Flight

“I’m gonna move

I’m gonna go

I’m gonna tell everyone I know

Looking for a home in the heart of the country.”

-- Paul McCartney, “Heart of the Country”

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I’ve decided what is my favorite part of flying. It is not the take-off, and it is not the cruise; it is the part between those two, the climb.

Why?

The clouds, mainly. It has to be a cloudy day, partly cloudy, not overcast, and preferably with at least two different kinds of clouds. Different kinds of clouds form on different layers in the atmosphere, which means there is variety. I like when the plane climbs and you’re sitting by a window, and you become equal with the clouds, and then their superiors. But then they subvert you again by becoming a fleet of ships floating to battle in the air.

When you are on the ground, clouds are two-dimensional things that move sideways across your vision. But climbing to their level is like watching a painting become a sculpture. A mural changes with dimension to a diorama.

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Writers have characterized the plains as looking like patchwork quilts from the air, but this is not entirely true during the climb. You can see the general squaring of fields because of roads, but even this isn’t through and through, because roads just outside a city like Omaha are slanted and curved all the time. And within the squares of farmland, there are squiggles and mazes that have been carved by farmers who understand how to navigate topography with their tractors. There are levees and shelterbelts of trees, and on days like today (after a raging morning storm) the creeks invade their banks like smudges of a pencil line.

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I stare at the wobbly wing of this aircraft and think about the days when I was a boy who wanted to be a fighter pilot. I biked to the base library every Saturday morning to play chess for two hours with the Chess Club, and then I would waste away the afternoon poring over the same dozen books that were filled with all the unclassified information about our nation’s airborne fighting machines. I learned the kind of engines an F-15 Eagle has, and how they are so powerful that this jet is the only one in the world (or at least it was at the time) that could accelerate while flying straight up. And how the F-16, even though it only has one engine, is the only aircraft that can make a turn without losing altitude.

Then, I learned a sad bit of information. There was a height requirement for military pilots. I think it was 5-8, making me four inches too short. Tom Cruise, even though he played an F-14 pilot in Top Gun, is also too short, and so is my dad. That’s why when my dad joined the Air Force he didn’t go to school to become a pilot, but instead was trained to operate field radars, which at the time required constant maintenance to be done in very tight spaces. Later he became an instructor at the NCO Academy at Lackland AFB in Texas, where he taught guys older than him how to be good leaders and use proper grammar on their paperwork and stuff like that. Then he became a computer programmer, which turned out to be something that he really loves doing, and which is the thing he still does even though he’s retired. Just goes to show you that dreams can be deceiving.

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I feel the vibration in my seat. It is not like a massage but it is still kind of relaxing. On supersonic jets, you’d think that you wouldn’t hear much because you’re going faster than sound, but sound travels much faster through metal and plastic than it does through air, so it’s actually just as loud, maybe even louder. Not that I’ve ever been on a supersonic flight. That’s just one of those things I read in those books.

I think about all the loudness and strength and force and absurd commotion it takes to get a single aircraft to fly. All the fuel that burns in the engines, the turbines that blow all this air, all the surface area of the wings, all the sensors and whistles and locks and streamlining. It’s not like a boat, which is effortless. A plane is all effort.

It sure takes a lot for us to do what birds do by instinct with unmatched grace. They also have the luxury of flying together. Humans have to separate for safety. To fly is to be sequestered, compartmentalized, searched and isolated. Birds fly and we marvel. We fly and everything else tries to ignore it. Or the engines swallow a swallow and the plane crashes.

That’s something that always bothers me whenever I go to air shows. The noise. There’s something thrilling about being sound-pounded, but as anyone who’s had to sit through an awful band at a concert knows, too much sound is just too much. It’s annoying.

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I see a field of electric windmills and I can’t remember if there’s a better name for these devices. But these rows in the Iowan farmscape look to me like white toothpicks stuck in a splotchy, green tablecloth.

Most of them aren’t turning, I guess because it’s not that windy of a day. But then I see one windmill whose blades are slowly, steadily rotating. It must be facing the right direction, angled just so.

I think that’s a lot like genius, talent or godliness: someone facing in just the right direction.

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We’re descending. The sculpture will become the painting again.