Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (24 page)

I first heard the decide call long before I became a pilot, when as a passenger I sat in the cockpit of an airliner for landing. At the time I was not long out of academia, not long into the business world, and it occurred to me afterward that many more situations in life—university seminar rooms and corporate meeting rooms, for example—should have such pre-programmed callouts. I now often mutter: “Decide,” in the 747’s unique accent and intonation, when I’m irritating myself by postponing small decisions in daily life. Even non-pilot friends to whom I have described the 747’s decision-making strategies, when they have heard enough from me about some small dilemma, will say to me: “Decide!” The voice of the 747 that they associate with me is the voice I associate with a moment just before every landing, with hopes for the sight of approach lights running forward in the mist and murk.

After an
autoland
we must remember to disconnect the autopilot. If we try to leave the runway without doing so, the plane fights back; it tries to turn back through the controls, to keep us on the runway centerline. It doesn’t know that it’s we who have disturbed its trajectory; it only knows that it must stay where it was last commanded to be, in the center of the place it found for us when we ourselves could not see.

Taxiing in dense fog is much harder than flying in it. In notoriously foggy places, such as Delhi in winter, a little car—a
follow-me
car—may be sent out to meet us as we leave the runway. The instruction from the controllers will then be to “follow the follow-me.” The follow-me drivers are typically sportier than the pilots they are leading and so the car will often vanish into the fog ahead. We may not be able to see even the signs on the taxiways, let alone another plane, and so we bring the jet to a gentle but complete stop. The follow-me driver soon realizes that the 747 is no longer following and turns around to find us. Soon we see the headlights of the car returning to us in the mist, and we ask the driver from now on to please drive more slowly.

—

Water from above is fractal, abstract, almost without scale. It is impossible to sense the size of its features, or the inner life of those peculiar and marvelous surface flows of a different reflectivity and texture, which are the shimmering sums of local winds and currents, of tides and ship wakes. Water from altitude is metallic; a rare alloy of what the poet Mary Oliver called the “silver of water,” from which sunstruck wings, too, so often appear to have been cut.

From above the open ocean we see the rippling pages of scalloped blue, the waves that reflect on nothing, that will not break until their steadily spreading crests reach a far shore, crossing a volume as naturally as music from a stage or light from a star. Most waves on the ocean below are first conjured by wind, before becoming a new vertical dimension that the wind catches, an air-handle, that allows it to create yet greater waves. Indeed, a scientist tells me that the wind over the sea pulls up waves to greater heights as simply as the slipstream lifts the upper surface of the wings of an airliner. It’s a pleasing thought, perhaps, that waves and wings are lifted by similar mechanisms of air; while the clouds that run in telltale patterns across the sky, in striped geometries of mist, are a reminder that there are waves in the atmosphere, too.

If you’ve ever been hiking or driving near the coast, perhaps there was a moment when you emerged from a dense forest or a curve in the road. The world suddenly opens, the floor of the sky falls away, and the paired blue vaults of the sky and sea stretch before you to their meeting place on the distant horizon. The chance to be present simultaneously below and above these windswept blues is, I think, what draws so many travelers to the world’s sunniest and steepest coastlines.

Pilots based in Britain will cross the Channel regularly, each overflight a chance to think of Hubert Latham, the French aviator who first attempted to fly over the Channel, and as consequence became the first to land an airplane on the sea, where he lit a cigarette while awaiting rescue, and who died in Chad—killed by either a buffalo or a murderer, depending on which account of his death you believe. Early one bright summer morning, descending toward London from continental Europe, I saw an aircraft carrier and its battle group in the Channel, steaming southwest toward the Atlantic Ocean. The sun on the water crossed the long white lines of wakes trailing behind each vessel; the bar code of a navy, a nation, each vessel like a motorized word—
power, dawn, fleet.
We pointed the sight out to the passengers, several of whom stopped to talk with us about the ships after we landed. The term
blue-water navy
refers to a nation’s long-distance, oceangoing vessels as opposed to a regional or coastal force. On mornings when I take off to start a long ocean crossing, I like to think: Here is a blue-water day.

