Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (62 page)

The specter of a fire down here is, of course, terrifying, as is the thought of a printing press or a stack of steel pipe breaking loose in turbulence. For this reason the contents of air shipments are carefully reviewed and documented; pilots receive written notification of even the smallest quantities of corrosives, explosives, and radioactive materials on board — anything that could start a fire. Cargo loads are tightly secured and neatly arranged so as to be accessible in flight. The flight engineer’s last responsibility on his walk-around before departure is to check each piece of fire-fighting equipment and make sure that each pallet and container is secure; the ones I watched were thorough about it.

On flights to North America from the Far East’s “new tigers” — Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taipei — the planes ferry (in descending order, by weight) personal computers, sound-recording equipment, athletic shoes, photocopying equipment, and clothes. Traveling from North America to the Far East are comparable loads of motors and engines, personal computers, telecommunications equipment, and tractor parts. Such commodities formed the bulk of most shipments I accompanied, but it was the condiments, so to speak, that made a load memorable: two hundred styrofoam cases of live tropical fish from Manila (labeled LTF) swimming in bags of oxygenated water, bound for Los Angeles; two Cadillac Eldorados for Osaka; canvas bags of home-bound paper bills (the accumulation of currency exchanges); munitions of war (MUW) for Khartoum; bundles of mesquite wood, for cooking, out of Houston; and noisome industrial chemicals (OBX).

In a fully loaded 747–200, cargo is palletized on thin aluminum “cookie sheets,” wrapped tightly in clear plastic weatherproofing (or opaque plastic, to discourage thieves), and secured against shifting by webs or rope nets. Twenty-two rectangular sealed containers and pallets, dogged to a floor of steel casters and roller track with red latches, stand in pairs down the middle of the airplane, leaving narrow outboard aisles. Two additional units, canted to the taper of the plane, extend along the starboard wall into the nose. In the tail, aft of a ten-foot-wide cross aisle directly opposite a cargo door, stand another four units. A twenty-ninth unit stands behind them, near the open wall rack that holds the plane’s Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder.

I sideslip by containers and pallets on the port side and look back from the cross aisle at our freight for Singapore and Bangkok. It shimmies in the cobblestone turbulence of what Wilbur Wright called “the infinite highway of the air,” a rickety but firm, continuous vibration. From a viewport on the flight deck, with this area lit dimly by only a few safety lights, the plastic-wrapped cargo looks like a double row of huge jellyfish strung up in a freezer.

Moving forward up the starboard aisle, I finally stand in an eerie place at the forward edge of the main deck, looking at the back side of the fiberglass radar dome that fills the plane’s nose. I look down into an open bay framed on either side by large jackscrews that push the nose out and up for loading through the front. The lip of this precipice, which I grip with my toes, is as close as one can get to standing on the bow of a ship. I spread my arms wide for balance, shut my eyes, and lean into the velocity of the plane. The sound of the engines is behind me, inaudible over the scream of air.

Chief pilots, or captains, men in their early fifties, “in the left-hand seat,” tend to gaze to some purpose out the windows, while copilots, or first officers, men (and, rarely, women) in their mid-thirties, remain focused with in the plane.

In the evolution of modem jet flight, there has been a dramatic shift away from the use of navigational references outside the plane, such as rivers, to using electronically displayed information with in the plane. Some of the copilots I spoke with, in fact, had only hazy notions of the geography they flew over. They were inclined to fly “heads down,” studying the route map, reviewing the flight plan (a sequence of way points, an expected fuel burn, the speed and direction of winds aloft), and watching their instruments and screens. On the most advanced commercial aircraft, it is the copilots who are frequently caught up in the protracted task of programming the plane’s computers. (“I don’t fly anymore,” they joke, “but I can type sixty words a minute.”)
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The chief pilots, many of them, possess a notable unique knowledge of how the earth has changed over the past thirty years: how far south, for example, the Sahara Desert has extended, how much the Aral Sea has shrunk, how far center-pivot irrigation has spread in Saudi Arabia. It’s a knowledge that predates satellite imagery and often is more historically integrated. Many of these pilots learned the earth’s surfaces when older planes held them to lower altitudes, when ground marks like pipelines and lakes were more important to navigation. Today, in advanced aircraft, they routinely fly high above the weather on automatic pilot and seldom descend for fuel. A dispatcher in a windowless international office half a world away will organize a sense of geography for them and radio in or even telephone with any changes due, say, to increased storm activity. There’s little need to watch the weather, or anything else.

