I write to you on a flight from New York to Denver, tens of thousands of feet above the surface of the Earth. The plane I’m in amazes me. It is rotund. Pudgy. Snub-nosed. Its wings are too short. It weighs thousands of tons. Yet it soars through thunderstorms, conquers thousands of miles in mere hours, laughs in the face of gravity's hubris. I can press my nose against the window and be an inch away from sky.
I love takeoff. There’s a moment when I don’t think the plane will make it, at least not this plane, this cumbersome, ugly land whale. Remove the wings — those too-short, too-thin pieces of flimsy plastic and rickety metal — and what we have is a metal sausage with windows. But to my consistent astonishment, takeoff goes smoothly, just as as it has thousands of times before. And we somehow gain altitude, and there’s that brief moment of weightlessness that makes my nine year old brother think something’s gone terribly wrong. And we make a turn, during which the left wing dips so low my brother now thinks two things have now gone terribly wrong. I laugh and tell him to look out the window, to enjoy the view.
We look at the city of New York together, sprawling out beneath us in all its horizonless glory. I love how busy it is, how densely all the buildings fit together, the gridlike patterns and meandering alleyways, the blend of civic planning and organic expansion. I imagine what the land looked like before human habitation, then try to envision a time-lapse between then and now — the first settlers in wooden cabins, the development of the harbor, the construction of the railroads, the rapid industrialization process, the factories and bulldozers, the skyscraper scaffolding. The depth and richness of the city’s history gives me goosebumps.
I feel big. I loom over New York. Its streets are no larger than the veins on the back of my hand. I can hold up my thumb to the window and blot out an entire industrial zone. Yet at the same time, I feel small. The sheer size of the city overwhelms me. Each fleck of light I can see -- and I can see thousands -- represents stories I will never know, relationships I will never understand, experiences I will never have. It's overwhelming, in quiet sort of way.
Soon, the city disappears from view, and we are in a storm cloud. The turbulence does its best to upset our somehow-not-unairworthy craft. Lightning is all around us, the rain hammers down, but it feels more like a mild case of hiccups than the wrath of Mother Nature. Again, I feel awe. When we exit the storm, I look out the window and see a carpet of white clouds beneath us, as if heralding our emergence.
I am so close to the stars.
