Some geographic features on a dark land can be seen directly, when waterborne moonlight falls on a land streaked with rivers or dotted with lakes, for example, or when starlight falls on snowcapped peaks. Others can be seen indirectly, through their effect on the lights of mankind. “You can’t divorce civilization from nature,” continues Balog, who has seen more clearly than most the effect of one upon the other. And the outlines of this relationship are exactly what we see from the sky, after darkness falls, when a populated river valley such as the Nile is often far more distinct than in the day. After sunset the banks of the Nile turn to paired rivers of light, and even under a thin layer of cloud the illuminated edges of the river are diffused but visible and form auriferous, leopard-like patterns in the cloudscape. Civilization casts outlines of both itself and physical geography up into the night, and through the night’s clouds we may see rising up what we are blind to in daylight: the cities of Egypt and the lines of its river.
Mountains, meanwhile, can be discerned by the absence of human light, which may flow around an isolated peak as naturally as water divides around a rock in a stream. When the mountains start at a coast, as they do along much of the northern and eastern Mediterranean, the illuminations of villages and roads are compressed into a golden, littoral plait that lies between the line of unseen water and the shadow of sharply rising land. If the lights of coasts like this one were not so severe in their detail and precision we might call such a view impressionistic and recall Cézanne’s description of Monet—“only an eye, but my God, what an eye.”
Even during the day, when we survey the works of humanity on the earth, the blessing is both how much we can see and how little. The smaller details are summed or lost. Cars become streams, which become abstracted arteries of motion. Less becomes more: houses turn into communities, communities into a city, a vast city refracts into its bones of light, into the only understanding of it. From the plane we see human landscapes the way a neurologist might sketch an outline of the nervous system: drawings of intricacy, networks, pathways, pulses, and flows that know only their part, not the whole they form.
This distillation—that of millions of individual lives and moments into the physical infrastructure that houses them—is greatly heightened at night. Indeed, so often from a plane at night, the truths of human geography are the only things we see, and all of them in light.
What is so important that we choose to light it? Flight raises few questions as often as this one. A fifth of the world’s electricity is used for lighting. Each light we see during our long nights awake above the earth is placed there, maintained with intention. The world still has its lamplighters, though we do not call them this any longer, and we think of them less than we did in the smoky cities of the past. The next time you fly over the glowing dendrites of a populated section of our world, try to imagine the plug pulled, the landscape gone dark, with only moonlight reflecting on water or the occasional fire; dark as the earth was until so recently in the history of our species. When we look down from an airplane we see our civilization engraved in light; we confront the new and stately shock of our bioluminescence.
Some cities are so enormous that from your general position above the world their light-identities are unmistakable: here is Chicago or Karachi or Algiers. But smaller cities may mean more, when you realize that one you used to live in is floating in the darkness beneath you, like a ship you once traveled on; or when you sleep through a long flight and awaken, just before landing, to raise the shade on the gathering lights of home.
Other cities pass by namelessly. I remember, as a child, the feeling of being in the backseat of a car late on the night of Christmas Day, heading home, passing through communities that were not mine, or walking through deserted streets late on Christmas Eve, perhaps to enjoy new snow. At such moments there was a peculiar quality to the quiet houses. Even the Christmas decorations hung on such stillness couldn’t capture the weight of the holiday that when you are a child permeates everything. Instead I placed that weight onto the empty streets and the silence and the outlines of nearly dark houses. At night, many cities pass like this on the land. What little we see of the lives within them becomes its own kind of weight.
This sense of the night landscape as a shorthand for the human world is echoed in the cockpit. While cities, countries, and continents are entirely absent from the 747’s navigation display, only airports are marked clearly, with a blue circle. We see the light of cities on the earth below; while the world the 747 knows is composed only of blue circles drawn against the darkness of the screen. Over much of the world, however, the shape of land can still be discerned indirectly from the patterns airports make on these screens. Britain, cast in the blue rings of its airports, is easily recognizable, as is all of Western Europe. The eastern United States, too, is drawn well enough from the airport rings that form something like the shape of a continent. Lights on the ground below show an observer in a window seat where people live, and where factories make things; blue circles on a pilot’s screen show where enough people live, or enough things are made, to warrant an airport big enough to be programmed into a 747.
I often fly over the Democratic Republic of Congo, where my father lived so long ago when it was a Belgian colony. David Van Reybrouck, a Flemish writer, recently completed an enthralling history of the country, which I am sorry my father did not live to read. The author opens his tale with descriptions of approaches to the country by sea and also by air, an arrival that requires no blue circles in the mind. (The book closes, too, with a flight over Congo, “the huge, moss-green broccoli of the equatorial forest, crisscrossed on occasion by a brown river glistening in the sun.”)
