O exile, for want of you, what night is cold, what stream is dry, what tree unleaved?
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for waiting. Flight 661 has now been accessorized, and is ready for passenger boarding through the jetway at gate eleven. We would like first to preboard those passengers requiring assistance in boarding and those with young children.”
There is a small stir now among the waiting passengers. The wingless are preparing to fly. Andy feels the first clench of the difference between earth and air. The woman knitting looks up and looks back down again. The football player hands his magazine to his lady without looking at her, and stands. She puts the magazine into her purse, hands him his crutches, and follows him to the door, carrying their bags. Even on crutches and hampered by the unwieldy cast, he moves gracefully. His grace and bearing and a certain neatness of conformation have deceived Andy about his size. It is only when noticed point by point, neck and shoulder and arm, that the mass of the man becomes evident. He weighs maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, and yet he moves and places himself with a light and easy precision. His hands too are precise, as if alert to catch a flying bird.
Presently, the voice in the air wishes the other passengers to begin boarding. It asks those in the back rows of the plane to be seated first.
The beautiful businesswoman puts her pad of paper and her recording machine back into her briefcase. The man with the newspaper refolds it and puts his glasses in his shirt pocket. The soldier and his weeping girl stand up and hold each other tightly.
As their rows are called, they get up stragglingly and join the line at the door. They do not look at one another, each remaining in a separate small capsule of air, observing scrupulously the etiquette of strangers, careful lest by accident they should touch. The uniformed stewardess taking their boarding passes gives them each a smile made for strangers. “Thank you!” she says. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” As Andy passes and goes on down the quaking tunnel toward the plane, he can smell the stench of engine exhaust and spilled fuel. The line moves to the door of the plane in little nudging advances that begin at the front and move back along its length to the rear, as an earthworm moves. Andy enters the door in his turn, and the halting movement of the line continues, branching into the aisles of the huge plane. Many are already in their seats, some reading newspapers, some opening their briefcases to go to work.
He says to himself, as he always does, “It is like a bus or a train. People take it for granted, and are at ease in it. Millions of people do this without death or injury. It is safer than driving a car. It is an ordinary thing.”
But, also as he always does, he begins to argue with his first proposition: “It is too big. It is like a lecture hall. It is preposterous. And it is most extraordinary that humans should fly. They have done so only recently, and they do so only clumsily, with a ludicrous hooferaw of noise and fire. Human flight, after all, is only a false and pathetic argument against gravity, which has the upper hand and is the greater fact. All will come down. And some will fall.”
A stewardess stands leaning against a bulkhead with her hands behind her back, saying, “Good morning! Good morning!”
He can smell the chemical smell of the plane, the disinfected cleanness of something that, though not new, is meant always to seem new. It is not marked either by its makers or its users. It will not wear like stone or wood and grow more beautiful. It is purely the result of design, purely answerable to function. All its flaws are secret, lying in wait in the imperfect attention and responsibility of human beings, in the undiscovered wear or breakage of some bolt or bearing or little wire.
He finds his seat next to a window on the left side of the plane, sidles in, and sits down. The aisles remain full of people coming in, finding seats, stowing luggage. In the seat across from Andy, a businessman has his opened briefcase on his lap. He is holding a sheaf of invoices in his left hand, and with his right hand is working rapidly a small calculator, a pencil crosswise in his mouth. And now a very pretty young lady, a very pleasant, intelligent-looking lady, nicely made, stops beside Andy. She opens the overhead compartment and lifts her suitcase. It is heavy, and she struggles with it.
“Can I help you?” Andy says.
“No,” she says. “But thanks.”
She puts the bag into the compartment, and he is relieved. He did not want her to see that he has lost his hand, a fact which he now disguises by folding his arms, the stumped arm beneath the good one. She settles herself in the seat next to him, makes herself comfortable and orderly with little attentions to her clothes. Like other women alone in such places, she is enclosed within herself, not wary perhaps, but composed with a composure that certainly includes the possibility of wariness. She takes from her purse a book, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, and opens it and begins to read. It is a book that Andy knows, by a writer he loves, and he almost speaks to her about it, but he does not. He does not want her to be wary of him. It seems to him that he could not bear for her to be wary specifically of him.
The travelers are all in their seats now. There is a click and an unlocatable aerial voice says, “Ladies and gentlemen, our destination today is Cincinnati and Cincinnati only. If Cincinnati is not your destination, please do deplane the aircraft.” There is another click, and presently the sound of the door closing, the outside noise suddenly excluded, the inside noise suddenly contained, and they are sealed within the possibility of flight, committed to the air.
We commit these bodies to the air, O Lord, and to Thy keeping.
The plane lurches and rolls back from the gate and turns, brakes, lurches, and begins its trip out to the runway. The passengers all move as it moves, lurch as it lurches, all enveloped now in the one power.
