About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (15 page)

We had no trouble getting into or out of Anchorage, and we enjoyed an unperturbed flight to New York, with spectacular views of the Canadian Rockies. On the next leg, from JFK to San Francisco, I fell into conversation with the pilot about the history of aerodynamic design that produced the 747. Like many pilots, he had an intuitive sense of the volume of abstract space, and he was a gazer-out-of-windows. It was about one in the morning. Air-traffic control in New York had given us a direct path to San Francisco. Our flight plan showed no areas of turbulence ahead, and no one in front of us was reporting any. The moonless sky was glimmering, deep. I asked the pilot if he had ever heard of James Turrell. He hadn’t.

I’d hoped for weeks to speak with someone who had. Turrell is best known for an enormous project called Roden Crater near Flagstaff in northern Arizona. He reconformed the crater with bulldozers and road graders, believing celestial space actually had shape, that one could perceive the “celestial vault” above the Earth, and that a view from within the crater could reveal that architecture by so disposing the viewer. Turrell, a pilot, once said, “For me, flying really dealt with these spaces delineated by air conditions, by visual penetration, by sky conditions; some were visual, some were only felt. These are the kinds of space I wanted to work with.”

People who have traveled to Roden Crater—heavy-equipment operators as well as museum curators—say, yes, you do see that the sky has shape from the crater. I’d like to go, I told the pilot.

After a while the pilot turned around in his seat and said, “He’s right. I know what he’s talking about. The space you fly the plane through has shape.” I asked if he thought time had boundary or dimension, and told him what I had felt at Cape Town, that time pooled in every part of the world as if in a basin. The dimension, the transparency, and the agitation were everywhere different. He nodded, as if together we were working out an equation.

A while later he said, “Being ‘on time’ is like being on fire.”

O
NE OF MY LAST FLIGHTS
takes me to Buenos Aires, seat of the old viceroyalty on the Río de la Plata, the river of silver. Here, as in other places I visited, people in the freight depot are friendly and open, and sometimes quite sophisticated about ironies in the airfreight business. I go to lunch with four men who treat me to a meal of Argentine beef and a good Argentine red wine. Affecting philosophical detachment, they explain the non-European way to conduct business in Buenos Aires, the paths money might take here. We laugh. Three of us then go to a strong room to inspect a shipment of gold bullion.

I walk out to the tarmac afterward with the KLM freight manager. He is directing the loading of Flight 798 from Buenos Aires
to Amsterdam, a thirteen-hour run. In the crackle blast of combusting kerosene, swept by hot winds, I watch the pallets go aboard. These, I have come to understand, are the goods. This lovely, shrieking behemoth, the apotheosis of modern imagination and invention, is being filled yet again with what we believe in. I watch, as agnostics must once have watched at Chartres, for a sign, a confirmation of faith. I see frozen trout; fresh strawberries; eighty cases of live worms; seventy-three pounds of gold for Geneva, packed in light green metal boxes sealed with embossed aluminum bands, wrapped in clear plastic, banded again with steel strapping. An armed security officer stands by until the bulk-cargo door is closed, then stands at a distance, watching.

The last load in the aft compartment is four tons of horsemeat. The temperature is set at 53 degrees and the door is closed. The last load in the forward compartment will be 175 penguins. They have come in on the plane from Santiago and are headed for Tokyo. They wait in the noise and heat around the airplane while freight in the forward compartment is rearranged, the weight more evenly distributed.

The penguins stand erect in narrow cells, five cells forming a wooden crate. A wire mesh panel on the front, beginning at chest level, slants up and back, reaching the top of the crate just above their head height. So constructed, air can reach those on the inside of the load, thirty-five crates stacked in tiers on a single pallet. The gangs of five face in four directions; some see us, some see one another, some see the plane, some the back of another box. I recognize magellanic and rockhopper penguins. If they’re making any noise I cannot hear it over the jet engines. A few strike at the wire mesh with their bills. Some of the rockhoppers rise on their toes, cramping their heads, and flap their flippers repeatedly against the dividers.

After they are loaded, the temperature of their compartment is set at 43 degrees and the door is closed.

