About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (11 page)

In the assembly building that night, the 747 came together so quickly that to be away even for half an hour meant missing lines in a sketch that soon became a painting. I would stand in one place, then another amid the cocoon of jigs, cradles, floor jacks,
elevated walkways, and web slings surrounding the plane, watching while teams of men, some in sleeveless shirts with ponytails and tattoos, polished off a task neat as a snap of dry fingers in slow motion. They were glad for the work. They knew it could disappear in a trice, depending on the banks, the market, a securities trader in Singapore.
^*

A
N AIRCRAFT WILL
give away some of its character to a slow walk-around. If you stare nose-on at a 747, you can tell whether the plane is fueled or not by the angle at which the wings sag. Empty, they assume an upward dihedral, making the plane appear to rest even more lightly on its wheel trucks. This vertical flexibility in the wings partly explains the sensation of unperturbed agility one feels as a passenger. If you let your eye run to the tip of either wing, you can see another key: a slight horizontal twist apparent in the last thirty feet or so, an engineer’s quick, intuitive solution to damping a troublesome oscillation. A similar intuition once compelled Wilbur Wright to warp the leading edge of the wings of an experimental glider, lending it critical lateral stability. The glider metamorphosed into
Flyer
, in which, on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills on the North Carolina coast, Orville Wright achieved powered, sustained, controllable flight for the first time.

During the evening that I studied the buildup of the Singapore Airlines freighter, I was prompted, often, to reflect on early aviation. The vast interior of the Boeing plant and the peculiar absence of industrial noise combined to make the distant movement of messengers riding vintage bicycles seem almost timeless. The sight of these parts couriers gliding across the smooth concrete floors on fifties-era Schwinns triggered thoughts about the
bicycle-building Wright brothers. The written history of all that led up to that December morning in 1903 reveals two young men who, beyond anything else, wanted to fly, at a time when most others were keen simply on winning the prize that feat would earn. While other people threw contraptions at the air, the Wright brothers worked out in painstaking detail the first practicable formulas for flight, challenging the previously revered mathematics of a German glider pilot named Otto Lilienthal, the author of
Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation
(1889). When
Flyer
flew, with its cambered wing and controllable elevator, its rudder and the world’s first rudimentary ailerons, the Wright brothers knew exactly what they were doing. The achievement at Kill Devil Hills was not the fact that the plane sustained itself at about seven miles per hour over 120 feet, or the addition of a motor and props to a glider, but that Orville controlled it. He
flew
the plane.

The Wrights’ entrepreneurial success embodies for many a vanquished innocence in America: this was an unprecedented thing, done for love, with little thought of personal gain, and financed largely out-of-pocket.

Orville’s initial flight carried him about half the length of a 747 freighter’s main deck. He was airborne for twelve seconds in a craft stripped of every bit of excess weight. The plane I was standing beside that night can carry 122 tons 5,000 nautical miles in about ten hours. The Wright brothers had little inkling of commercial advantage; without the support of government subsidies and the promise of private profit, without corporations competing fiercely for shares in a marketplace, without continuous turnover in what’s considered fashionable in consumer goods, the 747 freighter might easily have gotten no further than a draftsman’s table.

My last impression of the plane, the rainy morning I drove away, was of accomplishment. Whatever people might do with it, however they might fill this empty vessel, it gleamed to my way of thinking like an ideal. It was an exquisite reification of the desire for beauty.

Sometime later, I returned to Everett to inspect the finished cockpit. I wanted to crawl into every space that would admit me:
low, tight bays on either side of the nosewheel doghouse that hold tiers of maintenance computers; the transverse avionics bay aft of them, where the plane’s triple-redundant inertial navigation system and flight deck computers are located (and from where, via hatches above and below, one can either drop to the tarmac or emerge on the main deck). I wanted to orient myself among banks of Halon bottles (the fire-fighting system) and emergency oxygen tanks on the lower cargo deck. I wanted to enter the compartment aft of the rear pressure bulkhead and see the massive jackscrew that tilts the horizontal stabilizer (the fins that protrude like a rear wing from the plane’s tail).

Once the plane was fitted with four Pratt & Whitney engines—each developing up to 56,000 pounds of thrust (about 21,000 horsepower)—Singapore Airlines would take it away. At something like $155 million, it was an enormous capital investment; but with an international airfreight market currently expanding at about three times the rate of the passenger market, Boeing’s plane number RR835 would soon pay for itself. After that, grossing upward of $750,000 per load against an operating cost of roughly $15,000 per hour, it would begin to earn its owners a substantial and unencumbered profit.

