He talks about family feuds, guns, executions in Lagos then road rage here, other stupid drivers. It takes me a while to figure out that’s what his word “Serralone” is and, even so, no transcription captures the music of his pronunciation. He is surprised I have heard of it. His father is from Nigeria. The cab driver is from Sierra Leone, on his mother’s side. The woman who stamps our passport routinely rejects Lindy’s explanation of “Traveling.” Brick houses suggest a gameboard. Distance has turned palpable: a concreteness of the ineluctably nonconcrete. We are floating over a cloud blanket, a map of England below, turning in the sky toward London. As we come down, fields are lime green and straw yellow in bright-colored blocks. We are over ocean, among clouds and mist, the unbroken planetary scenery below occasionally visible. I prefer land always, though it makes no sense there is no relative safety if falling from sky to earth. I want the water to end, but every time I look down, it is pretty much the same-gray with whitecaps, the great expanse that mariners, settlers, and earlier-century tourists had to cross.įinally Hebrides, North Scotland, not like an Old World landscape, more like another planet-mist wrapped around scags, pearly white on black. Fog is creeping along, poking, tucking-a living map of the Shire and Narnia. Lakes are black pools reflecting clouds perfectly: Merlin’s mirrors. In the swift passage of our flight their metallic surfaces suddenly disappear as if they weren’t there. That is the view-fog, hillocks, black lakes, rapidly forming and dissolving clouds, an old country still wild and unsettled. She says as though this were a choice of the airline, “I thought I would get to have it be night so I could sleep.”īut there is no true night, just a long day. I find this unexpected, wild, and somewhat elating. It is dark outside. We are over the sub-Arctic, somewhere we are nowhere.ġ0 is close to bedtime yet we are rushing toward a rising sun outside the window, a faint dawn. We leave the ground with a giant upsurge of force. We are bumping along in the clouds. Time disappears. It gets to be 6 PM. It gets to be 8. She says she has faith in machinery it can do so much. I arrive at just the opposite interpretation but don’t tell her. The Irish lady who takes the aisle seat beside me discusses her flying fears. It is hard to imagine getting it up in the air. The stewardesses with their jaunty caps make it feel as though we are going to an amusement park. The voice of the captain is like that of an actor playing a captain as he describes our soon ascent over San Francisco, north into Canada, Hudson Bay, Labrador, England. It seems facile, and it seems surreal. The plane resting at the gate in San Francisco is huge.
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