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

  ONE FOGGY January morning in 1977, a few hours before dawn, a DC-8 freighter crashed on takeoff at Anchorage International Airport, killing all five people aboard and fifty-six head of cattle bound for Tokyo. Rescuers found the whitefaced Herefords flung in heaps through the thick, snowy woods, their bone-punctured bodies, dimly lit by kerosene fires, steaming in the chill air.

  A few days after the accident I happened to land in Anchorage on a flight from Seattle, en route to Fairbanks. The grisly sight of the wreck and the long scar ripped through birch trees off the end of the runway made me philosophical about flying. Beyond the violent loss of human life, it was some element of innocence in the cattle I kept coming back to. Were they just standing there calmly in large metal pens when the plane crashed? And why were they needed in Tokyo? At 35,000 feet over the winter Pacific, cruising that frigid altitude at 400 knots, did their lowing and jostle seem as bucolic?

  Like many people who fly often, I have watched dozens of windowless air freighters lumbering by on taxiways and wondered at their cargos. In the years after that accident I puzzled over them everywhere—in Quito, in Beijing, in Nairobi, in Frankfurt, in Edmonton. What could warrant a fleet of machines so sophisticated and expensive to operate? It must be more than plasma and vaccines they haul, materials desperately needed; more than cut flowers, gold, and fruit, things highly valued or perishable. Would it be simply the objects people most desire? A fresh strawberry on a winter morning in Toronto?

  Watching pallets go aboard on monotonously similar tarmacs around the world, I became more and more curious. I wanted to know what the world craved. I wanted a clarifying annotation for the rag-doll scatter of cattle.

  At two a.m. one December night I climbed aboard a 747 freighter in Chicago to begin a series of flights around the world with freight.* I would fly in and out of cities like Taipei, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles with drill pipe, pistol targets, frozen ostrich meat, lace teddies, dog food, digital tape machines, pythons, and ball caps; with tangerines from Johannesburg, gold bullion from Argentina, and orchid clusters from Bangkok. During the hourless penetration of space between continents, I would sidle among the eighty or more tons of airborne freight on the main deck, examining disparate labels like an inquiring bird. Out cockpit windows on the flight deck, I would become absorbed in the strange untapering stillness of the Earth seen from that altitude.

  Before I boarded the first flight, however, I wanted to learn about the plane.

  II

  THE ASSEMBLY BUILDING at Boeing’s aircraft plant at Everett, Washington, is so large—ninety-eight acres under a single roof more than a hundred feet off the ground—that it has its own weather. Sometimes low clouds form in steelwork near the ceiling, where gantry cranes carrying subassembled sections of 747s, 767s, and 777s maneuver toward sites of final assembly. Over a single November night I watched swing-shift and third-shift crews at the plant complete the assembly of a 747–400 freighter, nearly the largest plane ever to fly. I studied it, and listened and touched, as its 68,000-pound wings were joined to a fuselage section, the six fuselage sections slid together and landing gear attached beneath, leaving it to tower above workers, empty as a cathedral, aloof as the moon.

  As a boy I raised tumbler pigeons, a breed that at some height above the ground will destroy its aerodynamic lift and come plummeting down like a feathered stone, only to pull out at the very last moment, a terrifying demonstration of power and grace. Model airplanes—P-47, P-38, F-86, B-29—hung from the ceiling of my bedroom on black thread; I was mesmerized by the wind seething in eucalyptus trees around the house. Once I leaped hopefully from our roof with an open umbrella.

  At seventeen I entered college as an aeronautical engineer, only to discover it was the metaphors of flight, not its mechanics, that moved me. I was less interested in engineering than in the imagination of an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote of the “tender muslin of the meadows, the rich tweed of the woods,” who climbed into the open cockpit of his Sahara-bound mail plane with heavy clothes and a tool bag, like a deep-sea diver, and who died in a crash in the Mediterranean in a P-38, a plane my mother’s first husband helped design.

  I switched to liberal arts, but the marvel of airborne flight never diminished for me. And the exotic allure of the Earth continued to tug. I saw the sky as an airscape of winds—West Africa’s harmattan, Greece’s damp Apeloites, California’s Santa Ana, Japan’s daiboufu (“the wind that knocks horses down”).

