Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (63 page)

We had no trouble getting into or out of Anchorage, and we enjoyed an undisturbed 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 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 with in the crater would 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 come 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 told the pilot I’d like to go.

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 that 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.”

One of my last flights takes me to Buenos Aires, seat of the old viceroyalty on the Rio de la Plata, the river of silver. Here, as in other places I visited, the 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. Then three of us go to a strong room to inspect a shipment of gold bullion.

Afterward, I walk out onto the tarmac with the KLM freight manager, who 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 horse meat. The temperature is set at fifty-three 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’ve been waiting in the noise and heat around the airplane for freight in the forward compartment to be rearranged, the weight more evenly distributed.

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

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

KL 798, a passenger flight, takes us up the south coast of Brazil, above the Serra do Mar and Serra do Espinhaco and out over the Atlantic near Natal. There is a lightning storm near Recife, on the coast. I send my worn letter of introduction up 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.

From 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’m aware of my faith in the integrity of the aircraft. I recognize the familiar, impetuous hurtling toward a 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. I think of the penguins two decks below, standing up on their toes and slamming flippers that once were wings against the walls of their pens.

^1.
The forty flights, covering about 110,000 nautical miles, were made aboard 747 freighters or 747 passenger planes with substantial amounts of cargo in their lower-deck compartments or on the aft portion of their main decks, separated from the passengers by a bulkhead. The flights were arranged by Northwest Airlines in the United States and the Far East, and by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in India, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and South America. Both airlines provided cockpit clearance, which permitted me to ride with the pilots.

^2.
As a singular icon the 747 also symbolizes huge economic risk, brutal financial efficiency, and despotic corporate ego. Boeing president William Allen and Pan American’s Juan Trippe dared each other to take the then mind-boggling steps of contracting for and building the 747. Who would go first? In 1969, when Boeing’s total debt after developing the plane was thought to be larger than its net worth, it eliminated 60,000 jobs to save the company, pushing Seattle’s unemployment to 17 percent.

^3.
KLM has five 747-400 passenger planes and eleven 747-400 Combis but no dedicated freighters. Virtually all wide-body passenger aircraft, however, carry, in addition, a diverse and often substantial belly cargo, not only of manufactured goods, flowers, fresh food, and live animals but, more and more, containers of personal effects and the coffins of returning nationals. At the end of 1994, about 1,000 freighters were flying. By 2014, the industry predicts, 2,080 freighters will be in operation, 38 percent of them aircraft the size of 747s, capable of carrying 120 to 150 tons. Smaller loads of similar goods will continue to fly aboard thousands of “passenger” aircraft.

^4.
Thoroughbred horses fly back and forth between the continents constantly during the respective national racing seasons. Slaughter horses, mostly young draft horses, are carried to the Far East from the United States and Canada with some regularity, 114 at a time. With a reduction in import duties on fresh meat in the Far East, slaughter cattle like those killed in the Anchorage crash have become less economical to fly live.

^5.
It is largely forgotten today that the notion of “standard time” in the United States, as opposed to local time, was promulgated by railroad commissions to coordinate the needs of railroads and other businesses engaged in long-distance commerce. A nationwide system, enforced by railroads and then by factories, was entrenched by 1883. Congress eventually gave its official approval, although several states — Utah, Minnesota, California — fought the inconvenience until 1917. The principal objection was that standard time distorted the natural rhythms of human life for the sake of greater efficiency in business and commerce. Today Cincinnati lives, more or less complacently, by Boston’s sunrise.

^6.
Pilots use different methods to compute their actual (as distinct from scheduled) flying time. One is “block to block,” or from the pulling of the nosewheel chocks at one end to the setting of them at the other end. Northwest pilots are limited to 82.5 hours of flying per month and to no more than 30 hours in any seven-day period.

^7.
The heritage of oceangoing vessels is preserved in the language and some of the design of modern airplanes. Pilots frequently call the plane a ship; its fuselage, a hull. Its interior space is divided into decks that extend fore and aft. The captain might refer to starting an engine as turning a wheel. He steers the plane on the ground with a tiller and speaks of docking the ship, after which, on a freighter, cargo is always taken off the main deck on the port side (originally, the side of a ship desired for use in port). A rudder in the plane’s vertical stabilizer changes its course. Waterline numbers stenciled on the interior hull indicate height above the ground. Sailboat fairings taper engine mounts into wings that bear green running lights to starboard, red lights to ports

^8.
About 4:00
A.M
. one December night in Hong Kong, I stood at the top of our air stairs with my binoculars, scanning nearby office buildings. Christmas trees twinkled on a dozen floors. I had seen Christmas trees banked with brightly wrapped gift boxes in Muslim Dubai and in the Buddhist city of Bangkok, as well as in Amsterdam and Houston. The displays, of course, had nothing to do with the Christianity of, say, Joseph Arimathea. “This time of year,” one pilot told me while we waited in Hong Kong, “we’re flying freighters out of here wingtip to wingtip.”

^9.
Pilots refer to newer planes like the Boeing 777 and the Airbus 320 synecdochically as “glass cockpits,” planes in which the information most frequently reviewed is displayed in color overlays on video-like screens. The instrument cluster in older jet aircraft is referred to collectively as “steam gauges.”

^10.
The turbulence over Anchorage that we encountered on the flight with the horses was the worst that one of the pilots had ever experienced. On another flight out of Anchorage, the freighter built up the heaviest loads of ice the chief pilot had ever had to contend with.

Thomas Lynch

 

THOMAS LYNCH’S
collections of poems include
Skating with Heather Grace
,
Grimalkin & Other Poems
, and
Still Life in Milford. The Undertaking
, his first book of nonfiction, won the American Book Award, and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Bodies in Motion and at Rest
won the Great Lakes Book Award, and
Booking Passage
was named a 2006 Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. He is also the author of a book of short stories titled
Late Fictions
. His work has appeared in
Harper’s, The New Yorker
,
Newsweek
,
Esquire
,
The New York Times
,
The Times of London
, and
The Irish Times
and has been broadcast by NPR, the BBC, and RTE in Ireland. He has read and lectured across the United States, throughout Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and is an adjunct professor with the Graduate Department of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moven, County Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

 

Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.

Apart from the tangibles, I sell the use of my building: eleven thousand square feet, furnished and fixtured with an abundance of pastel and chair rail and crown moldings. The whole lash-up is mortgaged and remortgaged well into the next century. My rolling stock includes a hearse, two Fleetwoods, and a minivan with darkened windows our pricelist calls a service vehicle and everyone in town calls the Dead Wagon.

I used to use the
unit pricing method
— the old package deal. It meant that you had only one number to look at. It was a large number. Now everything is itemized. It’s the law. So now there is a long list of items and numbers and italicized disclaimers, something like a menu or the Sears Roebuck Wish Book, and sometimes the federally-mandated options begin to look like cruise control or rear-window defrost. I wear black most of the time, to keep folks in mind of the fact we’re not talking Buicks here. At the bottom of the list there is still a large number.

In a good year the gross is close to a million, five percent of which we hope to call profit. I am the only undertaker in this town. I have a corner on the market.

The market, such as it is, is figured on what is called
the crude death rate
— the number of deaths every year out of every thousand persons.