Pilots say they “fly by wire” now, no longer sensing the plane’s response in their hands and feet. They refer to “cockpit management skills” more often than to their “stick and rudder” ability. In the 747–400, they monitor six separate cathode-ray screens, mesmerizing as small televisions. In this kind of self-absorbed travel, built on a dashboard knowledge of one’s surroundings, a sense of both geographic scale and particularity is ruptured. Flights cover huge distances in a few hours; matriculation at a hotel, often reached on a crew bus driven down an advertising corridor similar to the airport’s passenger corridors, is brief. English is spoken everywhere. Seven-Up, Anacin, Rambo, CNN, Ray-Ban, and Time are omnipresent. Reality outside the plane slowly merges with the comforting, authoritative, and self-referential world with in it.

Jet lag is popularly construed as an affliction of the unseasoned traveler, a preventable distraction. No pilot I talked to regarded it as such but rather as a sort of temporal and spatial abuse that, by the time you reached your fifties, could overwhelm you on a single trip.

Over many days of flight, I fought my own idiosyncratic battle with jet lag, following the common advice of pilots to sleep when you’re tired and eat when you’re hungry. When I got home, after traveling 30,000 or 40,000 miles in ten days, I would fall into bed like an iron ingot dropped in the dust. On the road, like the pilots, I endured the symptoms of a jagged, asynchronous life. No matter how exhilarating a trip might have been, I sensed upon leaving the plane that a thrashing like the agitation of a washing machine had ended and that, slightly dazed, I was now drifting off my path, a yawing ship. My tissues felt leaden. Memory seemed a pea suspended in the empty hull of my body. I had the impression that my mind was searching for the matching ends of myriad broken connections and that it was vaguely panicked by the effort. The fabric of awareness felt discontinuous. Time shoaled, losing its familiar depth and resonance. I craved darkness and stillness. I believed that with out stillness no dreams would come and that with out dreams there would be no recovery. Once, in a hotel, I slept on solely to dream.

The physical hazards of long-term flying are relatively minor — an increased incidence of cataracts, high-frequency hearing loss — or unknown: the effect, for example, of regular exposure to high doses of cosmic radiation. Pilots more than copilots will tell you that whatever health hazards they may face, they love flying too much to give it up. Many think that jet lag is the principal cause of chronic moodiness, a prime source of tension in their domestic relationships. But they view separation and divorce as grim contemporary realities, and say resignedly that they are very well paid for what they do.

I liked the pilots I flew with. They had a remarkable ability to relax for hours in a state of alertness (pilots describe the job as “hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror”). They seemed able to monitor an instrument’s unwavering reading and run technical checklists repeatedly with out mentally wandering from or re-imagining the information. Their hand movements were smooth, slow, direct; they concentrated on precision and routine, on thoroughness. The virtues they admired — dedication to one’s job, loyalty, allegiance to a code — were more military than corporate. Some, like generals, carried with them a peculiar, haggard isolation.

Standing between the pilots on the Singapore flight, my neck bowed beneath the overhead instrument panel, I could take the most commanding view possible of space outside the plane. Over the South China Sea, I could see outlying islands in the Spratly Archipelago to the southeast. To the northwest were the distant Mouths of the Mekong: Cua Tranh De, Cua Dinh An, Cua Ham Luong. A while later, Indonesia’s Bunguran Selatan Archipelago loomed off the port side, the translucent sea turquoise over its reefs. Afternoon light from the bare orb of the sun filled the clear air at 37,000 feet with a tangible effulgence that made the island of Subi and the water seem closer. We looked down from the keep of our own wind, through layers of wind, to wind on the water; below that the surface current ran counter to currents deeper still. Toward Karimata Strait, between Borneo and Belitung Island to the south, a single layer of thin stratus cast its shadow over a hundred square miles of water. Beyond it the sea was brilliant. The effect was as if I were looking from today across the night and into tomorrow.

