Celestially grounded to reality
I was sitting in the window seat just behind the wing on a cross-country red eye JetBlue flight from Oakland, California to Washington D.C. The only illumination in the cabin came from the superfluous no smoking signs above and the LCDs in front of every seat. Despite almost everyone being asleep, most of the LCDs were still on, because it just isn’t obvious to a passenger how they’re supposed to be turned off (or even that they can be turned off). I was one of the few conscious passengers on a plane six miles in the air filled with sleeping people, like drones slumped over in front of their screens, unable to take anymore of the pacifying in-flight entertainment.
On the car ride heading to the airport I noticed that the Moon was full. What an eerie omen to take a flight after. Looking out the window on that plane, all of the ground below me was faintly illuminated by reflected moonlight. I could make out mountains, forests, and lakes; even unlit roads. It felt like traveling in twilight, but at two in the morning, the Sun was far from peeking over the horizon. The ground was illuminated by an unearthly disembodied glean.
We passed over Colorado. Looking at the live map on the screen in front of me, I could make out all of the major cities of Colorado, with Denver being by far the most prominent. Its lights stretched out over a large area in the mountains, reflecting up into the air and making the atmosphere six miles up appear to radiate light. Looking out that small porthole window in the plane, I could see the majority of Colorado all at once. I counted off three long, silent minutes and Denver had only slightly moved rearwards of the plane.
Storms raged above Denver. I saw huge anvil thunderclouds in the distance, reaching up to nearly the same altitude as the plane. The clouds periodically lit up with intense flashes of white as lightning flickered between their layers. The pilot kept the plane far away from the storm, but not so far that I couldn’t see intimate, frightening details of the massive thunderclouds at work.
The plane’s wingtip pulsed regularly about once a second in a brilliant shade of red coming off the beacon atop the plane. The plane’s fuselage blocked the crimson light from reaching all but the tip of the wing, but when we earlier traveled through the clouds at lower altitudes, the light diffused through the fog in all directions, making it seem as if the very sky was pulsating in alien red tones.
After I had looked horizontally out at what I usually considered the sky, with its clouds and all, I looked up, and was reminded of the real sky. The only things unchanged in this alien landscape were the stars. Trillions of miles away, they looked no different from the ground than from the plane, even if everything else did. The stars didn’t twinkle so much, they seemed brighter, and I could see a lot more of them than usual from the light-polluted area I’m from. But they were still the same as always. I picked out familiar constellations and marveled at faint dim stars in them I couldn’t usually make out. Up here in these unfamiliar environs it was the stars, so far away I could never reach them in my lifetime, that were the most familiar, and made me feel the most at home.
