Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (6 page)

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The most curious aspect of the pilot’s life may not be that we work in the air. It is that our world on the ground—the realm of places we know well, and that we connect to other places, the world that for a child begins with the rooms at home, and then expands to the backyard, and to the neighborhood—is so enormous. The job induces an almost planetary sensibility, a mental geography that rounds countries and continents as easily as you follow turns in a path through a familiar wood.

As a child you are taken to places by others. When I grew up and learned to drive I eventually drove myself to many of these same places: small towns, or lakes, or state forests in New England where my family had camped or hiked when I was young. I realized that although I remembered the sites well, they had floated freely in my memory, untethered to actual geography. I hadn’t known how they lay on a map or on the earth, how to travel to one, or between two of them, or how long such journeys might take. But when I drove to them myself, the cloud they formed began to sort itself, to fall into place, as we say, like the pieces of a wooden puzzle. I realized that a lake I thought faced in one direction actually faced another, for example, and was close to a second location that I had never linked it to.

When I learned to fly, such a sorting of idea-places onto the physical world around me happened on a fully planetary scale. What suddenly appeared in the window included not only the few cities I had flown to as a child, but everything I saw from the air that was identifiable—all the cities and mountains and oceans I had heard of or read about and dreamed of someday visiting.

This sense of a formal knowledge of places falling onto actual earth and lining and connecting up, one with another, may be similar to the ways in which bodies change in the minds of medical students when they first learn how the organs and bones they’ve always known the names of are really located in three dimensions, and how they’re connected by other tissues they did not know about before medical school. The first time I flew to Athens, I noted some digits on our paperwork that marked the presence of an area of high terrain not far off our route. As we approached this region a snowy peak came into view. I said to the captain: That’s quite a mountain. He looked at me as if I had said something strange and then answered: Mark, that’s Mount Olympus.

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I’m over Arabia, routing toward Europe. Ahead is Aqaba, the lights of the Sinai; then the city of Suez, and the lights of ships streaming through the canal like blood cells in an animation of the earth’s circulatory system; then the glow of the Nile, a flowing ring of light around the waters, a flume that fans into Cairo, leading the eye to Alexandria, pooling on the coast; and off to the right is all of Israel, shimmering on its water so marvelously that if I did not know which coastal place I was gazing upon I would bet it was Los Angeles; and beyond is Lebanon, where I look for this night’s electrified shadow of the biblical city of Tyre, that “dwells at the entrance to the sea.” The next lights are those of ships, and then comes the illuminated net of Crete, and the city of Heraklion. An idea of these places was all I had, until I saw them turning below me in their natural order.

A few hours later I am over Germany, looking down at an inland sea of light. I remember a childhood fascination with an atlas of the world owned by my parents, in which the most densely populated areas were clearly marked out, so that London or Los Angeles or Tokyo were surrounded by splotches of bright red. In northwest Germany, too, there was a large red area like this, that I was certain must be a misprint because it was so enormous and sprawled over a region that was far from any major German city I had heard of, such as Frankfurt or Munich. I asked my dad, and he told me the name of this place, which I still find beautiful, perhaps because I can remember him pronouncing what I myself can never properly say: the Ruhr. It is Germany’s most populous area, he told me, though you won’t yet know the names of even the largest cities that constitute it: Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg. The Ruhr is easy to see from the sky at night, a sprawling illumination as clear as any colorings in a childhood atlas.

Before I became a pilot I had the naive sense—a feeling, as opposed to what I’d been taught to the contrary—that most people lived in a world that looked something like where I grew up: small towns, forests, fields, four seasons, hills in some recurring, familiar pattern, the reference of a coastline a few hours away, and the vague gravity of a major metropolis at some similar distance. Today I understand in a direct and visual sense what I learned in school, that humanity is concentrated in a dense set of the lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and further in a dense set of longitudes in the eastern hemisphere; and what I have read since school, that ours is an age of cities—small ones as well as the conurbations like Mumbai, Beijing, and São Paulo that dominate the urban earth—in which for the first time a majority of humanity lives.

A plane’s center of gravity is a critical piece of information that pilots receive before takeoff; it depends on the weight and location on the aircraft of the passengers, cargo, and fuel. Methodologies vary, but several calculations place humanity’s center of gravity, the geographical midpoint of the world’s population, in or near the far north of India. I often fly not very far south of there, either approaching Delhi itself or passing it en route to southeast Asia. I imagine a bull’s-eye of concentric rings that begins at the center of gravity and echoes out, each ripple eventually sweeping up more and more of the planet’s population, and then I am reminded that I, like nearly everyone I know, am from the provinces, from the periphery of the map when the map is weighted by individual lives. When I fly between New York and London it is easy to forget that only in an economic sense are even these cities much more than outer stars in the galaxy of human geography, and that the place I myself have been centered—rural New England—is almost comically tangential, not even a footnote in the textbook a visitor from another planet might write about the geography of our species. The question of how the world looks to most people is one I would have got entirely wrong before I became a pilot.

A separate question is what the surface of the earth typically looks like. If someone had asked me this before I became a pilot, my answer would inevitably and provincially have focused on what I had seen of the earth in the places where I had lived or traveled—trees, rolling hills, small towns between big cities. Today I would answer that question differently. I would say that the world looks mostly uninhabited.

Most of the earth’s surface is water, of course, and an enormous portion of what isn’t water is very sparsely populated—whether because it is too hot, too cold, too dry, or too high. We forget this, if we ever even learned it, because we never see it—unless, of course, we look out the window of airliners, at the vast, nearly empty regions that planes bear witness to, and carry us over, the in-between places that are such obvious features of our planet’s face but that by definition we are unlikely otherwise to experience. By one estimate, the portion of the earth’s surface on which an unclothed human could survive for twenty-four hours is about 15 percent. That’s a hard calculation to make—it depends on the season and weather, for example—but from the cockpit of a long-haul airliner, at least, such a figure does not surprise me.

