Washes, Dragons and Legends

​​As the plane roared in takeoff, I craned across the seats to watch the veined desert slide away. The dusty, lumpy dirt and bunch grasses were marbled with ribbons of mottled and dotty green that traced the arroyos furrowed into the ground. I knew from my childhood those arroyos, while shady, would only be a degree or two cooler than exposed flat lakes of rocky brown. I marveled as the mountains ebbed away and the landscape shrank like a map zooming out. Stark browns and rusts gave way to deep blues and greys, and the mountains looked ever increasingly like the half-buried skeletons of dragons that dwarfed and ate dinosaurs. Diving upwards into hot haze, scattered blocks of heavy curving clouds shaded the washes, dragons and legends of Southern Arizona.

Every time I fly in or out of Tucson, several dozen times at least by now, I’m struck by the immensity of this country. This only a corner of the 5th largest State in the nation. Not even the 2nd or 3rd largest. Alaska, Texas… I’m not even sure which is the 3rd largest… California. I could Google it, but yeah, it’s California. New Mexico is #4. And after having bisected Utah, then driven all the way through Wyoming and South Dakota, I have a renewed profound sense of awe.

A sense of surrealism blurred my perception as the stewardess’s voice rattled and rasped in the outdated intercom. “In the case of an emergency, please find an additional aircraft in the overhead bins.” Well that’s handy.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” I wondered aloud to the woman whose lap I was staring across to see out the window.

“No, it really isn’t.” she replied and proceeded to tell me for the next two hours how much she and her husband hate traveling and how driving from Upstate New York to see the Four Corners National Monument was the dumbest thing they’d ever done. Really.

I was sympathetic and offered no other opinion. What would be the point?

By the time we leveled out at an indiscernible altitude measurable only by instrumentation, I had the puzzling words of Flat-Earthers in my head. Some basketball star said he’s flown all over the planet and the whole thing was flat, wherever he went. He must have been joking. I can’t even…

I envisioned a map of the world stretched out in a large rectangle, with Alaska trailing off the left-hand edge, and the teacher asking “Class, what’s the fastest route from Alaska to Indonesia?”…

…How could any of these children be future pilots? What would happen to their heads, when sitting in a navigation class, they asked that same question. When the instructor showed them it was a scant few thousand miles from Juneau to Jakarta, would it completely rewrite their relationship with God? How could it not?

One of the things I love about flying is how the miles slip away much faster than time. I look out at the nebulous landscape of indistinct locations and have no idea where I am, how far we’ve gone or how much farther we have to go. It’s easy enough to mark the journey in terms of, but not in specific miles. Disappointingly, screens embedded in seat in front of you is changing that.

If the Earth is flat, where are the edges? Can you acknowledge the International Date Line? If time is a flat line, why wouldn’t the Earth be? If Flat-Earthers become politicians, could they declare a single time zone for the entire planet? Well, yes it would be dark in London when it’s 3pm in Los Angeles, but so far, facts don’t seem to stop these people. At what point does this idiodessey awaken from the siren call of the insanely religious?

“In case of Rapture, this car will become unmanned.” Was this the M.O. behind self-driving vehicles?

And I hope self-driving cars will never reach the vast expanses of the Great Basin, the heart of the Rocky’s ridges or those blank spaces in between where time stops and there’s nothing but miles.