the sea and tumbles among the molecules of water. The results are the very model of blue, the color, somehow, of both above and below, both freedom and meditation: the “wild blue,” the “deep blue,” the “aching blue.” From our aero
nautical
vessels the colors of the ocean and the sky are often so perfectly matched that it is hard to say, without reference to the horizon, which is water and which is sky.

Robert Frost visited the coast of North Carolina as a teenager, about a decade before the aerial labors of the Wright brothers would come to fruition there. Later, Frost referred to his time on that Carolina shore, and what took flight from it, in a poem titled “Kitty Hawk”:

…But that night I stole

Off on the unbounded

Beaches where the whole

Of the Atlantic pounded…

We have made a pass

At the infinite,

Made it, as it were,

Rationally ours…

What better place than a beach for it all to have started? This first symmetry between the shore and a runway, the ocean and the sky, still holds. When a jet lowers its wheels over the water, when it descends to solid ground from over the open water, it comes to land in every sense.

We have forgotten that the
Good Ship Lollipop
was an airplane. But when we transfer from the airport’s supply of electricity to the aircraft’s, an older captain may say we have switched
to ship’s power.
In navigation terms we speak of
ship-derived
or
own-ship
positions. The captain is still the
skipper,
often abbreviated to
Skip
as a term of direct address—“Hey, Skip.” As a copilot I am a
first officer
on an air
liner
; among the cabin crew are
pursers.
We talk of
forward
and
aft; cabins, galleys, bulkheads, holds, yokes; manifests, tacking, coamings,
and
trim.
We count aircraft by
hulls.
A colleague not sure if I am still flying the Airbus A320 or if I have switched to the Boeing 747, will ask me which
fleet
I am on. The small handle we use to turn the plane at low speeds on the ground, a sort of steering wheel that few visitors to the cockpit notice, is a
tiller.
Airplanes have
rudders
—and, in a linguistic twist analogous to those marine mammals that have re-evolved limbs better suited for their return to water, floatplanes may have
water rudders.

The protrusions from the aircraft that hold antennas or drains are
masts.
The probes that measure the plane’s indicated airspeed are called
Pitot tubes,
invented in the eighteenth century by a hydraulic engineer who studied Roman aqueducts and measured the speed of the Seine; who surely could never have conceived of the life his creation would come to in the latter-day skies above Paris, above everywhere. The naval heritage of the typical pilot’s uniform—
pilot,
one who steers a ship—was chosen by Juan Trippe, the naval aviator who founded Pan Am and named his flying boats
Clippers.
The ambition of the 747’s lead designer was to give his airplane the “stately majesty” of great liners; to conquer “oceans in a single flight.” In the early days of air-traffic control, planes were tracked on maps using little weights cast in the shape of boats. Under the rules of the air, powered aircraft must give way to gliders, as on the water “steam shall give way to sail.”