Congo today has around 80 million inhabitants—more than Britain or France, about twice the number of California. Its area is six times larger than Japan, something like Alaska and Texas combined. And yet Congo has only two blue circles on our screens, neither of which appear on a more restrictive list of airports where we would consider landing a 747 under normal circumstances. Africa, the second-most populous continent, accounts for less than 3 percent of the world’s air-passenger traffic. An observer of modern Africa might watch for changes in the lights seen from above or for additions to the constellations of rings on the navigation screens of overflying airliners.
Congo’s most useful blue ring stands for the airport of Kinshasa, a city I now and then overfly between London and Cape Town. There is often little time to look out at Kinshasa though, which my father knew as Leopoldville, because the view coincides with a busy section of flying where the aerial regions of several countries meet. There are often storms here, too, and even when the night is cloudless the humid, equatorial air is rarely clear. The city and the country are among the few that now remain to which my father traveled, but I have not.
When I have had the chance to look out of the window on a clear night, there has been little to see. The lights of Kinshasa are shockingly few for a city of this size, and the contrast between its scattered lights and the dizzying grids of much smaller places in the rest of the world is jarring. Every night that I fly over the United States I pass small cities I know nothing of, that I’ve barely heard of, that appear brighter than Kinshasa. Even the light we do see of Kinshasa looks slightly green and wavy, as if it has emerged from a boundless volume of water that has absorbed or scattered the energy of the metropolis. The world remains unequal, in light as in almost everything else, and the lesson of Kinshasa lies open to the sky, in the dimmed night-whorl of its fingerprint.
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Sometimes when I fly to Los Angeles I arrive from the northwest, from over the shadowed mountains of Malibu, and the city suddenly looms into view like a bowl of phosphorescence gathered from the surface of the Pacific. Los Angeles, from a clear night above it, may alone explain why Joan Didion wrote that “the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.” Even when you come to Los Angeles from the east, from over the land, the deserts are all b
ut empty until you overfly the last great crescent of the city’s mountains. In this sense the city approached from any direction is an island, ablaze between two oceans.
It is hard to fly into Los Angeles and not to feel that its cultural and geographic positions are as well matched as those of Plymouth Rock; that human and physical geography are hardly worth teasing apart here. The western flow of a nation’s cultural energy has reached its terminus and, at night, we see how the light has pooled, like the Pacific it meets, against the beaches and mountains.
If, as a pilot, I could listen to music during an approach and landing only once in my career, I would choose a night arrival in Los Angeles. The air above the city is often free from cloud, and there is a sense that it is hiding beyond its mountains, that its location is privileged by its geography, that we must cross over mountains, or all the Pacific, to approach it. My mother’s hometown in Pennsylvania is in the coal country, nestled in a small bowl surrounded by dark hills. When I was a child, each time we drove there at night there was a moment when we came over the last crest of the road into the sudden prospects of the lights of the surprisingly densely settled town below. The view ahead then was as bright an image of a city as Los Angeles is to me now, when, like the starling of Richard Wilbur’s poem that vaults over “the sill of the world,” the 747 I am flying crosses over the San Bernardino mountains and follows the nerves of the gathering freeways to the ocean.
The name of Los Angeles, too, is perhaps the finest of all the world’s large cities, melodic and evocative not only of flight but of a metropolis that to many remains dreamlike. Then there is the scale of the city, the visual oxymoron of its sprawling density, so marvelous at night and from altitude, as if only a city with such a name could be so blessed in light. Turning in flight over Los Angeles after sunset is like turning over nowhere else on the earth. To one side is the electrified bloom of an American-edged night, and to the other, where the wing lifts over the ocean, is a window filled with stars.
A night city may appear after crossing not a continent, but a sea. The East Coast of America, with its large and energy-profligate urban agglomerations, offers singular experiences of night-coast arrival. In the cockpit there are tantalizing hints that a coast is approaching. We may switch from long-distance radios to shorter-range, higher-quality frequencies. The needles on the navigation display that show ground-based radio aids will quiver and spin to life as they acquire the first coastal stations. Shortly after, the first lights appear on the horizon.
Here is a 747, coming to the end of its ocean crossing; here it is tacking high in the ice-wind, making good its steady arc toward the light of landfall. I’m certain that the curve of the planet is apparent at these moments, the land’s bowed edge rotating toward us like some long, elegant face, a horizon drawn from the glowing serrations of cities.
The pull of such moments is caught up in the historical weight of what we are doing—the physical crossing of the Atlantic, in six hours instead of six weeks, to reach America and its gleaming nets of coastal city light. Partly, too, there must be some ancient sense of relief at the thought—and then, of course, the sight—of land after a long absence over open water. But mostly I love the visual pace of an approaching coastline. It’s something about the way in which the horizontal lights, compacted into a distant line by the angle of vision, gradually expand and turn, revealing the liquid of electricity that we have channeled along the open canals of roads, to the cities that have amassed along the circumference of a continent.
