I’m flying west, Boston to Portland. This isn’t my first evening flight along this route, but for some reason I can’t remember the last time that I chased the sunset at 30,000 feet. The quiet is surprising somehow, as is that sense that the plane is just hanging, suspended in the remains of a day. Incredibly, I’ve got the whole row to myself, which provides enough solitude for actual calm to creep in. The night’s clear up here - crystal - and looking down you can just make out smooth cords of highway, bending in shallow angles around a faded patchwork of fields; long stripes that stretch to the horizon across what’s probably Ohio. Small towns glitter feebly in the distance, reminding me of slower trips and stops at the Gulf station or Motel 6, of that moment when I step out of the car and stretch and look up for a second to see that one winged dot silently careening across a purple sky. Moments, in other words, where the roles have been reversed. (Who’s up there? Where are they headed? Why?) '

Surprising too is the clumped and radical beauty of clouds from above, how the texture is so sharp from up here, how patterns of air amongst each successive layer of cumulous and nimbus and cirrus can sit frozen, yet still be so strangely freighted with personality. Or what about the womb-like feeling of entering a cloud, lit with the pink of a fading day? Remember that enveloping shift of color? Remember the sudden shift in mood and outlook that caused your eyes to burn with gratitude?

Had I the means, I think I’d fly just to write. There was never a more natural pairing. I’d break it up somehow, buy tickets that took me somewhere beautiful in six hour chunks, always West. Moscow to Paris to Marrakech to New York to Portland to Honolulu. I’d follow the sun and stare and sigh and drink wine out of little plastic cups. I’d stay a month each place, just to renew the magic - the sheer wonder of the thing. And I’d do it alone. Let the quiet slip in, let the cocoon of distance push back the real behind a fading horizon.