Ending a long silence in the cockpit, the captain said, “The earth is beautiful.”

On our approach to Singapore, smoke began pouring out of the window vents — warm humid air from outside condensing in our dry interior. The pilots enjoyed my alarm.

On the ground, while the plane was unloaded, and then reloaded for Bangkok and Tokyo, I strolled through mown grass in an adjacent field. Two common mynah birds landed on the port wing.

The hotel in Seoul was just west of Mt. Namsan Park in Yongsan-Ku, in the city’s southwest quarter. The crew bus would not leave for the airport for four hours, and I had risen before sunrise to take a long walk. I wanted to see things that couldn’t be purchased.

I walked north through a cramped residential district. Seoul is a city of granite hills, of crags and pinnacles. On this winter morning it filled gradually with a diffuse gray light under heavy, overcast skies. As I wandered the narrow streets, I endeavored not to seem too curious about what was displayed on the shelves of small stores attached to small two-story houses. Instead I observed what sort of bicycles people rode, what kind of clothing they wore against the cold — indigenous solutions to common problems. I studied the spines of books displayed in a window, the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean titles mixed. I could not see past a street reflection in the window glass whether a companion volume was in Arabic.

Some Westerners traveling today in the Middle East may experience what they take for irritation over religious differences; in Seoul — or Bangkok or Wuhan — the look a Westerner may get while walking through residential streets seems more often one of resentment or bewilderment at the imposition of economic change. You are the one responsible, the looks imply, for swift, large-scale, painful alterations in my culture; you see them as improvements, but they are designed only to make business — your sort of business — flow more smoothly. It is you, they seem to say, who define, often and titanically, what is of value.

What I felt — the discomforting gospel of a world-encircling consumerism of which I was an inadvertent symbol — I could have felt as an indictment in any of a dozen other cities. What I had hoped for here was relief from the impact of culture I felt every time the plane landed.

Some in the West see in such rearrangements net gains; others, net losses. I do not lean strongly either way, though I’m saddened, as a traveler, by the erosion of languages, the diminishment of other systems of aesthetics, and the loss of what might be called a philosophy of hand tools. It is easy to rue the lack of restraint in promoting consumption as a way of life, but we daily accept myriad commercial solutions to our own discontent — the assuagement of new clothing, new investments, new therapies to ease our disaffection. Some who endure such accelerated living (our advertising presumes) find it a relief periodically to sweep everything into the past, making room for less obligating, more promising products or situations. But it is a rare consumer who has any sense of what such inclinations require of the world around him.

It is not difficult to disparage the capitulation in such manic living; what is hard to avoid is the impulse to blame or the instinct to exempt oneself. Getting dressed at the hotel, I had to smile at the labels in my clothing: J. Crew, GAP, The Territory Ahead, Patagonia. My shoes, dark brown suede wing tips, had been made in Korea.

Once, suspended over the North Pacific, I held the image of a loom in my mind. If these flights back and forth across the Pacific are the weft, I wondered, what is the warp, the world already strung, through which my shuttle cuts back and forth? And what pattern is the weave producing?

The plane I boarded out of Seoul was a passenger flight with a lower hold full of cargo for Narita. There I boarded a freighter bound for New York via Anchorage. In the Jeppesen Manual that most United States pilots carry — a two-inch-thick ring binder of tissue-thin pages containing detailed information about airports — Anchorage is described as a consistently dangerous place to get in and out of. The nearby area experiences a lot of wind shear and turbulence; icing is common in winter.
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Pilots recall with little prompting the details of commercial airplane crashes going back many years. Each one is a warning. Their interest is almost entirely technical and legal, not macabre. While I was flying in the Middle East, a freighter crashed in Kansas City, killing the three pilots aboard. Although the crew I was with read the story in the International Herald Tribune, no one commented. The pilots presume such reports are always confused and therefore misleading. They wait instead for the National Transportation Safety Board findings to appear in Aviation Week and Space Technology.