When a plane departs from the airport of a port city and points immediately out to open water, it enters simultaneously the realms of the sky and of the sea. If our destination is also a coastal city, then we return to land in the same two senses. Similar, perhaps, to the effect of clouds on arrival, an air traveler’s sense of return takes on a kind of purity when much of the descent takes place over water. Over land, the material of the view changes—fields, then roads, then factories. But in an approach over the sea, the content is unchanging—only its proximity continuously and frictionlessly alters. The eye follows these fluid transitions, over twenty or so descending minutes, from a blue abstraction to individual, three-dimensional waves, from the pleasing idea of water to the direct sight of its heaving surface.

My goddaughter once told me that she likes to have a globe because it reminds her that there is only one ocean. I think of this, of her, when I see more than one ocean in a flight. When I fly to Los Angeles from London, although we cross some portions of the Atlantic, its volume is diminished by thoughts tuned to a destination that stands on the edge of a further and greater ocean. Occasionally, at the end of such a flight we fly briefly out over the Pacific before turning back—only the first few miles of an ocean that, set against the mileage of the flight, is little more than an afterthought. Yet this ocean is the reason this city is here; it is the reason why we left London. After landing I may go to the beach, and there I have a vivid awareness that I am facing west, or thinking west, like the plane and the historical windsock of the city and America, that all the day’s westward miles have brought us only to a beginning.

Standing on a west-facing beach, when the sun at last begins to set on the long day of a westbound flight, you may see a line of light that runs from the sun directly to you, dazzling over the water’s surface. This effect is often seen from the cockpit or window seat, too, when the light turns and moves with you, connecting you to the horizon beneath the sun. It is sometimes called
sun glitter.
But to me it looks more like a road, a path or paving of light that connects your eye and vessel to the setting sun. It might be better named the
sun road,
or the
sun way,
or the
sun wake.

It occurs with the moon, too—“moon wake,” we might call it. I think it’s most sublime not when it connects us to the moon over an intervening ocean, but when we are flying at night over a land scattered with many lakes, such as northern Canada. The moon wake doesn’t appear at all when what lies between the plane and the moon is solid ground. But when a lake appears on the line between the airplane and the point of the horizon the moon is over, the moon wake flickers to yellow-white life over the interposed water. The moon wake ripples over the water until it crosses the lake’s far shore and both light and lake vanish into the darkness, until the next of the lakes appears, each sounding off like notes strung along a stave.

—

In bygone days the edge of a continent was where travelers might rest or change from one sort of vehicle to another. Now it’s the nature of long flights that the threshold of land may pass unnoticed. The boundaries of earth and water, the great divisions that have sculpted species and ecosystems, countries, and languages, are rendered inconsequential by an airplane.

Sometimes I mention to passengers when we will reach or cross which far coast, when we will “make landfall” over Ireland or Newfoundland. But this phrase—full of historical import, as if we were due to sight land at eye level, and to come ashore in small boats, staggering through the surf clutching a text, lifting ourselves onto the sill of a new world we had gone to an ocean of trouble to reach—is never quite right in the air. In airplanes, even if the pilot announces the moment, we cross over the rocky shores as if they were fictions, boundaries of an expired empire, stone walls like the old ones of New England that the forest has long since grown back up around, the hairline fractures of unconsidered journeys.

—

It’s early summer. I’m in my late twenties, not yet a pilot. I’ve been working in the business world for a year or two now. I spent a summer in Japan in high school, in Kanazawa, a charming cityon the Sea of Japan most famous for a castle and its nearby garden. I lived with a Japanese family and studied Japanese at the local university. If you had asked me then if I hoped to live abroad someday, and where, I would have answered yes, and Japan. (Later, when I have the chance to move from a short-haul to a long-haul airliner, flying to Japan is one of the dreams that make my decision so easy.)

