About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  The wide acceptance of such standardized measurements and procedures can lead to the impression that a generally convivial agreement obtains throughout the world. And when, in one week, you transport the same sorts of freight to Cairo, Melbourne, and Rio de Janeiro, it is also easy to draw the conclusion that people everywhere want more or less the same things. However pervasive, the view is illusory. The airplane’s speed and geographic reach benefit the spread of a European and North American consumer ethic, but not all the world’s cultures can be folded into this shape. One need only leave the airport in Lima or Calcutta or Harare to see how true this is. It is not merely poverty and starvation you see, the ringing of another music you hear, or inversions of Western intuition you observe. It is starkly different renderings of the valuable.

  Again and again, stalled in boulevard traffic in hot, choking air, feeling the taxi bumped by a languid crosscurrent of beggars, I thought of the speed of the plane, how much it could leave behind. If we fled quickly enough, I thought, nothing would catch up.

  One morning at KLM’s corporate headquarters in Amsterdam, I spoke with a vice president in his corner office. Beyond us, planes were taking off every couple of minutes like salvos. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I was given my father’s watch. I thought that would be my watch for the rest of my life. But I have five watches now. I choose one in the morning to match my suit, a tie. You just buy them.” He spread his hands, a gesture of lament and consternation. In an adjacent office, another vice president told me, “Speed is the word. Air cargo is the answer to speed, it makes speed happen.” I could not tell from his piercing look whether he meant it as a summary or an indictment.

  AN OCEANIC EXPANSE of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of Bhiwani, Rohtak, Ghaziabad, and a dozen other cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots on peninsular Malaysia and in southern Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island, as far east as Port Jefferson. A summer lightning bolt once unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. Another night, off the eastern coast of Korea, I arose from a nap to see a tight throw of the brightest lights I’d ever observed. I thought we were low over a city until I glanced at the horizon and saw the pallid glow of coastal towns between Yŏngdŏk and Samch’ŏk. The lights directly below, brilliant as magnesium flares, were those of a South Korean fishing fleet.

  Over Anchorage we slam into severe turbulence at 34,000 feet. The plane seems suddenly to shrink, and we are pitched through the sky like a wood chip for ten minutes before we get clear of it and divert to Fairbanks. When I go below with a handler, the horses appear to have come through the violence unfazed. The handler knows each of the animals and speaks soothingly to them. As we proceed down the line, he recalls their breeding histories. Draft horses like the Percheron, he says, are the calmest breeds, and working quarter horses are bred for calmness. He isn’t surprised they’re all right, or that they settle down quickly.

  If you ask pilots which loads they most remember, they mention either costly objects—a $319,000 Bentley, flying 70,000 pounds of gold into Riyadh—or animals, the things that are animated in a freight shipment. Most say Vietnamese potbelly pigs are the worst creatures to haul, their stench so permeating that pilots have to strip off their uniforms, seal them in plastic bags, and fly in clothes that they later throw away. As bad, they say, is a planeload of durians, a pulpy, melon-size fruit whose scent reminds most Western people of vomit. A problem that occurs on some cattle flights turns on their rank perspiration. Rising as a vapor, it penetrates the ceiling insulation and freezes to the plane’s interior skin surfaces. Melted by warmer outside temperatures at lower altitudes on descent, the fluid funnels forward and begins dripping on the pilots.

  When large animals—draft horses and bulls—kick their stalls in midflight, you can feel the plane shudder. Goats and ostriches will chew at whatever cargo they can reach. One pilot told me about going down one night to look at a white tiger. Believing she’d been sedated, he drew close to the bars to peer in. She charged as ferociously as the cage permitted, sending the pilot reeling onto his back. The animal’s roar, he said, drowned out the sound of the engines and nearly stopped his heart.

  Pilots remember animals in some detail—wolf puppies turned loose in the cockpit, a killer whale in a tank—because they are alive and making these formidable journeys. Like the pilots.

  WE WAIT IN Fairbanks until the Anchorage weather quiets and then fly back, landing in light turbulence. A 747 freighter taking off just after we land hits a wind shear and in less than two seconds accelerates from 210 to 260 knots. An hour later, on takeoff, we abruptly lose 20 knots of airspeed when a headwind collapses. We’re barely airborne when the departure threshold on the runway passes under our wheels. Two hours later our automatic pilot malfunctions. The nose plunges violently and we are in a rapid descent. In one of the most assured and swiftest moves I’ve ever seen a human being make, the pilot recovers the plane and brings it back level before we fall 500 feet.

  When I again accompany the handlers below, we find the horses awakened by the fall and spooked by our soundless approach. They glare a while, then doze off. The rich odors in their corrals don’t drift up to the flight deck. I thought they might, and take the edge of indifference off the electronic atmosphere up there.

  In those same minutes the sun had just risen (at 30,000 feet it clears the horizon about twenty-two minutes earlier than it does when seen from a spot on the Earth directly below), but the moon had not yet set, and for a while I held both in the same gaze, in a sky that goes from azure to milk blue between horizons. We are pushing against a 120-knot headwind, common this time of year over the North Pacific. When I ask whether the pilots have names for these winds aloft around the world, the captain says, “No, we haven’t been flying long enough.” I ask whether the jet stream—“the jets,” they call these winds—blows strongest here. Yes, he answers, here and over the North Atlantic. By then the copilot has located something he’s been searching for in his personal logbook. On this same route last year, he shows me, headed the other way with a tailwind, he made the fastest ground speed he’s experienced in a 747—702 knots.

  Far beneath us the winds are calmer. The burnished surface of the ocean seven miles below appears still as a slab of stone, and crinkled like an elephant’s skin. I see only one ship headed southwest against the Okhotsk Current, far off the coast of Kamchatka, its wake flared at the characteristic 39-degree angle.