  I admired what I saw come tangibly together that night in the Boeing assembly building: a staggering achievement in engineering, in metallurgy, in economy of design. The assembly of a 747–400 freighter—232 feet long, 165 tons poised over eighteen tires like a barefoot gymnast on a balance beam, a six-story drop from the apex of its tail to the ground—suggests the assembly of a chronometer by tweezer, a sculptor’s meaning with a jeweler’s fastidiousness. Standing on a scaffold inside a wheel well, I marveled at a set of brass-colored steel screws securing six hydraulic lines in a pattern neat as a musical staff. Not a tool mark, not a misstep was to be seen. (Elsewhere, workers were buffing the airplane’s aluminum skin to remove scratches I couldn’t find with the pads of my fingers.) Fuselage sections came together smooth as a cap sliding onto a French fountain pen.

  For twelve or thirteen hours that night I watched, wandering off to sift through a box of button-head rivets (three million of the plane’s six million parts were rivets); or to observe agile men disappearing into the labyrinthine recesses of another 747’s unfinished wing; or to heft “nuclear hardened” cable—flexible, shielded conduit that carries thick bundles of color-coded wire from controls on the flight deck to each engine. Then I circled back to the freighter—this particular one being built for Singapore Airlines—with another bit of understanding, a new appreciation of its elegance. People who saw the 747’s first flight, in 1969, were impressed that something so huge could fly. What surprised the pilots were its nimbleness, its fluid response to their foot and hand pressures, the easy way the aircraft absorbed turbulence. Designing a plane to fly this well is exceedingly difficult. The engineering task, the working out of that single genetic code, proves to be beyond the reach of formulas. It’s as intuitive and mysterious a process—and as prone to catastrophe—as developing and holding on to the financial market for such things.

  The Boeing 747 is the one airplane every national airline strives to include in its fleet, to confirm its place in modern commerce, and it’s tempting to see it as the ultimate embodiment of what our age stands for. Superficially, it represents an apotheosis in structural engineering and in the applied use of exotic metals and plastics. Its avionics and electronics systems incorporate all the speed and design efficiency of modern communications, and in terms both of manufacturing and of large-scale corporate organization, the swift assembly of its millions of parts is a model of streamlining and integration. In the air, the object itself is a virtuoso solution to flight, to Icarus’s dream of escape and freedom. It operates with as little regard for geography, weather, political boundaries, intimidating physical distance, and time as anything humans have ever devised.

  If subtleties in the plane’s engineering were beyond my understanding, the spare grace of its long lines was not, nor its utilitarian perfection. The only thing that disturbed it, I was told, were rogue winds, the inevitable riptides and flash floods of the troposphere.

  When I measured off the freighter’s nearly completed main deck that night—sixty-eight paces down the bare interior—I was thinking of the quintessential symbol of another era, the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe, and of its emptiness, which we once filled with religious belief. Standing on the main deck, above the boxlike stub that joins the wing roots, standing where “nave” meets “transept” and looking up toward the pilots’ “chancel,” I recalled the intention behind Lúcio Costa’s Brasília, a fresh city, aligned east and west like a cathedral but laid out in the shape of an airplane. But there on the assembly line the issue of
spirituality, as serious a consideration as blood in the veins of a people, remained vague. The machine was magnificent, beautiful as staggered light on water, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations. But what placed within it could compare with religious faith?

  In the assembly building that night, the 747 came together so quickly that to be away even for half an hour meant missing lines in a sketch that soon became a painting. I would stand in one place, then another amid the cocoon of jigs, cradles, floor jacks, elevated walkways, and web slings surrounding the plane, watching while teams of men, some in sleeveless shirts with ponytails and tattoos, polished off a task neat as a snap of dry fingers in slow motion. They were glad for the work. They knew it could disappear in a trice, depending on the banks, the market, a securities trader in Singapore.*

  AN AIRCRAFT WILL give away some of its character to a slow walk-around. If you stare nose-on at a 747, you can tell whether the plane is fueled or not by the angle at which the wings sag. Empty, they assume an upward dihedral, making the plane appear to rest even more lightly on its wheel trucks. This vertical flexibility in the wings partly explains the sensation of unperturbed agility one feels as a passenger. If you let your eye run to the tip of either wing, you can see another key: a slight horizontal twist apparent in the last thirty feet or so, an engineer’s quick, intuitive solution to damping a troublesome oscillation. A similar intuition once compelled Wilbur Wright to warp the leading edge of the wings of an experimental glider, lending it critical lateral stability. The glider metamorphosed into Flyer, in which, on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills on the North Carolina coast, Orville Wright achieved powered, sustained, controllable flight for the first time.

