as we may blog

I was caught off guard yesterday during a very brief business trip to San Francisco. I haven’t been on a flight in probably twenty years where the pilot bothered to point out the sights below, but the captain of yesterday’s flight did. About halfway through the flight he announced that we had climbed just a little bit and reached our final cruising altitude of 40,000 feet; those of us on the left side of the plane would be able to see Omaha in fifteen minutes; right now we were traveling over northern Iowa.

At that moment I strained to look out the window as best I could from my aisle seat. Fields and crops, a few roads intersecting neatly at 90 degrees. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to identify any river, road, or city looking south, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I was. I thought for a moment about how odd it was to be screaming past family and friends at 600 mph, a tiny speck in the sky if any of them had happened to look up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. It was a strange, homesick couple of minutes.

For whatever reason I think that I do my clearest thinking on long flights. The suspension of time, that placeless feeling I get when I’m in an airport, being forced to sit for six hours with two hundred strangers, well… it gives me a chance to step back and look at where I am, so to speak. There was no great revelation yesterday, just a few poignant minutes considering the pilot’s words while I watched my old home pass below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 12:12 am and is filed under Iowa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.