A stewardess stands at the head of the aisle, and another at the head of the aisle on the other side of the plane, and as the disembodied voice explains their movements, these two act out the ritual pantomime of survival in the breathless heavens, salvation in the midst of danger: how to fasten the seat belt, when to refrain from smoking, how to don the oxygen mask, how to find the exits.
“This voice is talking about falling,” Andy thinks. “It is talking about breathing oxygen while we fall. It is talking about finding the exits after we have fallen. That is why the voice is from the air, disembodied.”
The plane waits in the line of planes waiting to take off. It stops and starts, moving around slowly to the end of the runway. When its turn comes, it leaps forward, roaring, jolting, and shuddering with its sudden commitment to flight. It lifts and rises. Going up through the lower, warming layers of the air, it bucks and tosses like a little boat in waves. Andy braces his feet against the legs of the seat in front of him and holds tight to the arm of his seat, panicked, as always, to feel that there is nothing to hold to that is not in the air.
When the air becomes smooth, he can think again. He becomes aware, with a kind of wonder, of the unconcern around him. The people who were reading newspapers are still reading them. The young woman sitting next to Andy has not looked up from her book. He looks at the page she is reading and finds John Wesley Powell’s sentence: “I feel satisfied that we can get over the danger immediately before us; what there may be below I know not.”
Afloat in fickle air, laboring upward, the plane makes a wide turn out over the ocean, and heads inland. Andy can see the city with its bridges, the Marin peninsula, and, even farther below, the upper part of the bay, and then the marshes of the river delta. As they rise from it, the details of the ground diminish, draw together, and disappear. The land becomes a map of itself.
To Andy, the air is an element as dangerous to mind as to body. For wingless creatures, it is the element of abstraction: abstract distance and speed, abstract desire. Flight seems to him to involve some radical disassemblement, as if one may pass through it only as a loose suspension of particles, threatened with dispersal.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We want to welcome you aboard, and
thank you for flying with us. We’re ascending now to our cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. Our route today will carry us approximately over Denver, Salina, Kansas, Springfield, Illinois, Indianapolis, and then on down to Cincinnati. Our flying time will be, oh, about three hours and fifty-three minutes. As soon as we have reached altitude, our cabin attendants will be around with complimentary beverages and lunch. So settle back, folks. Enjoy your flight.”
Thirty-seven thousand feet is over seven miles. How long would it take to fall seven miles? He thinks of falling seven miles and knowing that one is falling. Flight has always returned him to the ancient desire to die at home. He does not want to die in some place of abstraction, or in a featureless heap in some place he has never seen. But he fears most his body’s brutal fear of falling, of falling through the high and alien air and knowing it. He imagines the moment before the crash when the body, remembering its long familiarity with itself, would find it strange. His hand, that had imagined many things, had never imagined its absence.
He wonders, if they were going down, would the young woman sitting beside him be willing to hold his hand? He looks at her, covertly, wondering. Holding hands, they would go down through the miles of air and crash into their total absence from the earth forever. She catches him looking, lifts her chin a little, and tugs down the hem of her skirt.
“Now you’ve done it!” he thinks. “You’ll have to crash by yourself.”
They cross the patchwork of farmland in the valley, and then the foot-hills, golden under the dark green oaks. And then the forests begin, and the bright gray rock of the Sierra Nevada, snow on the higher summits. Yosemite Valley, under a flock of little clouds, opens deep in the stone. Andy thinks of the islands of wilderness, bypassed in settlement, now tramped by modern backpackers, starved for what has been destroyed elsewhere and what their economy is destroying everywhere. Over it all hangs the brown veil of the world’s entrails lifted up and burned.
Spare us, O Lord, the logical consequence of our folly.
Out his window he can see the huge engine shuddering under the wing. The cabin is flooded with light. They are flying in the pure sky, corrupted only by their flight, and below that is the smutted sky, and below that the world, that cannot be helped except by love.
They are flying above white, flat-bottomed clouds sailing eastward, their shadows dark on the treeless red hills of Nevada. Among the hills there is a large lake, blue as the sky. The streams curve sweetly against the curves of the land. The older roads follow the streams, curving with them. The newer, larger roads are ruled according to the ideal of flight, deferring as little as possible to the shapes of the land. And above it all is the veil of the smog, and above the smog this little room in the air, on the long stem of its seven-miles-fallen shadow, depending for life on speed and fire, on the ability of an explosion to sustain itself for three hours and fifty-three minutes.
Andy is one of the last to receive his lunch: a plastic tray containing a tossed salad, an empty coffee cup, a helping of roast beef with gravy, small carrots, and a potato, a piece of chocolate cake, a tiny paper carton of pepper and one of salt, a plastic envelope containing a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a napkin.
Andy tears the envelope of salad dressing with his teeth and squeezes the contents onto his salad, needing another hand for this operation, but finally succeeding approximately; and then he begins the struggle to liberate his silverware.
The stewardess, pausing in the aisle with a pot of coffee, watches him a moment with unseemly absorption — a one-handed man in the toils of supraterrestrial sanitation — and then, leaning solicitously toward him, asks, “Does everything seem to be all right, sir?”
