Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (4 page)

If we do not see much of the intervening earth—if we as passengers sleep most of the way or do not have a window seat—then journeys of such inconceivable scale can seem to take place all but instantaneously, the airplane door like the shutter of a camera.

It is right that our first hours in a city feel wrong, or at least bewildering, in a way we can’t quite specify. We are not built for speed, certainly not for this speed. When we cross the world some lower portion of our brains cannot understand what has, we might say, taken place. I can say matter-of-factly to myself: “I flew from home to Hong Kong. Clearly, this is Hong Kong: the destination signs on the fronts of the buses, the rivers of pedestrians, the surface of the harbor where the lights of so many boats race over the heaving, blurred reflections of skyscrapers.” Equally, I know that a day or two ago I was at home. I have the everyday memories, the receipts to prove it. Yet, just as with two disparate times from my own past, I am the connection between these wildly different places across 6,000 miles of intervening continent. Somewhere in my lower-brain unconscious,
I
am the most obvious answer to the question of what these places, separated not by an inconceivable distance but by mere hours, have in common. And that makes no sense at all.

If place lag were a more recognized term, the next time I walked down a street in Tokyo and a van blaring political announcements for a municipal election went past, or I stood in a food market in São Paulo and saw a dozen fruits I did not know how to name or eat, or the skies opened in Lagos and I saw rain the likes of which I would never see in Massachusetts, I could blink and say to my companion, who would nod and smile in recognition: “I have place lag.”

For pilots, flight attendants, and the most frequent business travelers, place lag may be a more common experience than jet lag. We rarely stay long enough to adjust to local time—to
acclimatize
(the formal term that appears in regulations specifying the rest a pilot requires after a flight)—before it is time to fly back. I never change my watch or cell phone to local time. Many pilots find it easier to eat and sleep on their home time zone for such short stays, even when very far from it, even when this means a complete reversal of night and day, even if this means three days in a city and never walking through it in daylight.

Place lag, unlike jet lag, may get worse with the passage of time. A huge proportion of our memories relates to the most recent minutes, days, or weeks of our lives. So the first days in a foreign city, even as our bodies begin to adjust to the new time zone, fill our minds with the accumulating incongruities of a new place, displacing the presence and immediacy of our now distant homes. The world gets stranger by the hour.

Travelers may know the experience of arriving in a city late at night, tired and unsure of where to go, and acquiring a specific feeling of the place; then, the next morning, waking in a hotel and opening the curtain to light and life outside the window, and having the sense of arriving anew, or even arriving for the first time, as if what happened at night did not happen at all. When I flew to Delhi for the first time it was January, and the city’s famous fog was thick at the airport and in the capital itself. It was perhaps three in the morning when our bus left the terminal. The streets quickly turned narrower, more residential. I was surprised that Delhi that night was far colder than London, and the gray dust on the streets, in the night drifts of fog, looked like nothing so much as snow. In my memory the journey was utterly silent; all I could think of was that we were stealing into Delhi, strangers to the city in both time and place.

Eventually, many passengers will have enough time to replace themselves in this new locale, like a cartoon shadow that’s briefly separated from its owner and later reunited. But before this can happen the crew from their flight will almost certainly have gone back to where they came from; we will probably already have flown to yet another city. Equipped with eyeshades and earplugs, and largely free from locally timed schedules in each city we visit, we have more control than most travelers over how much jet lag we experience. But place lag is an unavoidable and all but permanent presence in our lives.

When I have a free morning, I often go to a city’s main railway station. New or old, in Beijing or Zurich, the stations are typically masterpieces of architecture, and there are always cafés to linger at with a book. I like, too, the signs on the airport-like departure boards for many smaller cities I have not heard of, or did not realize were close enough to be reached by train. But sometimes I think that the real reason I like to wander or sit in these stations is because they are incarnations of in-betweenness. A busy foreign station looks exactly how I feel.

Place lag is most acute when we depart from a foreign city in the late evening. We board a bus at our hotel and journey to the airport, passing the cars or other buses filled with workers making their late way home, and shopping bags filled with what someone will cook; perhaps they’re listening to music or to a sober-voiced news anchor reading out the evening’s top stories from what to me might as well be another world. Tonight everyone I see on this road will sleep in their own beds, while I’ll be watching the flight instruments and drinking tea over Pakistan or Chad or Greenland. Occasionally on these bus journeys, I experience clarifying jolts of my current place, blasts of the truth that only foreigners will see of a city and a day, the privilege of the outsider’s view. But often I feel that I have already left, or that I was never in the city at all.

Later, several hours into a flight, I may think back to the staff we have left behind in Johannesburg or Kuwait or Seattle or Tokyo, those who “work on the ground,” as we say, and about the world they return to when their day’s or night’s tasks are completed, when they disengage from the plane as cleanly as the fueler from the wing. I think about what time it is now, in their city, and whether it’s dark yet. I try to imagine what they will eat, or what they will say about their day; what the homes they have gone to look like—Indian or Japanese or American, and each home itself a country.

Although place lag is more a feature of a pilot’s life than jet lag, it retains analogies to time. When I see an old black-and-white photograph, I have to remind myself that the world was in color when it was taken; or that to the people in it, the moment captured felt as much like the present as the moment in which I am now looking at the photograph. Place lag is the geographic equivalent of this chronological effect, a dislocation only airplanes are fast enough to conjure from the present moments that run not chronologically down through the past, but horizontally, across the geography of the earth. It’s our experience of a truth we could never have evolved to grasp easily: that the whole world, every place, is going on at once.

One winter night I flew to New York, as a passenger. The plane was nearly empty. I was in a middle seat, but the windows on this plane were larger than most and if I sat up straight I had a clear view of the city scrolling past the glowing ellipsis of the windowpanes. In their stowed position the individual passenger television screens faced sideways, out toward the windows and the world.