The shock of a nearly empty world is most startling on routes that take us into the far north, where so much of the planet’s emptiest land hides in plain sight. Over Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest countries, are many hours of flying where you see almost exclusively snow and ice, or their brief seasonal absence; this is the taiga, the forest, and the tundra where almost no one lives. The entire population of Canada is smaller than that of greater Tokyo, and nearly all Canadians live in a narrow strip along their country’s southern border. Siberia alone is larger than the entire United States, larger even than Canada; but Siberia has fewer inhabitants than Spain. Northeast Greenland has an area comparable to the combined size of Japan and France, and a population of forty. Many hot places, too, appear similarly desolate. We forget, unless we cross it as often as long-haul pilots do, that the Sahara isn’t much smaller than the United States; then there are the vast, barely inhabited portions of Australia, a continent comparable in breadth to the contiguous United States (as Australian postcards that overlay maps of the two make so clear); and then there is the Kalahari, and Arabia.

I don’t mean to suggest that the portions of the earth that look empty have not been disturbed—nearly all of them have been, not least by climate change, to which the planes that carry us over such places make a growing contribution—or that we can make useful assessments of our impact on the environment from casual aerial observations. Only a specialist can look down on a brown autumn landscape of Canada or Finland, for example, and say where the snow would likely have fallen by this date a hundred years ago.

But if you have ever hiked or driven through a very rural area or a nature reserve, and looked closely at the many lesser peaks that surround one well-known mountain, and speculated on whether anyone has ever stood on them, or even whether some have ever been given a name, then that is exactly the feeling I often have while looking out from the window seat of a long-haul airliner. In all contradiction to what we know about our negative influences on the world, so often from above it’s disturbingly easy to imagine that we are the first to look upon the earth, that we are seeking a level place to set down our ship.

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The author J. G. Ballard wrote that “civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.” Those who fly often may naturally acquire the worldview, inaugurated by the 747, that takes a planet to be a reasonably sized thing.

I’ve come to measure out countries in jet time. Algeria surprised me, when I first started to fly across Africa. North to south it is nearly a two-hour country and I now feel what I did not then know, that it is the largest country in Africa. Norway, too, was another surprise, on routes to Japan that give us this country from end to Norwegian end; in the north of a continent crowded with smallish countries it is a fully two-hour land. France at the angles I most often cross it is a land of around one hour, as are the states of Texas and Montana. Belgium, with a healthy tailwind, is a fifteen-minute country. On many routes Russia is a seven-hour country, though really it’s best imagined as a day-long or night-long land.

I often fly over tiny, windswept Heligoland, an island in the German Bight of the North Sea; there is an important beacon there that many pilots will know. Britain once swapped its Heligoland for Germany’s Zanzibar, off East Africa. Pilots may swap cities, countries, continents just as nonchalantly. I might give a colleague a Johannesburg on Monday for their Los Angeles on Tuesday, or exchange a Lagos for a Kuwait. Some crew find their body clocks prefer one time direction over another, and so they will say that they “do better east” or “do better west” and may ask to swap with a colleague of an opposite-pointing disposition. I generally prefer west to east, though I’m still occasionally surprised to hear myself talking about cardinal directions as if they were brands of breakfast cereal.

I might eat dinner with a member of the cabin crew at a Belgian restaurant in Beijing, and he may ask if I know this or that Thai restaurant in San Francisco, or a new café in Johannesburg that he heard about on his last trip to Sydney. Countries blur, cities elide. Airline crews experience this age of cities, if not quite as casually as they do the rooms of their homes, as little more than different districts of the earth metropolis. Someone asks me if I can recommend a good spot for breakfast in Shanghai. I pause—I cannot think of a place. It takes me a moment to remember that I have never been to Shanghai.

In contrast with the various species of lag and the occasional loneliness of my job, I have enjoyed connections that would otherwise not have been possible. There are many friends from high school and college whom I see regularly only because I am a pilot and can fly to the far-off places in which they now live. When I flew short flights within Europe, I was able to visit relatives in Belgium and Sweden almost as often as I pleased. It was as if a switch had been turned on, and entire branches of the family tree were re-illuminated. I would move so often and so casually around Stockholm that my once-unremarkable inability to speak Swedish began to seem increasingly strange to me.

For many years, too, I would go to Paris at least once a month. One afternoon I went to the Musée Rodin, and as I walked down the rue de Varenne I had a sudden memory that this was the neighborhood in which my mother had lived when she studied for a year in Paris. She had told me the name of this very street, perhaps, as part of her story about the French strangers who gathered around her to offer condolences, when they heard her accent on the day that President Kennedy was shot. I called her in Massachusetts, interrupting her breakfast. Yes, she said, with a smile I could hear even as her voice drifted off, it seemed, into memory; she had indeed lived on the rue de Varenne. I took many photographs of the street and her old building from different viewpoints, and mailed them to her.

I had a pen pal in Australia when I was a child, a friendship that was held together by the tissue of aerograms until the night, two and a half decades after we had first written, when I myself was charged with flying the airmail to Australia. My colleagues and I flew from Singapore across Indonesia, then across the entire outback to Sydney, where after a long sleep and an enormous cup of coffee I met my pen pal for the first time ever, at a bar on the promenade below the Opera House. Australia will never feel close to me. But that one month it had nevertheless appeared on my schedule, in the small-print, all-capitals form of the ordinary airport code, SYD, and the long arc of a childhood transoceanic friendship—formed precisely because there was almost no chance I myself would ever travel such a distance—was closed.