My boss in the consulting company has heard about my early experiences in Japan. That is why I am assigned to this new project for a client in Japan, and why I am flying to Osaka today. To get to Osaka from Boston I fly first to Dallas, the sort of check mark–shaped itinerary that is consistent within the logic of airline hubs, but that still strikes me as an arresting feature of our modern journeys—that airplanes have so abstracted place that the great logistical circle between New England and Japan should naturally cross, say, the plains of north Texas. I stare out of the window for the last half hour of this first flight of my itinerary, marveling at the approach of a state larger than France, and then at the sail-specked lakes of Dallas, dazzling in the sun wakes of the first Texan morning of my life.

After a few hours working on my laptop in a café in the enormous airport, I’m embarrassingly excited to board an MD-11, a large three-engine airliner, for the first time. In flight I work again, eat lunch. I chat with the older man seated next to me, who tells me he has been doing business in Japan since the 1960s and will retire soon. I talk with the cabin crew about which restaurants in Osaka they’d recommend. One of the pilots comes out to greet some of the passengers. I ask him about the new airport in Osaka. I like the code for this new airport, KIX, I tell him. He laughs. It has been built on an artificial island in a bay, he says. A former naval aviator, he tells me it feels a bit like landing on a luxuriously dimensioned aircraft carrier. A few minutes later we each return to our work, to our computer screens. We are having very different days, I think.

Before I open my laptop again I turn to look out of the window. We are crossing a dizzyingly mountainous coastline, piled with forests and tawny, rocky peaks. It appears to be hardly inhabited. Where the steep land ends, where North America reaches both its horizontal and vertical conclusions, are long parenthetical surf lines, like the torn edges of expensive paper. This coast, the pilot later tells me, is California. Big Sur. We have a slightly southerly route today. We are crossing the entire Pacific.

It’s surprisingly rare for an airplane to cross an ocean so simply and wholly, to say farewell to land at one point early in the journey and to have it appear again only near the end of that same journey. Even on a flight from the east coast to Europe, the definition of what we term a transatlantic journey, around half the flight may take place over land. Although we think of a flight from London to Seattle, too, as transatlantic, and culturally this is true, geographically and certainly visually it’s better imagined as a journey of unweighted steps between the stones: Britain itself, the Hebrides, Iceland, Greenland. Baffin Island, the world’s fifth-largest island, peaked with mountains named for Odin and Thor. The narrow, ice-clogged strait, the Fury and Hecla, that divides Baffin from the Canadian mainland and forms part of the Northwest Passage. The Canadian Shield, the Rockies, the Cascades, at last Seattle. A grand journey; but hardly transoceanic.

Other island hops have a more inviting climate and scale. I once flew across the Aegean as a passenger, from Athens to Rhodes. There were so many islands that at nearly every point I could see water meeting a vertiginous coastline. Greece’s archipelagos looked as if California had been hammered, shattered like glass and scattered across the blue, a blue so perfect that it appeared that not only water but the sky, too, was breaking along the new shores. It was easy to imagine how these coast-shards assembled to a history and a country, to a mythology, to the idea of a nation composed not so much of land as of its edges. On no other flight have I seen passengers pay such continuous attention to the view below.

—

Cape Town stands near the southwest tip of Africa. Only three-fifths of the northern hemisphere is water; but about four-fifths of the southern hemisphere is, a truth that alters the ring of the name Cape Town—or Kaapstad in Dutch and Afrikaans, iKapa in Xhosa. Cape, an accident of tectonics or erosion, a rocky hinge of history, a settlement at one end of its christeners’ world, a reminder that the best place names may be those that make the most sense from above. The Cape of Good Hope, Cabo da Boa Esperança—though Bartolomeu Dias, when he first rounded it more than five centuries ago, twelve years before he was wrecked and drowned off it, called it the Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms.

It’s the morning after a long night flight. I’ve had some cereal and coffee and now my colleagues and I are in the last stages of our approach to Cape Town. It’s high spring in Europe but here it’s autumn, a gray and blustery morning. The main runway at Cape Town’s airport runs roughly north–south, not too far from the beaches of False Bay to the eastern side of the city, where no one at all will be swimming on a day like this. Today the wind blows gustily from the north, so the controllers send us past the airport and the city, past Africa, to the south. At some point over the water we will bank around completely, and after 6,000 southbound miles we will come at last to Cape Town heading north, facing London.