the continent from above, june 2011
The flight departed at roughly 8:30 in the morning in Portland, 11:30 at my destination. I had never flown across the country in the daytime before.
My knowledge of the United States is spotty. I may as well view the world through a mirror. Having flown nearly everywhere I've ever been, I've barely experienced any spatial transitions between ecosystems or variance in terrain. This flight was the most I've ever seen of any landscape whatsoever, with the exception of the jagged peaks of different major cities (from within their centers), or short trips between them (New York-Baltimore, New York-Providence, etc). Seventeen cities and hardly a step beyond their limits.
Six miles of elevation gives the ground a visual quality not so different from the gloss of the photographs that have and continue to be my vision of the world. 35,000ft. Such a distance leaves only stone, water, plants, and architecture visible to the eye. As such humans are the only animal whose traces I could still detect.
There I was, poised in space, a dis-embodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
The alluvial fan of agricultural development spread out of an Eastern bend in the Columbia River. How could the edges be so discrete? The steep sides of the Coastal Range sank under the momentarily flattened earth, spectacular in greens.
Again the earth began to rise, this time without end. The mountains, the likes of which I had never seen, bore little vegetation and exposed seams of multiple shades. They read like the rings of trees or lines made on walls to count years in isolation. Rivers were only the thinnest bands of water charging blindly along their paths wedged between the rock that seemed to force them out of the way. I remembered that the rivers wore their own paths through the stone. My perception of the hills began to change. They were no longer peaks rising out of flatness, but the remnants of a land that once rose all together, broken by the wearing away of water and wind, as badlands are worn by rainfall. Perhaps this was Idaho.
Quickly the mountains became steeper and trees began to grow. Snow appeared on some of the tallest peaks. I supposed we had reached Montana and was surprised and lost at the lack of signifiers to tell me. I was relieved to feel that common suspicions about mapping are true -- that it is incomplete, futile -- for I've never inhabited a place that did not have a network of streets, a direct articulation of a map, an obvious correspondence. For a while I was frantic in my search for a sign of where I was. I saw a lake that looked like a tear in fabric, a still and unnatural void whose edges seemed too precise to belong in its valley. Identifiable roads began to race through trees as though my eyes were laying them. They widened as they unwound eastward.
A brownish grey appeared in my periphery, and once it entered about halfway into the frame of my airplane window I was certain of where I was for the first time since takeoff. All of the mystery of my location over the land was as stripped and exposed as its surface. Lines winding downwards, a shade of lakewater I had never seen, a legible network of markings. A wide road belting a grid, spilling some street-lines south of its border. A city small enough to fit in my window with a trap door as the surface of its lake -- hardly a lake, but undeniable as such. Why such a strange beach? Carved like a stepwell whose waters none can touch. A city halved by excavation, whose hollows threatened annihilation by gravity. I knew where I was and searched for a white mark on a hill. I found nothing. The slope of the earth seemed to be crumbling into its deepest point. I passed over the scene in minutes, and, having held my breath for too long, surrendered to sleep for the next few hundred miles.
