Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker Read Free Book Online

rooms at home, and then expands to the backyard, and to the neighborhood—is so enormous. The job induces an almost planetary sensibility, a mental geography that rounds countries and continents as easily as you follow turns in a path through a familiar wood.

    As a child you are taken to places by others. When I grew up and learned to drive I eventually drove myself to many of these same places: small towns, or lakes, or state forests in New England where my family had camped or hiked when I was young. I realized that although I remembered the sites well, they had floated freely in my memory, untethered to actual geography. I hadn’t known how they lay on a map or on the earth, how to travel to one, or between two of them, or how long such journeys might take. But when I drove to them myself, the cloud they formed began to sort itself, to fall into place, as we say, like the pieces of a wooden puzzle. I realized that a lake I thought faced in one direction actually faced another, for example, and was close to a second location that I had never linked it to.
    When I learned to fly, such a sorting of idea-places onto the physical world around me happened on a fully planetary scale. What suddenly appeared in the window included not only the few cities I had flown to as a child, but everything I saw from the air that was identifiable—all the cities and mountains and oceans I had heard of or read about and dreamed of someday visiting.
    This sense of a formal knowledge of places falling onto actual earth and lining and connecting up, one with another, may be similar to the ways in which bodies change in the minds of medical students when they first learn how the organs and bones they’ve always known the names of are really located in three dimensions, and how they’re connected by other tissues they did not know about before medical school. The first time I flew to Athens, I noted some digits on our paperwork that marked the presence of an area of high terrain not far off our route. As we approached this region a snowy peak came into view. I said to the captain: That’s quite a mountain. He looked at me as if I had said something strange and then answered: Mark, that’s Mount Olympus.
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    I’m over Arabia, routing toward Europe. Ahead is Aqaba, the lights of the Sinai; then the city of Suez, and the lights of ships streaming through the canal like blood cells in an animation of the earth’s circulatory system; then the glow of the Nile, a flowing ring of light around the waters, a flume that fans into Cairo, leading the eye to Alexandria, pooling on the coast; and off to the right is all of Israel, shimmering on its water so marvelously that if I did not know which coastal place I was gazing upon I would bet it was Los Angeles; and beyond is Lebanon, where I look for this night’s electrified shadow of the biblical city of Tyre, that “dwells at the entrance to the sea.” The next lights are those of ships, and then comes the illuminated net of Crete, and the city of Heraklion. An idea of these places was all I had, until I saw them turning below me in their natural order.
    A few hours later I am over Germany, looking down at an inland sea of light. I remember a childhood fascination with an atlas of the world owned by my parents, in which the most densely populated areas were clearly marked out, so that London or Los Angeles or Tokyo were surrounded by splotches of bright red. In northwest Germany, too, there was a large red area like this, that I was certain must be a misprint because it was so enormous and sprawled over a region that was far from any major German city I had heard of, such as Frankfurt or Munich. I asked my dad, and he told me the name of this place, which I still find beautiful, perhaps because I can remember him pronouncing what I myself can never properly say: the Ruhr. It is Germany’s most populous area, he told me, though you won’t yet know the names of even the largest cities that