As we came in to land these unwatched televisions were still on. When I looked toward the windows I saw their images, partially reflected back into the plane. Projected against the night was a comedian at a stand-up club, somewhere and some time else. His glowing, moving image, his silent, laughing audience, rolled smoothly over the turning illuminations of the city. Further down the plane, from another television, a flickering African savanna floated over the sky. Lions turned their faces sideways in inaudible roars and prowled over their unexpected night dominion.

I found myself recalling the memorable name of a category of papal address:
Urbi et Orbi
—to the city and the world. Here we see place more clearly than ever; here we see one city that is given to us so beautifully, that gathers beneath us in the form of its own electrified approximation. Yet here, too, are places crossing places, unmoored and frictionless in the world made by airplanes.

—

“Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I / have been a traveler under open sky,” wrote Wordsworth. Twelve hours in a 747 is a fair run under the blue or the stars; Tokyo to Chicago, Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg to Hong Kong.

I struggle for a means to measure out the human scale of these journeys. The task gets harder, not easier, the more I fly. Sometimes after a long flight I reach my hotel room and close my eyes, and I’m hit by the silence of being alone for the first time in thousands of miles, and I don’t know how many faces I’ve seen since my day began, since the sun rose in whatever city I happened to wake up in that morning. I am certain that on most workdays I see more people than many of my ancestors saw in an entire lifetime. I think how those I’ve seen have been scattered by the hours of airplanes, how the simplest definition of community, of sharing a space, has been disassembled, even as the plane has enabled new forms of reunions, those that take place on a fully planetary scale. By nightfall many of the people I saw in the airport or onboard my plane will have taken further flights, or will be at home, or in a hotel room like mine. Some may be driving the last miles down a narrow road, completing their journey to a place distant in every sense from the world I know, or may even now be describing their journey to the person they’ve traveled so far to see.

Sometimes, trying to imagine the dimensions of modern flight, I think of the air. Not just of the volume or depth of air we move through, or Wordsworth’s open sky, but rather of their opposite. It’s ironic that what’s called air travel, which vaults us through so much of the world’s air, is so profoundly cut off from any direct physical encounter with it. I suspect this may be the sharpest contrast between those who flew in open cockpits and those who fly now. Who knows what teleportation might feel like; presumably I’ll be looking for work as soon as someone finds out. But I imagine we already have a small sense from the air-conditioned boxes and tubes, so well prepared for us, that can convey us nearly anywhere on the planet.

I wake up in a hotel room, after a long postflight nap. I’m in a hotel in an Asian metropolis. It takes me a moment to remember which one. I remember the name of the city just before I sit up, stand, go to the window, draw the curtain back on a harbor filled with moving light, a maritime scene so frenetic it could be a far older age. I lift my gaze, and before looking for the airplanes descending over this waterscape, I pause to look at the noble skyscrapers behind the glittering logos and signs hardly smaller than the faces of the buildings. I shower, dress, wander outside into the electric evening, amid all the light, all the workers rushing home or to meet friends. I look up to where the upper floors of the towers thin out in a starless haze, and I can’t calculate how many hours and miles have passed since I was last outside under the open sky.

I skid over the miles and the hours, tripping over the threads that can’t be cut, that constitute my various lags. I remember a dark early start in London, a walk to a Tube station, an unconsidered last moment of unmediated sky, when I did not even pause to consider a farewell. Then a train, to another train that took me to the depths of an airport; a walk through the terminal, another underground train, a covered jetway to a plane bound for Hong Kong; a bus from the covered airport station to beneath the large awning of our hotel; automatic doors, banks of shiny elevators with music playing inside and advertisements on the walls for the rooftop jazz lounge; my room and sleep. A journey nearly as momentous as any we can make on the earth; yet not one mile or moment of it under open sky.

The ease with which we cross the world now would certainly shock previous generations. But our ancestors might be equally surprised that it’s possible to make such a journey without seeing the sky, or without, at least, the permanent mediation of glass. And air travel is often the most enclosed portion of such journeys. I can enter a terminal in one city and take a series of connecting flights, be carried across the world in no small measure by the wind; I can shop and sleep and dine along the way and yet never face a local breeze.

I often try to open a window in the hotel rooms where I sleep. In many hotels, none can be opened at all. The term
built environment
typically refers to the totality of man-made features such as streets, parks, and buildings. But one subset of this, the cocoon of glassed-off insulation that is modern travel—in particular, the global house of sealed comfort that air travelers are presumed to want—is a more compelling object for the name.

The completeness of the built environment, the built sky, is often taken as a mark of the quality of the airport, or even of the level of development in a country. Few travelers enjoy boarding a plane that is parked away from the terminal, which may involve waiting on stairs in the wind and the rain. Jetways—or air bridges, a term in which the increasingly sealed-off modern traveler might hear a touch of irony—are added as airports develop and expand. Like aviation itself their shiny presence is taken for a sign of progress.

The extent of the built air is revealed most clearly when it breaks down. Even when the plane is attached to the terminal by a jetway, if the seal it makes is imperfect, where the edge of the climate-controlled jetway meets the plane there are brief little gusts of Dallas heat or Brussels damp or Moscow cold. Such air feels and smells different from the conditioned environment; it hits me like a transgression, but also a blessing of place—a sudden blast of place lag, perhaps, but also the first breath of what will eventually remedy it. Honolulu, with an open-sided, though still covered, terminal, is a rare exception in the world of large airports. I was dumbfounded when I first walked through it, not by the volumes it speaks about Hawaii’s weather, but by what was for me the extraordinary sensation of natural, fragrant air washing though the sanitized realm of global aviation.