About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read online

  If you drink copious amounts of water, breathe oxygen occasionally while you’re aloft, eat very sparingly during the flight, and decline coffee and other diuretics, you can diminish the effects of jet lag. But the pilots and aeromedical officers I spoke with said the symptoms are so inevitable and intractable, you have to learn to accommodate them.

  Pilots get regular checkups, many of them exercise, and most appear and feel fit. The physical hazards of long-term flying are relatively minor—an increased incidence of cataracts, high-frequency hearing loss (beginning in the right ear for copilots and becoming more severe in the left ear with pilots)—or are 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 have 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 seem able to monitor an instrument’s unwavering reading and run technical checklists repeatedly without mentally wandering or reimagining the information. Their hand movements in the cockpit are slow, smooth, direct; they concentrate on precision and routine, on thoroughness. The virtues they admire—dedication to a job, loyalty, allegiance to a code—are more military than corporate. Some, like generals, carry 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. From here, still 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 at an angle to currents still deeper. Toward Karimata Strait, between Borneo and Belitung Island to the south, a single layer of thin stratus cloud cast its shadow over a hundred square miles of water. Beyond, the sea was brightly lit once more. Because detail on the water resumed there again with the same brilliance after fading in the foreground, the huge shadow’s interruption created the illusion that the distant water was lit by light from another kingdom.

  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 grasses in an adjacent field. Two common mynah birds landed on the plane’s port wing.

  VI

  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 from the hotel 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, their ideograms so clearly different in comparison. 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 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 to my culture; you see them as improvements, but they are designed really 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 world-encircling consumerism of which I was an inadvertent symbol—I could have felt as an indictment in a dozen other cities. It needn’t have been here, where I only wanted relief from the impact of culture I felt every time the plane landed.

  Early in the morning in a city like this, you may see several hundred years of history unfold in just a few hours. The earliest people out are those packing fish up from boats on the Han River, people selling charcoal to shopkeepers or transporting food in handcarts, a manner of life relatively unchanged from 1750. Appearing later are factory workers, headed for parts of Seoul where the smoke and grit ash of nineteenth-century Pittsburgh still cling. Then come department store clerks and employees of large firms, the lower and middle levels of white-collar work. Last out on the sidewalks are expensively dressed men, headed for the Samsung Building or for other corporate offices.

  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 disaffections. 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.

  It is not difficult to disparage the capitulation in such manic living; what is hard is avoiding 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, Territory Ahead, Patagonia. My shoes, dark brown suede wingtips, 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 will the weave produce?

  I picked my way around rain-pocked mounds of snow back to the hotel, down tight alleys backed with fishmongers’ crates.

  THE PLANE I boarded out of Seoul was a passenger flight with lower-deck 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.*

  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 misleadin
g. They wait instead for the National Transportation Safety Board findings to appear in Aviation Week and Space Technology.

  We had no trouble getting into or out of Anchorage, and we enjoyed an unperturbed flight to New York, with spectacular views of the Canadian Rockies. On the next leg, from JFK to San Francisco, I fell into conversation with the pilot about the history of aerodynamic design that produced the 747. Like many pilots, he had an intuitive sense of the volume of abstract space, and he was a gazer-out-of-windows. It was about one in the morning. Air-traffic control in New York had given us a direct path to San Francisco. Our flight plan showed no areas of turbulence ahead, and no one in front of us was reporting any. The moonless sky was glimmering, deep. I asked the pilot if he had ever heard of James Turrell. He hadn’t.

  I’d hoped for weeks to speak with someone who had. Turrell is best known for an enormous project called Roden Crater near Flagstaff in northern Arizona. He reconformed the crater with bulldozers and road graders, believing celestial space actually had shape, that one could perceive the “celestial vault” above the Earth, and that a view from within the crater could reveal that architecture by so disposing the viewer. Turrell, a pilot, once said, “For me, flying really dealt with these spaces delineated by air conditions, by visual penetration, by sky conditions; some were visual, some were only felt. These are the kinds of space I wanted to work with.”

  People who have traveled to Roden Crater—heavy-equipment operators as well as museum curators—say, yes, you do see that the sky has shape from the crater. I’d like to go, I told the pilot.

  After a while the pilot turned around in his seat and said, “He’s right. I know what he’s talking about. The space you fly the plane through has shape.” I asked if he thought time had boundary or dimension, and told him what I had felt at Cape Town, that time pooled in every part of the world as if in a basin. The dimension, the transparency, and the agitation were everywhere different. He nodded, as if together we were working out an equation.

  A while later he said, “Being ‘on time’ is like being on fire.”

  ONE OF MY LAST FLIGHTS takes me to Buenos Aires, seat of the old viceroyalty on the Río de la Plata, the river of silver. Here, as in other places I visited, people in the freight depot are friendly and open, and sometimes quite sophisticated about ironies in the airfreight business. I go to lunch with four men who treat me to a meal of Argentine beef and a good Argentine red wine. Affecting philosophical detachment, they explain the non-European way to conduct business in Buenos Aires, the paths money might take here. We laugh. Three of us then go to a strong room to inspect a shipment of gold bullion.

  I walk out to the tarmac afterward with the KLM freight manager. He is directing the loading of Flight 798 from Buenos Aires to Amsterdam, a thirteen-hour run. In the crackle blast of combusting kerosene, swept by hot winds, I watch the pallets go aboard. These, I have come to understand, are the goods. This lovely, shrieking behemoth, the apotheosis of modern imagination and invention, is being filled yet again with what we believe in. I watch, as agnostics must once have watched at Chartres, for a sign, a confirmation of faith. I see frozen trout; fresh strawberries; eighty cases of live worms; seventy-three pounds of gold for Geneva, packed in light green metal boxes sealed with embossed aluminum bands, wrapped in clear plastic, banded again with steel strapping. An armed security officer stands by until the bulk-cargo door is closed, then stands at a distance, watching.

