Laura Erickson's For the Birds

I look the longest airplane flight of my life last month when we flew non-stop from Minneapolis to Honolulu. l’m afraid of heights, yet though some inexplicable inconsistency, l love flying in planes. As I look down, l wonder if this is how birds see the beautiful and varied shapes the earth takes—the neat squares of tilled and settled land; the lovely natural curves of lakes and rivers; the bold, jagged lines of mountain ranges. In the west there are green circles in the midst of a parched brown landscape—those are the irrigation patterns. I love flying inside all-enveloping clouds that make me feel like l’m lost in a deep Humphrey Bogart–Claude Rains fog. I love looking down on soft puffy-lump clouds straight out of a Care Bears movie. Never do they seem like simple water vapor.

I love when we are up so high that the curvature of the earth seems detectable. I love figuring out where I am by a huge landmark—crossing the Missouri River, seeing the Great Salt Lake, crossing the Rocky Mountains, approaching the Pacific Ocean. Before the trip, several seasoned travelers warned me that flying over the ocean seems endless and boring, but I found the sheer vastness of the Pacific thrilling. You can see a depiction of the ocean on any globe, or read its statistics in an almanac, but it takes the real time of actually crossing it to appreciate its magnificent hugeness.

I’ve always felt sorry for Captain Kirk for doing so much of his travel at warp speed or via transporter. If all I had to say was “Beam me up, Scotty,” to suddenly find myself in Hawaii, it wouldn’t have felt like l’d gone any place now. How could the crew of the Starship Enterprise have a sense of the vast distances involved in intergalactic travel if they were simply transported from one place to another? Or flew at the speed of light? I don’t even like driving at 60 miles per hour because I miss so much. Light speed might be more efficient by some measures, but for me savoring the journey is at least as important as reaching the destination.

At the speed we were going, we crossed half-way around the Pacific in five or six hours. It took Captain Cook in his sailing vessels weeks, and the ancient Polynesians in their canoes months, to travel to Hawaii. How much vaster the ocean must have been for them! How much richer and scarier and more thrilling with the fishy smelI of saltwater and the feel of the wind and the ocean spray, and the taste of its bounty.

From so far above, I didn’t see a single ship down below, and on the long trip, at high altitude, not a single bird. But the ocean was still changeable: at times patterned with white-caps, at times still and peaceful. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the gray clouds ended and the water began. Staring out at the sea below I fell into a reverie, imagining ancient Polynesians in canoes, British ships a’sailin’ in, albatrosses soaring, an ancient mariner seeking redemption. I watched the shadow of our own airplane down below, as it passed ghostlike over the shimmering water. There’s plenty to look at and wonder about when looking down at the ocean. Albatrosses, storm petrels and other oceanic birds spend virtually their entire lives at sea, searching and tasting and feeling and breathing it in, ever experiencing its varied moods and hues, never completely fathoming its depths.

No. My flight over the ocean was definitely not boring.