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the urban naturalist

15. Plane

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The first time I came to New York City it was by jet plane. Flight remains, I think very futuristic, taking a plane ride is bound up with all kinds of symbolism, freedom, the future, finding new beginnings.

I think of Stephen King's short story The Langoliers (that was made into a very bad TV movie): in it airplanes and airports provide an escape portal to the future (and the past) the story ends with a vibrant description of an airport infused with newness as the present catches up and the heroes are returned to safety. In my experience, in some way airports are always infused with newness. So much so that the modernist architecture is often the subject of ridicule.

I also think about the last scene in the play "Angles in America" where Harper Pitt addresses the audience from a plane:

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

Again, we have the imagery of airplanes intertwined with images of the future and new beginnings, and yes, death too, but the kind of death that is a new beginning.

And then there is that cheesy song by John Denver, Leaving on a Jet Plane.

But, I'm leavin on a jet plane
Don't know when Ill be back again.

And, yes, the first time I saw New York City: it was from the window of a plane. So, I am as enthralled as anyone in the magic of air travel. It is strange to think that I will probably never ride on a plane again in my life. Not by choice in any case. (Not unless there was some great emergency.) Despite all of this futuristic, clean imagery-- air travel is extremely dirty, brutal and destructive to the environment. It's worse than driving and most certainly worse than traveling by train.

But, none of these cultural images of air travel even hint at this aspect. It's not really something that people think about often, I think people may be more aware of the damage caused by cars.

If our leaders become at all serious about cutting carbon emissions we'll find that air travel is much more limited than in the past. The moments described in these works of fiction will seem mysterious, even hard to imagine for our grand children, they will wonder at the fact that people once took to the sky so carelessly.

Transportation:

1. Plane
2. Bus
3. Foot
4. Train

Last: 11. The Wounded City
Next: 16. Share

These little snapshots of transportation are part of a larger series called "The Urban Naturalist"