  The last load in the aft compartment is four tons of horsemeat. The temperature is set at 53 degrees and the door is closed. The last load in the forward compartment will be 175 penguins. They have come in on the plane from Santiago and are headed for Tokyo. They wait in the noise and heat around the airplane while freight in the forward compartment is rearranged, the weight more evenly distributed.

  The penguins stand erect in narrow cells, five cells forming a wooden crate. A wire mesh panel on the front, beginning at chest level, slants up and back, reaching the top of the crate just above their head height. So constructed, air can reach those on the inside of the load, thirty-five crates stacked in tiers on a single pallet. The gangs of five face in four directions; some see us, some see one another, some see the plane, some the back of another box. I recognize magellanic and rockhopper penguins. If they’re making any noise I cannot hear it over the jet engines. A few strike at the wire mesh with their bills. Some of the rockhoppers rise on their toes, cramping their heads, and flap their flippers repeatedly against the dividers.

  After they are loaded, the temperature of their compartment is set at 43 degrees and the door is closed.

  KL 798, a passenger flight, takes us up the southern coast of Brazil, above the Serra do Mar and Serra do Espinhaço and out over the Atlantic near Natal. There is a lightning storm near Recife, on the coast. I send my worn letter of introduction to the cockpit to see if it would be possible to watch and talk for a while. The purser comes back with a smile. Yes.

  I take my place in the jump seat, assure the chief pilot I am familiar with how to operate the oxygen mask and with my responsibilities in case of an emergency. This is a 747–400. With this new design, the flight engineer’s job has been eliminated; a relief crew of two is now asleep in bunks along the port side, just aft of the cockpit.

  We watch cobra strikes of yellow-and-blue light on the starboard horizon. Against the display of lightning I hesitate to speak. I take in the instruments to learn our heading, the speed and direction of the wind, our altitude, the outside temperature. I’m aware of my faith in the integrity of the aircraft. I recognize the familiar, impetuous hurtling toward the void, a space to be filled only briefly, then to yawn again, hopeful and acquisitive.

  Out over the Atlantic I lean forward and ask the captain how long he’s been flying, which routes he knows best. Twenty-eight years, he says. He speaks of the South American and Caribbean routes. I think of the penguins two decks below, whose wings have become flippers, slamming them against the walls of their pens.

  * The forty flights, covering about 110,000 nautical miles, were made aboard 747 freighters and on 747 passenger planes hauling substantial amounts of cargo in their lower-deck compartments or, with some aircraft configurations, on the aft portion of the main deck, separated from the passengers by a bulkhead.

  * As a singular icon the 747 also symbolizes huge economic risk, brutal financial efficiency, and despotic corporate ego. Boeing president William Allen and Pan American’s Juan Trippe dared each other to take the then mind-boggling steps of building and contracting for the 747. Who would go first? In 1969, when Boeing’s total debt after developing the plane was thought to be larger than its net worth, it eliminated sixty thousand jobs to save the company, pushing Seattle’s unemployment to 17 percent.

  * Virtually all wide-body passenger aircraft carry a diverse and often substantial belly cargo of manufactured goods, flowers, fresh food, and live animals. With so many people now living and working abroad, they also commonly carry large containers of personal effects and the coffins of returning nationals.

  * Thoroughbred horses fly back and forth between the continents constantly during the respective national racing seasons. Slaughter horses, mostly young draft horses, are carried to the Far East from the United States and Canada, 116 head at a time in 29 pens on a 747. With a reduction in import duties on fresh meat in the Far East, smaller animals like the slaughter cattle killed in the Anchorage crash, have become less economical to fly live.

  * It is largely forgotten today that the notion of “standard time” in the United States, as opposed to local time, was one promulgated by railroad commissions to coordinate the needs of railroads and other businesses engaged in long-distance commerce. A nationwide system, enforced by railroads and then by factories, was entrenched by 1883. Congress eventually gave its official approval, though several states—Utah, Minnesota, California—fought the inconvenience until 1917. The principal objection was that standard time distorted the natural rhythms of human life f
or the sake of greater efficiency in business and commerce. Today Cincinnati lives, more or less complacently, by Boston’s sunrise.

  * Pilots use different methods to compute their actual (as distinct from scheduled) flying time. One is “block to block,” from the pulling of the nosewheel chocks at one end to their being set at the other end. Another is doors closed to doors open. Northwest pilots are limited, on this latter basis, to 82.5 hours of flying per month and to no more than 30 hours in any seven-day period.

  * The heritage of oceangoing vessels is preserved in the language and some of the design of modern airplanes. Pilots frequently call the plane a ship, its fuselage a hull. Its interior space is divided into decks that extend fore and aft. The captain might refer to starting an engine as turning a wheel. He steers the plane on the ground with a tiller and speaks of docking the ship, after which, on a freighter, cargo is always taken off the main deck on the port side (originally, the side of a ship designed for use in port). A rudder in the plane’s vertical stabilizer changes its course. Waterline-like numbers stenciled on the interior of the fuselage indicate height above the ground. Sailboat fairings taper engine mounts into wings that bear green running lights to starboard, red lights to port.

  * One story I heard many times but couldn’t confirm concerned shipments of large bluefin tuna to Japan from Newport, Rhode Island. A Newport buyer with a small plane on standby reportedly offers returning sport fishermen a premium price for any bluefin over 500 pounds. The fish is iced, flown immediately to JFK, and put aboard the first available commercial flight to Tokyo.