KL 798, a passenger flight, takes us up the southern coast of Brazil, above the Serra do Mar and Serra do Espinhaço and out
over the Atlantic near Natal. There is a lightning storm near Recife, on the coast. I send my worn letter of introduction to the cockpit to see if it would be possible to watch and talk for a while. The purser comes back with a smile. Yes.

I take my place in the jump seat, assure the chief pilot I am familiar with how to operate the oxygen mask and with my responsibilities in case of an emergency. This is a 747–400. With this new design, the flight engineer’s job has been eliminated; a relief crew of two is now asleep in bunks along the port side, just aft of the cockpit.

We watch cobra strikes of yellow-and-blue light on the starboard horizon. Against the display of lightning I hesitate to speak. I take in the instruments to learn our heading, the speed and direction of the wind, our altitude, the outside temperature. I’m aware of my faith in the integrity of the aircraft. I recognize the familiar, impetuous hurtling toward the void, a space to be filled only briefly, then to yawn again, hopeful and acquisitive.

Out over the Atlantic I lean forward and ask the captain how long he’s been flying, which routes he knows best. Twenty-eight years, he says. He speaks of the South American and Caribbean routes. I think of the penguins two decks below, whose wings have become flippers, slamming them against the walls of their pens.

A
FEW MILES EAST
of home in the Cascades I slow down and pull over for two raccoons, sprawled still as stones in the road. I carry them to the side and lay them in sunshot, windblown grass in the barrow pit. In eastern Oregon, along U.S. 20, black-tailed jackrabbits lie like welts of sod—three, four, then a fifth. By the bridge over Jordan Creek, just shy of the Idaho border in the drainage of the Owyhee River, a crumpled adolescent porcupine leers up almost maniacally over its blood-flecked teeth. I carry each one away from the pavement into a cover of grass or brush out of decency, I think. And worry. Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?

I do not stop to remove each dark blister from the road. I wince before the recently dead, feel my lips tighten, see something else,
a fence post, in the spontaneous aversion of my eyes, and pull over. I imagine white silk threads of life still vibrating inside them, even if the body’s husk is stretched out for yards, stuck like oiled muslin to the road. The energy that once held them erect leaves like a bullet, but the memory of that energy fades slowly from the wrinkled cornea, the bloodless fur.

The raccoons and, later, a red fox carry like sacks of wet gravel and sand. Each animal is like a solitary child’s shoe in the road.

Once a man asked, Why do you bother? You never know, I said. The ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness.

In Idaho I hit a young sage sparrow—
thwack
against the right fender in the very split second I see it. Its companion rises from the same spot but a foot higher, slow as smoke, and sails off clean into the desert. I rest the walloped bird in my left hand, my right thumb pressed to its chest. I feel for the wail of the heart. Its eyes glisten like rain on crystal. Nothing but warmth. I shut the tiny eyelids and lay it beside a clump of bunchgrass. Beyond a barbedwire fence the overgrazed range is littered with cow flops. The road curves away to the south. I nod before I go, a ridiculous gesture, out of simple grief.

I pass four spotted skunks. The swirling air is acrid with the rupture of each life.

D
ARKNESS RISES
in the valleys of Idaho. East of Grand View, south of the Snake River, nighthawks swoop the roads for gnats, silent on the wing as owls. On a descending curve I see two of them lying soft as clouds in the road. I turn around and come back. The sudden slowing down and my K-turn at the bottom of the hill draw the attention of a man who steps away from a tractor, a dozen yards from where the birds lie. I can tell by his step, the suspicious tilt of his head, that he is wary, vaguely proprietary. Offended, or irritated, he may throw the birds back into the road when I leave. So I wait, subdued like a penitent, a body in each hand.

He speaks first, a low voice, a deep murmur weighted with awe. He has been watching these flocks feeding just above the road for several evenings. He calls them whippoorwills. He gestures for a carcass. How odd, yes, the way they concentrate their hunting right on the road, I say. He runs a finger down the smooth arc of the belly and remarks on the small whiskered bill. He pulls one long wing out straight, but not roughly. He marvels. He glances at my car, baffled by this out-of-state courtesy. Two dozen nighthawks careen past, back and forth at arm’s length, feeding at our height and lower. He asks if I would mind—as though I owned it—if he took the bird up to the house to show his wife. “She’s never seen anything like this.” He’s fascinated. “Not close.”