The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 3

After taxiing half way to West Virginia and twenty ear popping minutes of climbing, we were not only airborne but at cruising altitude. Most of the people on this plane took the flight as a pretty routine thing; maybe it was. They've done it before and so have I. There were three little girls in the row behind me traveling home to Utah with their mother for the summer. They played quietly, not even bothering to look out the window although we had a clear view of the ground from our cruising altitude at 35,000 feet. Approaching 60, to me this was still an amazing experience. I think it was my age that made for such an impressive experience. The memory of my first plane trip is foggy after 50 years but there was a two engine propeller driven DC-something and a set of roll away stairs that I climbed to get aboard. Resting back on its rear wheel left the plane already tilted skyward, an awfully positive attitude it seems to me now. The flight was from Roanoke, Virginia to Allentown, Pennsylvania for a visit with my Aunt Susan. She lived in a huge apartment in Catasaqua, near Allentown. The visit was memorable for me not only because it was my first flight but because I would discover cartoons on TV there, a phenomenon which for some reason had not worked its way to southwest Virginia where I lived. Disney and the like were still doing plain black and white cartoon art but I was entranced by them.

We were traveling at about 600 miles per hour, six miles above the earth in air conditioned comfort. Two hours in the air had put us over one of those really flat states; the ones this Easterner can never seem to keep sorted out….Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas…somewhere with corn, cows and presumably combines. The roads were arrow straight with right angle intersections. What a great market for selling "STOP" signs.

The grid below was totally geometrical, the regularity of the patterns emphasized by random tracks of rivers, streams and creek beds, which were in turn revealed by the foliage growing along their banks. I saw three recognizable shapes in the regimentally cultivated earth: rectangles of grains, the regular ovals of athletic tracks and the distinct diamond shape of the baseball fields. No doubt when we get over a more populated part of the country the turquoise spots that are swimming pools will be visible as well.

As we moved farther west the terrain changed to show more contour, evident in part because the occasional terracing of some of the farm land is also visible now almost as if it were a topographic map with contour lines.

I tried shooting a few feet of video out the window as the terrain changed but the windows on the plane weren't too clean so the video was not clear. In some of the fields I saw patches of dark green where the trees and other foliage had defied the farmers’ efforts to clear the land.

Further west the squares gave way to the circular and semi-circular profiles of irrigated parcels. We were too high to see the giant wheeled pipes that the shapes said were there. The ones that aren't complete circles seem mimic giant pie charts showing the profit and loss or expense distribution for the farms they make up. The farther we went the more circular patterns there were until finally the earth looked almost as if it were a giant checkerboard after the early moves of a new game. Most squares were still covered in straight lines, almost perfectly aligned except for a few spots where it looked as if some invisible giant old men had made a few moves.

After a while even my wide-eyed wonderment began to fade. They showed a movie but I passed on America West's kind offer of a headset for the paltry sum of $5 so I could hear the sound on a movie I had seen. They wanted to sell me something they called a 'SkyBox' as well, a little cardboard treasure chest intended to fend off starvation. This time I saved $2.00 and so between the head set and the 'SkyBox', the unspent $7.00 offset the cost of the sandwich I bought in the terminal to bring with me.

Aren't I clever…that's a rhetorical question, OK?