30,000 FT

August 1, 2016

Every time I’m on a plane flying toward or away from home, I try to find my neighborhood from the sky.

(I’ve been doing this for the past twelve years. I’ve never found it.)

There’s something endlessly fascinating about looking out a plane window and watching the world spin past. I’m writing this on a flight from Korea to Detroit, and it’s been nearly eight hours (only four more to go!). We are passing over the northern coast of Canada, and I can see the shoreline beneath the clouds, bare and brown and edged with water so grey it looks like frozen land. The clouds are bedsheets, rumpled. I spent the past thirty minutes trying to decide whether or not I was seeing ice, a confusion only cleared up once I saw the ocean below.

Above the thick white clouds rests a blanket of thinner, mistier ones, tinged with the blueness and pinkness of a morning sky. This plane has been chasing the sunrise.

(We left Korea at 10 a.m. on Monday, August 1. We will touch down in Detroit at 10 a.m. on Monday, August 1. And I will have been on this plane for twelve hours. Isn’t it funny, the way time works?)

While I was staring out the window, I imagined I could see the shadows of enormous whales moving through the water, their lives untouched by us except when we soar above them in these little metal contraptions that really shouldn’t be capable of flight. (Do whales even live this far north? For all the Planet Earth that I watch, I have absolutely no idea.)

(Also. In the time that it took me to scrawl the above paragraph, the landscape has been transformed into a smooth layer of clouds, much like untouched snow. We don’t get much of that in North Carolina, but you must remember some time when you saw one of those rare undisturbed expanses of snow, when you wanted to step in it and leave it be, all at once. I want to reach out and touch these clouds, but I am afraid of ruining them.)

Probably the most disillusioning moment in every childhood (besides Santa Claus Isn’t Real, And Also, Neither Is The Tooth Fairy) is the moment when you learn that you can’t walk on clouds. That they’re just made of water vapor and small particles, that there’s nothing in them that can hold you up. I’m finding that hard to believe, because the open window to my right is currently demanding I acknowledge the magic of clouds.

How instantly they can bring back your childhood.

One of my best friends and I spent the day at Duke gardens a month ago, enjoying a flawless summer day. Contrary to North Carolina’s normal June temperament, it was neither too hot nor too humid, the perfect temperature to spread out a picnic in the shade—homemade BLTs with avocado, tomato salad from a special recipe, potato chips, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, four peach Izzes—and lay back with polaroid cameras in hand, staring up at the sky. Fluffy cumulus clouds abounded.

I hadn’t cloud-gazed (is that what it’s called? Cloud-watched?) in years. But there we were, sprawled picturesquely on a hillside, finding shapes in the clouds (a face! A duck! A unicorn!), marveling at how quickly they moved, when barely a breeze touched us, so far below. We were at the gardens for three hours; the clouds were discontent to stay in the same place for more than a minute, their moods changing as swiftly as their forms, mercurial as the tide.

On planes with TV screens, when I’m not playing movies, I like to turn on the flight tracker and watch the little plane icon as it inches across its dotted path, leaving a solid green line in its wake to mark the distance we’ve traveled. The proportions are completely off, of course. The plane icon is the size of Minnesota. But I enjoy watching the progress we make, however slight, towards our destination. It even tells you the time left (only three hours and forty-one minutes to go, everyone!).

The clouds are clearing now, and we’re still skirting the northern edge of Canada. (I’ve heard that this arching flight path makes more sense when one accounts for the curve of the earth’s surface, although spherical geometry ranks right up there with chemistry and angular momentum in the list of Concepts That Confuse Veronica Most—that is, it’s vying for first place.) It’s so beautiful. I think I can see the tundra—a term I learned from Planet Earth, thank you—it’s greenish-grey, freckled with lakes; the sun is hitting one of them just right, so it’s all lit up, like a mirror. There’s a river twisting away down there too, looking as if a piece of cloud dropped to the earth and decided to stay.

I went on an exchange trip to Spain the spring of my junior year, and one of my friends, who also went, was unused to air travel. He spent almost the entire flight from RDU to Philadelphia (where we boarded a plane for Madrid) staring out the window. My other friend and I, seated in the aisle, spent that same flight laughing at his wide-eyed curiosity, at whatever purely excited and youthful part of him kept his gaze trained outside, wondering how he didn’t tire of it.

I get it, though. Clouds are so damn cool.

(In case you’re wondering—although you’re probably not—they look like ice again. Swaths of it, marred by grey canyons where they dip closer to the ground. Imagine Hoth, but sunnier. And the entire horizon is blurred, dripping into the sky like wet paint.)

Sometimes you hear about sights so beautiful that you can’t rip your eyes away. Clouds are different. They don’t hold their breath, like the Grand Canyon, which is so still that you feel as if you’re intruding on a photograph just by being there. They’re not silent and ethereal like stars. Somehow, though, they’re equally as mesmerizing. Their topography forever shifts; their textures are as fluid as water.

Worst simile ever, you’re thinking. Clouds are literally made of water.

Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry.

But I’ve written over a thousand words about them, so there must be something special about clouds, about plane windows, about losing yourself in the vastness of a world from miles in the air. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s the same wonder that drives you to finish a particularly good book, or keeps your eyes glued to the sunrise, or holds you transfixed during a meteor shower, with what seems like the entire night sky glowing above you. I don’t want to miss a single moment.

In about seven hours, I’ll board a plane home. As is my custom, I’ll fix my attention outside as soon as we begin to descend, scouring the horizon for any familiar landmarks (do I recognize that water tower? That swimming pool? Where’s the highway?). But everything looks so different from up here. That’s probably why I’ve never been able to find my house.

If I do, will the magic be gone?

Header image courtesy of Imgur