  When Japan looms I feel suddenly very tired. I haven’t slept for thirty hours—traveling to Chicago, then caught up in events surrounding the horses, anticipating en route to Anchorage an appearance of the aurora borealis, listening to the pilots tell stories, looking out the window at the remoteness of Alaska, at the spectacle of clouds. Beneath us, every day, I’d seen buttermilk, mare’s tail, and mackerel skies, and then looked in vain through phrase books and small dictionaries for what they are called in Korean, in Spanish.

  We touch down at Narita International Airport at 12:42 p.m. local standard time. At 12:45 we set the plane’s parking brake at Gate 211.* At 12:54 Japanese officials open the door and a quarantine officer boards to inspect the horses. Once he is assured of their good health, he leads us down the air stairs where, one by one, we step gingerly through a plastic basin of disinfectant. The horse handlers, wearing fine-looking Western boots, hesitate a moment. />
  The wood stalls are to be burned. The horses will be in quarantine here for three weeks before being flown to Hokkaido. I remember the snorts of steam and billowing breath on the frigid ramp at O’Hare and wish I could see them now, standing, like us, in the sunshine and balmy breezes outside the plane.

  V

  FROM MY ACCUSTOMED SEAT, just behind and slightly to the left of the pilot, I have a clear view to the southeast over the South China Sea. Though it is slightly awkward to manage, I often lean into this window. Just those few inches closer and my view widens appreciably. I look back at the port wing, the sleek gape of the winking engines, at a pinpoint of nuclear light winking on a windshield ten miles away. At night, if I rotate my head 180 degrees and hold the upper edge of this canted window against the stars, the world is utterly still. We do not appear to move at all.

  Far to the south, just now, a ribbon of sunlit cumulus towers, fumaroles and haystacks, great pompadour waves of this cloud. I never tire of seeing them, the most dominating evanescent form on the planet. We have seen a great range of them since leaving Tokyo some hours ago. East of Honshu, over the Pacific, the ocean was occluded by a vast sheet of wool-nap cumulus. When that flat plain opened into a lattice hundreds of miles later, the formation appeared serried in three dimensions, away from me and down. These puffs eventually thinned and I thought the sky cloudless until I looked up to see a rice-paper layer of cirrostratus. Then it, too, thinned to blue space, and for a while there was nothing but an occasional fair-weather cumulus, built up over a distant Pacific atoll, until we came to the rampart of heaped clouds—cumulus congestus. For all their beauty, the impossibly slow tai chi of their movement, clouds are of almost no help, claim the pilots, in anchoring a sense of depth or distance in the troposphere. They accentuate, however, the peculiar and insistent, ethereal nature of the sky.

  I need to stretch. None of the three pilots wants anything from the galley,* so I raise the smoke door (which would give us some protection in case of a main-deck fire) and descend the stairs to take a turn around the cargo. Unlike the pilots, I cannot resist a look each time the plane’s contents change. I am drawn by the promise of revelation in the main hold. “Used clothing” might mean a boutique-consignment of East German military uniforms. A persistent rumor of fabled cargo might be confirmed.* The pilots, who speak animatedly about circus tigers, Lamborghini Diablos, and small wooden pallets of gold bars, each in its own burlap bag, seem uninterested or vaguely embarrassed by the bulk of what fills the space behind their heads.†

  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 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 ferried (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 (labeled LTF), swimming in bags of oxygenated water, bound for Los Angeles from Manila; two Cadillac Eldorados—right-hand drive—for Osaka; canvas bags of homebound paper bills (the accumulation from currency exchanges); munitions of war (MUW) for Khartoum; bundles of mesquite wood, for restaurant cooking fires, 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 on the pallet by webs or rope nets. Twenty-two rectangular sealed containers and pallets, dogged down to a floor of steel caster bearings and roller-track with red latches, stand in pairs down the middle of the freighter, leaving narrow outboard aisles. Two additional units, canted to the taper of the plane, hug 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, the last, stands behind them, near the open wall rack that holds the plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder (the “black boxes”).

  I sideslip past the containers and pallets on the port side and look back from the cross aisle at the mass of 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 the 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.) I turn and clamber over the rearmost loads, reaching a white concave hemisphere marking the aft edge of the main deck. Here, as far as possible from the plane’s compasses, is where any magnetized cargo is palletized.

  Moving forward up the starboard aisle, I finally stand in an eerie place, at the forward edge of the main deck, looking at the backside 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 which 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 of the cockpit, while copilots, men (and, rarely, women), in their midthirties, remain focused within the plane.

  In the evolution of modern jet flight, there has been a dramatic shift away from the use of navigation references outside the plane, such as rivers, to the use of electronically displayed information within 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 a 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 display 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.”)*

  The chief pilots, many of them, possess a notable, unique knowledge of how the Earth has changed over the past thirty years; how much farther south the Sahara Desert has crept, how much the Aral Sea has shrunk, how far center-pivot irrigation has spread in Saudi Arabia. It’s 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 descend less often for fuel. A dispatcher in a windowless international office half a world away may organize a sense of geography for them and radio in, even telephone with any changes in the flight plan, 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 ofte
n than 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 chain hotel, often reached on a crew bus driven down an advertising corridor like the airport’s passenger corridors, is brief. English is spoken everywhere. Anacin, 7-Up, Rambo, CNN, Ray-Ban, and Time are omnipresent. Reality outside the plane slowly merges with a comforting, authoritative, and self-referential world found within 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 spatial and temporal abuse which, by the time you reach your fifties, can overwhelm you on a single trip.

  Over many days of flying, 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 hulk of my body. I had the impression 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 without darkness and stillness no dreams would come and that without dreams there would be no recovery. Once, in a hotel, I slept on solely to dream.