“Well, as long as we are supposing, let us suppose so.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I was joking. Everything seems to be all right. Thank you.”
She returns to her distance and her smile. “Enjoy your meal, sir.”
They eat and drink, pretending to be groundlings who are pretending to fly, trays in front of them laden with food and drink that will leave a plastic residue to be thrown away in some place out of the sight of groundlings pretending to be clean, the country below them become a map, perhaps not even of itself.
What there may be below I know not.
There comes over Andy a longing never to travel again except on foot, to restore the country to its shape and distance, its smells and looks and feels and sounds.
Spare us, O Lord, the logical consequence of our ingratitude.
Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers.
The stewardesses have taken the trays away. Utah is below them now, canyon country, eroded yellow and pinkish walls opening among sparsely forested slopes. Andy is thinking of the wagons laboring westward against the resistant shapes of the land, places supplanting places. Of the one-armed Powell and his men on the Colorado, living by intelligence and strength and will alone.
How many connecting strands are braided there in the passes and the fording places, to be dissolved out of mind and lost almost before the grass could grow again over the wheel tracks, almost before the rain could wash them away?
I should walk. I should redo every step. It is all to be learned again.
“Andy, here’s something you ought to see,” Burley Coulter says, handing him a page, folded and worn, brown with age, the ink on it brown. Burley is sitting in his chair by the stove in the living room with a shoebox open on his lap.
Flora is there too, and Danny and Lyda Branch, their children playing among the chair legs, returning now and again to the large bowl of popcorn that Lyda is holding. Outside, the wind is blowing and it has started to snow. Andy and Flora have already said twice that they need to be going, but Burley has kept on taking things from the box and handing them to Andy, who has examined them and passed them on to Flora, who has passed them on in turn to Lyda and Danny. They do not remember what reminded Burley of the box. At some point in their conversation he remembered it, and went up the stairs to his room and got it. He set it on his lap, untied the heavy string that was around it, and began to probe into it with his crooked, big-knuckled forefinger. The box contains his keepsakes — the family’s from long back, but his because after his mother’s death he continued to keep them and to add to them the odd relics of his own life that he could not bring himself to part with. There were some photographs, a few letters, a gold watch, Spanish and French coins carried back along the footpaths from New Orleans in the pockets of Coulter men who had made the downward trip on flatboats or rafted logs. These had all been looked at and explained as far as Burley could explain them. And then from the very bottom of the box he brought up the folded brown page.
“Boys,” he says, “your great-great-great-grandmother wrote that. She was married to the first Nathan Coulter. Way back yonder. She was a McGown. Letitia. Letitia McGown. Read it, Andy. My eyes have got so I can’t make it out.”
And so Andy reads the script, not much used since it was a schoolgirl’s, of an old woman dead before the Civil War:
“Oh that I should ever forget We stood by the wagon saying goodbye or trying to & I seen it come over her how far they was a going & she must look at us to remember us forever & it come over her pap and me and the others We stood & looked & knowed it was all the time we had & from now on we must remember We must look now forever Then Will rech down to her from the seat & she clim up by the hub of the wheel & set beside him & he spoke to the team She had been Betsy Rowanberry two days who was bornd Betsy Coulter 21 May 1824 Will turnd the mules & they stepd into the road passd under the oak & soon was out of sight down the hill The last I seen was her hand still raisd still waving after wagon & all was out of sight Oh it was the last I seen of her that little hand Afterwards I would say to myself I could have gone with them as far as the foot of the hill & seen her that much longer I could have gone on as far as the river mouth & footed it back by dark But however far I finaly w
ould have come to wher I would have to stand and see them go on that hand a waving God bless her I never knowd what become of her I will never see her in this world again”
They have passed the snowfields of the Rockies, Denver under its pall, and now in their orient flight are passing above a great floor covered with newly sheared fleeces shining in the sun, sight going down through it, where it thins, into shadow, the shadowed world, diminished, thirty-seven thousand feet below.
Now it comes back into his mind, that country, green and folding, that he knows as his tongue knows the inside of his mouth. It appears to him as if from the air, as in fact he remembers seeing it from the air, when a plane he was on happened to fly over it. He saw it then, he thought, as it might appear to the eye of Heaven, and afterwards was obliged to see himself and his life as small, almost invisible, within the countryside and the passage of time.
He sees Elton’s old truck rocking and jarring over the humps and holes of the Katy’s Branch road on the way to the Harford Place early in the morning. He and Henry and Elton are in the cab. He is sitting between Elton and Henry. Elton is driving. He sees the countryside shadowy and dewy under the misty light; he sees the road and the truck and the three of them in the cab littered with tools, ropes, spare parts, and other odds and ends that they have grown used to or may need. Henry is holding the water jug on his lap to keep it from turning over. He has been telling about his date of the night before for the edification of Elton, who has been egging him on by protesting that he would never have thought of anything like that, not him.