A
FTER
F
RANKFURT’S
Rheim/Main Airport and London’s Heathrow, Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport is Europe’s largest airfreight depot site. KLM’s operation here is efficient and organized—dangerous goods here, live animals there, valuables (jewelry, currency, silver bars, uncut gemstones) over here, drugs in yet another place. In this world “perishable,” I learned right away, refers to more than flowers, food, and newspapers; it includes everything in tenuous fashion: watches, video games, shades of lipstick, a cut of trouser—objects for which a few days’ head start on store shelves is crucial.

On an upper half-floor of the cavernous outbound-freight building—the main floor includes an open space perhaps 600 by 200 feet, and 40 feet high—there is no one, only automated
equipment, enslaved by a computerized sorting program that is updated continually in response to aircraft schedule changes and new delivery priorities. The loaders, moving on floor tracks, pull standard-size pallets and cargo containers from steel shelves at just the right moment to launch them on a path terminating promptly at the cargo doors of their intended airplane. It is stark, bloodless work. On the main floor the mechanical tedium is relieved in three ways: in the buildup of single pallets, with workers arranging dozens of small packages trimly in an eight-by-ten-foot-square load, at heights to fit either the upper or lower deck of a particular aircraft, and with one top edge rounded slightly to conform to the curve of the plane’s sidewall; by the loading of oddly shaped or remarkable objects—a matched set of four, dark blue Porsche 911s, a complete prefabricated California ranch-style house; and by the sheer variety of goods—bins of chilled horse-meat, Persian carpets, diplomatic mail bound in sisal twine and sealed with red wax, bear testicles, museum art exhibits, cases of explosives.

The impression one gets amid tiers of briefly stored cargo and whizzing forklifts is of mirthless haste. A polite but impatient rectitude about the importance of commerce prevails, and it forestalls simple questions: Have they run out of mechanical pencils in Houston? Is the need for eelpout in Osaka now excruciating? Are there no more shirtmakers in Rangoon?

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
I departed the freezing rain and spitting snow of Amsterdam for Cape Town, six thousand miles and an opposing season to the south, where one of KLM’s smallest facilities operates on a decidedly different scale. We came in by way of Johannesburg and brought, among other things, two Goeldi’s marmosets and eight white ear-tufted marmosets, both endangered, inbound from South America for a local attraction called Monkey Den.

When my escort completed our tour—a semienclosed metal shed, no automation—he very kindly suggested we go for a drive. He felt harried by shippers’ phone calls, cajoling for more
space than he could provide on the outbound flight. I, too, wanted to get away from the clamor.

For the past six days I had been flying a heavy schedule, mostly in and out of the Far East. I was bewildered by the speed with which everything moved, by how quickly I came and went through the countries. In a few hours I would turn around and fly back to Johannesburg, there to pick up fresh flowers, hunting trophies, and raw diamonds before returning to wintry Amsterdam.

We drove east through windblown sand scrub on the Cape Flats, rather quickly through Cape Town itself, and around to Clifton Bay on the west side of Table Mountain. The weather had been hot, but it was cooler now, seventy-two, with a brisk southeast wind, the one they call the Doctor.

For a long while I stood there on the bluff in the summer sunshine, staring into the transparent blue water of the Atlantic. I was acutely aware of history here at Bartolomeu Dias’s Cabo Tormentoso (the Portuguese navigator’s Cape of Storms, a foreboding appellation his king would later change to Cabo da Bõa Esperança, Cape of Good Hope). Cook and Darwin anchored here as did, in 1522, a remnant of that part of Magellan’s crew under Sebastián del Cano. In those days it had taken as many months as it now takes hours to come this far south from Europe, and an indifferent sea swamped and crushed the Dutch
jachts
and Iberian caravels like a child’s paper sailers. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent so many years, was just to the north. A few miles to the southeast was Skildergat Cave, a 35,000-year-old early human site. All this was once the landscape of the Khoikhoi people, now long since gone to Namibia and Botswana, where they are called San people and among whom are the much studied !Kung.

