The View

Towering cumulus near the Texas/Oklahoma border.                           (photo Tom LeCompte)

I like to take people flying. I like to give them a view they can’t get from the tiny porthole on an airliner—to let them experience the process of piloting and to see the breadth and beauty of the landscape laid out before them like an exotic fabric.

The world looks very different from the air. Size, distance and scale are all altered. Harsh edges soften, contours flatten, colors blend and fade as if viewed through gauzy film. Fine details vanish and what emerges is the abstract geometry that man imposes on the landscape: checkerboard farms, straight-edge railways, knotted highway interchanges, the paisley swirl of housing developments dotted with aquamarine jewels of backyard swimming pools.

Somewhere over South Dakota                                                    (photo Charles LeCompte)

From the air, even the most familiar places seem new and disorienting. For example, people inevitably ask to see their house. Fair enough. I’m happy to oblige. But just as inevitably, most have a very difficult time finding their house. Without the usual landmarks used to navigate on the ground, they are lost.

In the days before GPS, getting lost was a pretty easy thing to do in a plane. A sectional chart contains a ton of valuable information about the land you’re overflying—basic topography, airfields, railways, major highways, radio towers and assorted landmarks—but in the summer haze mountains all kind of look the same and in unfamiliar areas one highway looks pretty much like every other highway. I remember as a student pilot landing at the wrong airport during my solo cross-country. After handing my logbook over to be signed by the desk clerk, I was informed of my mistake. I grabbed the logbook back and slunk back to the plane to make the 10-minute flight to the correct airport 15 miles to the west.

For me, a big part flying has been about the view, about seeing new things or seeing familiar things in a completely different way. The world reveals itself when you’re flying, and the conventional barriers to seeing things on the ground are no longer in the way.

A pod of porpoise off Cape Cod.                                                                                                         (photo Wayne Davis)

A friend of mine, Wayne, a former tuna spotter turned oceanic wildlife spotter and photographer took me up in his small, tandem-seat Citabria. We flew out to Oceanographer Canyon, about 120 miles southeast of Nantucket, an underwater chasm on the edge of the Continental Shelf at the intersection of the warm Gulf Stream and colder New England waters, a confluence for all kinds of wildlife. A sharp line on the ocean surface delineates the border between the cloudy greenish waters of New England and the deep blue waters of the Gulf Stream. In the space of 40 minutes we saw pods of thousands of porpoise, fin whales, sperm whales, swordfish, manta rays (generally a warm water species), great white sharks and whale sharks. At one point, we were circling over a lone sperm whale, watching it as it slowly rolled onto its side and then tipped vertically in the water.

“Is it sick or dead?” I asked.

“No,” said Wayne. “Just sleeping.”

On the flight home, Wayne chatted about his days as a commercial fisherman and his lifelong passion for the ocean.

“I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people describe the ocean as ‘featureless,’ ” he said. “They have no idea.”

Sand bars off Monomoy Island, Cape Cod.                                         (photo Tom LeCompte)

Even the most common things can seem almost magical when seen from above—the sandbars off Monomoy Island glowing like an aurora; a mountain lake, it’s surface like a mirror reflecting the clouds above it; the evening rush hour traffic on Route 128 a meandering river of lights. Then there are the landscapes above the clouds—landscapes that seem created as if solely for you—towers of cumulus stretching skyward, forming canyons between them with the sunlight playing upon the ever-shifting surfaces.

There is always something new, something different to see when airborne. It’s why, even after 30 years of flying, I still request a window seat when flying commercial.

To fly is to be disconnected from the earth, both literally and figuratively. Once the wheels leave the ground, all my earthly concerns—the aggravations and petty annoyances, the grind of deadlines and phone calls, the stultifying routine of daily life—all that is, well, down there. Wherever I am is exactly where I want to be. I am totally in the moment.

Flying is freedom.

 

Fog filling the valleys in Pennsylvania.                                               (photo Tom LeCompte)