Flying home

The plane shuddered in the turbulent air. As it moved from side to side, the heads of all the passengers, barely visible above the seats, move in unison against the motion of the plane.

While we waited to take off, the flight attendant had told jokes over the PA. Pirate jokes - Where does a pirate go to get a burger? Harrrrrrdee's - and one knock-knock joke. He didn't joke now, in the air. Yet we were all calm.

We flew directly over the University. The red-roofed buildings of the quad framed the grounds. The buildings had no height, they were Euclidean shapes - rectangles inside bigger rectangles - on the great plane of the Earth.

Square blocks extended as far as I could see, up until the water. Where the shoreline could not be perfectly fitted by a tessellation of uniform rectangles, the city surrendered by building parks.

The view was similar over Indiana, except squares of corn and soybean fields took the place of city blocks. MidWestern Man, it seemed, must live in squares.

The shadows of the small white clouds, arranged in constellations between the plane and the ground, looked like lakes on the forested landscape. A lake either drained into or was fed by a long narrow river that flowed along the road. I suppose it is more correct to say that the road flowed along the river.

The first peaks of the Appalachians scrolled by. The mountains were covered in pin forests. Occasionally, valleys were marked by narrow strips of farmland. The towns sprung out of nowhere, surrounded by fields. Main roads radiated from obvious city centers. There, at least, towns defined the highways, and not the other way around.

On our final descent into Boston, we flew over a cemetery. It was large, taking up several blocks, like the cemetery's in Long Island. The cemetery surrounded a small lake, a park almost, which seemed to have been an insurmountable obstacle that the graves grew around instead of covering up. The office of the cemetery, or chapel, or whatever, was nestled among the graves and the gravestones and looked from the air like a Swastika, only backwards.

I wondered whether the people who build things, cemetery offices or cities or farms, whether they think about what their creations would look like from the air, from Heaven. I wondered who the first person was that thought to put the numbers of buses on the top, like in Speed. And they say the Reg is supposed to look like the U.S. from above. I think it's just a coincidence. But I always, when I'm flying, try to figure out where I am by looking at the landscape. Is that lake Superior? Is that river the Hudson? Is that city Albany? Is that cluster of houses Home? If only I knew more about the birds' world, and the pictures they could take.

As the wheels bumped, bumped, bounced, and spun, and the rubber painted itself upon the runway, I looked down at the pavement marked with lines and symbols and letters that I hoped the pilot understood. Now, it looked just like it did from the ground.