My companion was speaking English with a friend. When he lapsed into Afrikaans I recalled how, over the past few days, I had been scrambling to get the simplest grasp of Malay, Thai, then Hindi. I was moving carelessly around the planet. Beneath the familiar jet lag I began to sense something else: physical geography
was not only spatial, it was temporal. I looked up past my shoulder at the serene oak and pine forests of Table Mountain, da Gama’s defining pivot. It had a peculiar time to it, as indigenous as its rock. I could not take that time with me, nor bring my own time here and drape it possessively over the mountain. In that moment I glimpsed the impunity with which I was traveling, as well as the inseparability of time and space in geography. The dispensation I enjoyed from the historical restraints of immense distance had created an illusion about time: the Earth’s spaces might vary terrifically—the moonlight reflecting for me last night on Shatt Al-Meghir, a saline lake in barren eastern Algeria, was not the same moonlight shining back from the icy reaches of Cook Inlet in Anchorage—but time, until this moment, had seemed a seamless thing, never qualitatively different. Everywhere I went time continued the same, an imperial present. At most, in these new depots and their environs, I was resetting my watch.

As I stood there gazing at Table Mountain, then back at the transparent Atlantic, I knew the mountain’s time was not my time. And that I would not, now, give in to its time. I was on this other, no-Sunday, no-night, on-time, international commercial time. I sought out my friend and asked, “Shouldn’t we be getting back?” I was starting to behave as if the present were only a preparation for the future. When I phoned my wife from some point along the way to confide that I was deeply bewildered, that it was as though all the rests in a symphony score had become threats, she said, “It’s because you’re not going anywhere, you’re just going.”

T
WO CHANGES IN
the late eighties boosted the growth of international airfreight. Up until then shipping by air meant being assured your goods would arrive at such-and-such an airport within forty-eight hours of a promised time. Today, for an average of one to four dollars a pound, a customer expects guaranteed, on-time delivery; and increasingly that service is door-to-door, not airport-to-airport. The largest airfreight operation
in the world (though the bulk of what they haul is small packets) is Federal Express. Next, in descending order of tonnage carried, are Lufthansa, UPS, and Air France, then Korean Air and Singapore. (At present, profitability in the industry remains marginal while airlines continue to maneuver for market share.)

Most air cargo, according to an industry forecaster, now consists of “high-value, time-perishable, consumer items.” The business is driven by three things: the growing expectation, worldwide, of having whatever one wants tomorrow, not next week or next month; by frequent changes in fashion and in the design of basic products; and by a great disparity in labor costs from one country to the next. Much of what one sees aboard a freighter is placeless merchandise; except for the cost of employing a person, it might have been manufactured almost anywhere, including the country of destination. A museum director in Los Angeles found it less expensive, for example, to have the museum’s entire red sandstone façade quarried in India, airfreighted to Japan to be dressed, and then flown to Los Angeles than to have it quarried, dressed, and trucked in from Minnesota.

Companies ship city phone books from the United States to China to have the names inexpensively keyed in on mailing lists. Automobile insurance claims travel by the boxful from Miami to Manila to be processed by people who are not only cheaper to employ but who make fewer mistakes than the clerks for hire in Miami. And air shippers, exploiting the same small margins currency traders use, find it less costly to have, say, nine tons of rayon blouses machine-cut in Hong Kong and flown to Beijing to be finished by hand than to have all the work done in Hong Kong—before the blouses are flown on to customers in Berlin or Chicago.

On long eight- and ten-hour trips on the freighters, I regularly left the flight deck, though it seemed always to be offering me some spectacular view of the Earth—Mt. Pinatubo smoldering in the depopulated Zambales Mountains on Luzon, or L’Anse aux Meadows, a bleak site on the northern tip of Newfoundland where Norse people established a community about
A.D
. 1000. Leaving these, I’d climb down the narrow, folding aluminum
stairs and stroll the aisles at the perimeter of the cargo load. Containerized or shrink-wrapped in heavy plastic, tagged with routing labels in code, the shipments were frequently difficult to identify without the help of manifests or air waybills. One night out of Taipei: 17 cartons of basketballs for Boston; 5,898 pounds of sunglasses headed for Atlanta; 85 cartons of women’s polyester pajamas for Columbus, Ohio; cameras, men’s ties, battery-operated action-hero toys; 312 pounds of wristwatches for New York. What I saw very often seemed the fulfillment of mailorder-catalog dreams. The celerity in airfreight, in fact, and the freighter’s ability to gather and distribute goods over huge distances in a matter of hours, have made the growth of 800-number stores like J. Crew, Lands’ End, and Victoria’s Secret possible. By promoting “just in time” delivery—neither a sweater, a comic book, nor a jet engine arrives until the moment it’s needed—freight companies have also (1) changed the way businesses define inventory, (2) made it possible for stores to turn storage space into display space, and (3) forced governments to reconsider the notion of an inventory tax.