Happy trails
There are many aspects of our modern life which are ubiquitous, so ubiquitous that we don’t even think of them.
Friends of ours were due to be married on Saturday, September 15, 2001 in California. We had plane reservations and were getting excited about our mini-vacation in the Bay Area.
Then, of course, 9-11 happened. Life everywhere came to a horrified standstill.
Planes, also, came to a standstill. But word came through to us: D. and C. were still planning to get married, come hell or high water. They were driving straight through from North Carolina to California, not stopping at all, and they’d be there. So, given that they were toughing it out with a cross-country drive the likes of which we hadn’t seen since we were in our late teens, we couldn’t be outdone…since no planes were running, we would do our more usual thing and drive out there.
The eerie thing about that drive–aside from constantly worrying that there was going to be another horrendous terrorist attack, and speculating what it would be–was that the skies were totally empty.
There were no contrails.
None.
It made us realize, at a gut level, just how many airplanes usually travel across the U.S., and how accustomed we were to seeing jets fly by, and seeing the residual contrails. It left us feeling disjointed.
I realized this past week that one of the things that I’ve been subliminally missing here is jet contrails.
Not a one.
Oh, we have oodles of little airplanes scooting across the sky. Small airplanes are an Alaskan fact of life; there are tiny little grassy airstrips everywhere, and floatplanes docked on all the lakes.
But jets? No jets. No contrails. If you look at one of the data visualization maps of air traffic, you’ll see that most of Alaska is…off the beaten path, as it were. The bottom parts of Alaska are hubs of trans-Pacific flights, but nothing more.
In this case, however, it doesn’t leave me feeling disjointed. The disjuncture felt before was because of the contrast with our long-term experience. My realization this week was, rather, a sudden surprise: Oh! There are no jets traveling around here! Which was not a disjuncture because I have no experience here–to me, this is just another facet of living in the Final Frontier.
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