  During the evening that I studied the buildup of the Singapore Airlines freighter, I was prompted, often, to reflect on early aviation. The vast interior of the Boeing plant and the peculiar absence of industrial noise combined to make the distant movement of messengers riding vintage bicycles seem almost timeless. The sight of these parts couriers gliding across the smooth concrete floors on fifties-era Schwinns triggered thoughts about the bicycle-building Wright brothers. The written history of all that led up to that December morning in 1903 reveals two young men who, beyond anything else, wanted to fly, at a time when most others were keen simply on winning the prize that feat would earn. While other people threw contraptions at the air, the Wright brothers worked out in painstaking detail the first practicable formulas for flight, challenging the previously revered mathematics of a German glider pilot named Otto Lilienthal, the author of Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation (1889). When Flyer flew, with its cambered wing and controllable elevator, its rudder and the world’s first rudimentary ailerons, the Wright brothers knew exactly what they were doing. The achievement at Kill Devil Hills was not the fact that the plane sustained itself at about seven miles per hour over 120 feet, or the addition of a motor and props to a glider, but that Orville controlled it. He flew the plane.

  The Wrights’ entrepreneurial success embodies for many a vanquished innocence in America: this was an unprecedented thing, done for love, with little thought of personal gain, and financed largely out-of-pocket.

  Orville’s initial flight carried him about half the length of a 747 freighter’s main deck. He was airborne for twelve seconds in a craft stripped of every bit of excess weight. The plane I was standing beside that night can carry 122 tons 5,000 nautical miles in about ten hours. The Wright brothers had little inkling of commercial advantage; without the support of government subsidies and the promise of private profit, without corporations competing fiercely for shares in a marketplace, without continuous turnover in what’s considered fashionable in consumer goods, the 747 freighter might easily have gotten no further than a draftsman’s table.

  My last impression of the plane, the rainy morning I drove away, was of accomplishment. Whatever people might do with it, however they might fill this empty vessel, it gleamed to my way of thinking like an ideal. It was an exquisite reification of the desire for beauty.

  Sometime later, I returned to Everett to inspect the finished cockpit. I wanted to crawl into every space that would admit me: low, tight bays on either side of the nosewheel doghouse that hold tiers of maintenance computers; the transverse avionics bay aft of them, where the plane’s triple-redundant inertial navigation system and flight deck computers are located (and from where, via hatches above and below, one can either drop to the tarmac or emerge on the main deck). I wanted to orient myself among banks of Halon bottles (the fire-fighting system) and emergency oxygen tanks on the lower cargo deck. I wanted to enter the compartment aft of the rear pressure bulkhead and see the massive jackscrew that tilts the horizontal stabilizer (the fins that protrude like a rear wing from the plane’s tail).

  Once the plane was fitted with four Pratt & Whitney engines—each developing up to 56,000 pounds of thrust (about 21,000 horsepower)—Singapore Airlines would take it away. At something like $155 million, it was an enormous capital investment; but with an international airfreight market currently expanding at about three times the rate of the passenger market, Boeing’s plane number RR835 would soon pay for itself. After that, grossing upward of $750,000 per load against an operating cost of roughly $15,000 per hour, it would begin to earn its owners a substantial and unencumbered profit.

  III

  AFTER FRANKFURT’S Rheim/Main Airport and London’s Heathrow, Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport is Europe’s largest airfreight depot site. KLM’s operation here is efficient and organized—dangerous goods here, live animals there, valuables (jewelry, currency, silver bars, uncut gemstones) over here, drugs in yet another place. In this world “perishable,” I learned right away, refers to more than flowers, food, and newspapers; it includes everything in tenuous fashion: watches, video games, shades of lipstick, a cut of trouser—objects for which a few days’ head start on store shelves is crucial.