Few coasts are as marvelously straight or well lit as Florida’s eastern seaboard appears to be. The boundary between water and light forms a long blade of incandescence that we cross in the last stages of the descent to Miami, all the more striking after six or seven hours of unbroken oceanic murk. For several years my schedule did not take me to Miami, and when I went back at last it was easy to see the city’s ever more Hong Kong–like skyline as a kind of jewel, suspended in the night between Manhattan and Rio on a hemispheric arc of cultural longitude.
If I like a song or two about leaving New York, my preferred aerial song of the city would be one of arrival from far out at sea. The city looks as if a huge vase of pixels had been tipped over Manhattan, stacking and tumbling outward, flattening into the suburbs and gradually disappearing into the dark forests of the continent’s interior, as if in some computer-age myth of its foundation. The city’s bays and rivers glow in this reflected, electric gold; while further out the waters are themselves scattered with the constellated lights of vessels, as if an autumn storm had blown particles of light from the land where they first fell, onto the pitch-dark waters of the city’s maritime approaches.
On an eastbound flight from America, Ireland often appears as both the night and the journey are nearing their ends. Even after the most routine Atlantic crossing the sight can bring to mind the “dawn of their return,” the words for the hope taken from the eyes of Odysseus’ shipmates. The newly sighted land is criss-crossed with creases of illumination, the weave laid over a darkness that looks like history itself. The lights lie most densely around the coast and remain clearly lit even as the horizon above them whitens with dawn. It is a coast that makes me think of half-awoken villages and fishermen already started out from their settlements along the Rorschach-like fractals of the shore. Here is the dawn of return, as simple a view as we will ever have of it; here are lands braided softly with light, and the end of our night’s journey across the ocean they face.
—
Following my father’s death—a year and a half after our flight together to Budapest—the world I saw from airplanes, particularly the world I saw at night, changed. Like many people who lose a parent, especially at a relatively young age, I felt that something about the finite nature of life, previously irrelevant or obscured to me, had suddenly come into focus. A nurse might feel time’s new weight in piled stacks of medical records, a mechanic in rust and repairs, and an architect in an often-renovated old building’s palimpsest of styles. I saw it in what I was spending a large part of my hours above: the human geography of light on the earth.
The patterns we perceive from above—of country lanes and suburban cul-de-sacs, seething freeways, the warehouses storing up whatever it is we will buy tomorrow, the vast pages of parking lots, the steady proud pulse of red on radio masts—is necessarily disconnected from any individual life. We see, instead, the collective infrastructure of all our individual lives, the luminous netting that stands for us but is not us; the lights that suggest a line from Leonard Cohen—“we are so lightly here.” If in a moment everyone vanished from a city at night, for some time it would look much the same. The beauty of a night view of a city, though a city is something made of life, made for life, thus has a kind of distance and fragility, a formal or distracted indifference, like the blinking language of lit windows on an apartment building as evening draws on.
Above the world at night I was struck by the thought that this—distant, cold, busy, unaware of those gazing down—is how the world might look to my father now. Indeed, a common corollary of grief—the bewilderment of other people going on with their business, shopping, driving, walking, laughing—was heightened, perhaps, because I saw more evidence of it than most.
Friends, unprompted, occasionally tell me about a memorable flight—a flight on which they stared from the window for hours, perhaps, in silence or listening to music, caught by something they had not seen or noticed before. I’m struck by how often the flight they describe to me is one they were taking because a loved one had suddenly fallen ill or died. Such journeys seem conducive to a kind of outward-looking introspection, perhaps because we are likely to be tired or jet-lagged, and because in the rush of calls with family, friends, and doctors, the hours on the plane may be the only time for several weeks that we are alone with our thoughts. We are crossing, too, both mentally and physically, from the time and place before we had this news to some new reality. In the first months after my father died I
often wondered how many passengers on the plane I was piloting were traveling because someone had died or was gravely ill, and how the lights of the world below the plane might look to them on such a night.
Astronauts have reported that Belgium is easy to spot; on photographs of the earth at night, the country is a continuous splash of white light, as bright as any city. One of Europe’s most densely populated countries, Belgium also has one of the world’s densest and best-lit road networks. From the altitude of a plane, the lights appear not white but yellow-orange. As I see it so often when flying from London, Belgium appears first as a flat sea of illuminations beyond the shadowy contours of the Channel, a land as densely webbed and light-fractured as a cracked sheet of safety glass, that tilts up toward us in two senses, as we simultaneously fly closer to it and climb higher above it.
Belgium’s immediate neighbors survive with less profligate road-lighting policies. This means that on a clear night the sinuous and oft-ignored borders of Belgium are apparent to an aerial observer. The land grows darker beyond their line. I look for the lights of the French city of Lille (or Rijsel, as the once-Flemish city is still known in Dutch), and then let my eye cross northeast, over the frontier of light. This is how I spot my father’s hometown from an airplane; how I found it the night he was sitting in the front of the cabin, not 10 feet away from the locked cockpit of the airplane I was flying.
Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot Page 27
