Musings at 30,000 Feet

Journal entry, STL-PHX. Jan 18, 2011

We lift off and angle upwards through low, drizzly fog for a few minutes. As the flight attendant announces we have reached ten thousand feet and may power up our portable electronics, the plane enters a clear space sandwiched between two flat, horizontal layers of clouds. A short time later we pop up out of the top layer of clouds into the sunlight.

Now I’m reveling in the heat of the sun, glad to have scored the last free window seat on the sunny side of the plane. It’s been too cold and gray in the midwest for too long. Eighty-degree Phoenix is going to feel so pleasant, so comfortable. Just the thought of standing in the desert sunlight causes me to unclench and expand from my cold little soul outwards.

The clouds form a dreamy ocean of white beneath us, though looking beyond the nose of the plane I am beginning to see that we’ll be past them soon. These clouds have a topography all their own, informed by wind currents above and below. If the plane were to suddenly lose altitude and crash on a day like this, how lovely it is to imagine that we’d land gently on pillowy soft clouds instead of on hard water or unyielding earth. 

We’re passing over a stretch of clouds that have dual lines in the tops of them, running north to south. As if someone has been traversing them on a giant sled, or with cross country skis, leaving tracks behind. I smile to myself. These days it seems the only time I have the time to allow myself frivolous thoughts like these is when I’m on a plane.

I lean towards the tiny airplane window, wishing I could wrap the white mid-day sun around me like a cloak. I am grateful for air travel. I am grateful for this odd time-out thirty thousand feet above the earth. 

Mt. Hood, OR. For as much as I travel by air, I have so few photos taken from airplanes.

Journal entry, SFO-PHX, June 17,2014

Peach-fuzz atmosphere is what I see out the airplane window right now, with a layer of pale, bright blue above it that gradually becomes darker but no less luminescent. Flying from one place to the next is such a beautiful luxury. Especially when the flight has less than fifty people on it, like tonight’s flight. How rare, and how very luxurious it feels to have all three seats in which to spread out. It reminds me of the early 90s, the good old days before Southwest Airlines really took off (bad pun intended, most definitely).

Just in the minute I looked away to pull the book I’m reading from my backpack, the space between the terminator and sky became this wonderful shade of deeply purplish red, like you might see in an old painting of the Sacred Heart or in the gown of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Directly below that is a layer of deep indigo, also with a purplish hue that keeps darkening as each second passes. The layer between the indigo sky and the ground fades through light shades of grey-blue to a soft white. 

Now the blood-red is tinted brownish and has spread upwards into the sky. The lower bands of indigo, pale blue and soft white have taken on a misty quality and fused further into one another. 

We are over Southern California, and the pilot has swung the plane around to a more easterly trajectory. To the west and north I can see a low band of intense, fiery blood-orange just above the horizon. Such saturated colors, I can almost taste them. Sunsets and sunrises seem so magical from the windows of airplanes. Here I am a captive audience. Nothing within the metal tube of the airplane is nearly as interesting, and I have nowhere else to be, nothing to distract me from the unfolding drama in the sky. 

We’re under the edge of the terminator now, cruising into darkness with the last of the blue California twilight at our backs.

Speaking of skies, I’ve been enjoying images lately from the live site camera on the project we have under construction southern Florida. The sky down there has such an overtly tropical turquoise cast to it, I can’t help but call up the feel of sticky, salty humidity in the air and the tepid, viscous ocean water lapping at the sand. There are always squadrons of puffy white clouds - some passing overhead so quickly I can see them roiling and writhing despite the poor resolution of the site cam. I’m reminded of how long it’s been since the regular trips we took to Florida in my childhood. There are no skies that color in California, or in Arizona for that matter. I am almost struck with nostalgia. Almost. Northern California and Arizona have their own singular shades of skies, of which I am also deeply enamored.

The nose of the plane has begun angling earthward. Time to pull myself together and prepare to be earthbound once more.