  On an upper half-floor of the cavernous outbound-freight building—the main floor includes an open space perhaps 600 by 200 feet, and 40 feet high—there is no one, only automated equipment, enslaved by a computerized sorting program that is updated continually in response to aircraft schedule changes and new delivery priorities. The loaders, moving on floor tracks, pull standard-size pallets and cargo containers from steel shelves at just the right moment to launch them on a path terminating promptly at the cargo doors of their intended airplane. It is stark, bloodless work. On the main floor the mechanical tedium is relieved in three ways: in the buildup of single pallets, with workers arranging dozens of small packages trimly in an eight-by-ten-foot-square load, at heights to fit either the upper or lower deck of a particular aircraft, and with one top edge rounded slightly to conform to the curve of the plane’s sidewall; by the loading of oddly shaped or remarkable objects—a matched set of four, dark blue Porsche 911s, a complete prefabricated California ranch-style house; and by the sheer variety of goods—bins of chilled horse-meat, Persian carpets, diplomatic mail bound in sisal twine and sealed with red wax, bear testicles, museum art exhibits, cases of explosives.

  The impression one gets amid tiers of briefly stored cargo and whizzing forklifts is of mirthless haste. A polite but impatient rectitude about the importance of commerce prevails, and it forestalls simple questions: Have they run out of mechanical pencils in Houston? Is the need for eelpout in Osaka now excruciating? Are there no more shirtmakers in Rangoon?

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I departed the freezing rain and spitting snow of Amsterdam for Cape Town, six thousand miles and an opposing season to the south, where one of KLM’s smallest facilities operates on a decidedly different scale. We came in by way of Johannesburg and brought, among other things, two Goeldi’s marmosets and eight white ear-tufted marmosets, both endangered, inbound from South America for a local attraction called Monkey Den.

  When my escort completed our tour—a semienclosed metal shed, no automation—he very kindly suggested we go for a drive. He felt harried by shippe
rs’ phone calls, cajoling for more space than he could provide on the outbound flight. I, too, wanted to get away from the clamor.

  For the past six days I had been flying a heavy schedule, mostly in and out of the Far East. I was bewildered by the speed with which everything moved, by how quickly I came and went through the countries. In a few hours I would turn around and fly back to Johannesburg, there to pick up fresh flowers, hunting trophies, and raw diamonds before returning to wintry Amsterdam.

  We drove east through windblown sand scrub on the Cape Flats, rather quickly through Cape Town itself, and around to Clifton Bay on the west side of Table Mountain. The weather had been hot, but it was cooler now, seventy-two, with a brisk southeast wind, the one they call the Doctor.

  For a long while I stood there on the bluff in the summer sunshine, staring into the transparent blue water of the Atlantic. I was acutely aware of history here at Bartolomeu Dias’s Cabo Tormentoso (the Portuguese navigator’s Cape of Storms, a foreboding appellation his king would later change to Cabo da Bõa Esperança, Cape of Good Hope). Cook and Darwin anchored here as did, in 1522, a remnant of that part of Magellan’s crew under Sebastián del Cano. In those days it had taken as many months as it now takes hours to come this far south from Europe, and an indifferent sea swamped and crushed the Dutch jachts and Iberian caravels like a child’s paper sailers. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent so many years, was just to the north. A few miles to the southeast was Skildergat Cave, a 35,000-year-old early human site. All this was once the landscape of the Khoikhoi people, now long since gone to Namibia and Botswana, where they are called San people and among whom are the much studied !Kung.

  My companion was speaking English with a friend. When he lapsed into Afrikaans I recalled how, over the past few days, I had been scrambling to get the simplest grasp of Malay, Thai, then Hindi. I was moving carelessly around the planet. Beneath the familiar jet lag I began to sense something else: physical geography was not only spatial, it was temporal. I looked up past my shoulder at the serene oak and pine forests of Table Mountain, da Gama’s defining pivot. It had a peculiar time to it, as indigenous as its rock. I could not take that time with me, nor bring my own time here and drape it possessively over the mountain. In that moment I glimpsed the impunity with which I was traveling, as well as the inseparability of time and space in geography. The dispensation I enjoyed from the historical restraints of immense distance had created an illusion about time: the Earth’s spaces might vary terrifically—the moonlight reflecting for me last night on Shatt Al-Meghir, a saline lake in barren eastern Algeria, was not the same moonlight shining back from the icy reaches of Cook Inlet in Anchorage—but time, until this moment, had seemed a seamless thing, never qualitatively different. Everywhere I went time continued the same, an imperial present. At most, in these new depots and their environs, I was resetting my watch.