Riding Sky
From Sunday. I am in the air, returning home from San Jose. I’m taking American Eagle, and it is so much better than the regular American service. They have smaller planes at smaller gates, smaller crowds, shorter lines, plane-side valet service for your luggage. They’re less bureaucratic, more informal, and oh yeah, they even arrive on time sometimes–or early!
It’s nice to not be treated like livestock, it makes it easier to find the magic of flight. As I sit in my seat, I recognize I’m in a metal tube, filled with a million parts, powered by viscous rock goo from deep underground. Nothing less than the liquified remains of the lost botanical wonders of the Carboniferous, the age when Trees ruled the world.
From my little window I see the curious geometries below, made of stone and light, basically ignored by those energetic little people below. I can’t see them directly, but there they go, zipping around in painted metal boxes, their purposes utterly unknowable to me as I recede from them. They always have a lot to do.
The seething industry below spits out planes like this one. To board, I press buttons on a little box days before, manipulating symbols in just the right way. In this way I coax patterns of electrons to carry the insensible value of my past labors–more button pressing!–to a corporate being responsible for operating these complicated tubes.
And soon the plane will gracefully fall back toward the hard sphere from which it launched. I will emerge and then enter another metal container, this one small and yellow, likely operated by a man from the other side of the sphere. Our communication will be crude, functional, and brief.
Man, it is amazing. Amazingly weird!