I guess it’s time to go home when the pizza that looked and tasted so good the first day in Marseille starts looking and feeling like pasty flesh hanging over my belt after three or four. People probably make fun of me for cooking noodles and veggies in my room, but it works, I assure you, and I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about health. I used to eat all that greasy starchy restaurant food back in my career as a trade show geek. I felt like shit most of the time. That ‘campout feeling’, that lack of mental clarity and general malaise, does not come from not bathing. The last week in France proved that. It comes from no vitamins. Two or three years ago in Mexico I finally said, “Ya basta!” after running out late into the Mexican night to find an open pharmacy with vitamins available. It worked. If I go a few days without veggies, maximum one week, I start failing to boot. So I started making my own meals, limiting the street food to once a day at most. Vitamin pills work, too, but not the cure-all. When you get old, you start playing for keeps. It’s just like my old pickup; the older it got, the more maintenance it needed. If Doonesbury went into shock twenty years ago realizing, “We’re our parents!”, then now imagine what I feel like realizing, “I’m my old pickup!” At least I’m not a trade show geek any more. There was a major one going on while I was in Barcelona and I didn’t even go. I used to seek these out to look for wood-carving customers, Paris Frankfurt London, all of them. Music festivals are more fun.
So it’s time to rewind the tape and re-trace my steps. That contradicts my rule number one- ‘backpack, don’t backtrack’, but it really doesn’t matter when you’re flying. Every thing looks pretty similar from thirty-five thousand feet. Airports are certainly all pretty much the same, except maybe for Iceland. Landing at Reykjavik International is like landing on the moon. The landscape is quite similar in fact, except for all the water in Iceland, in profuse solid liquid and gas forms at all times. Iceland in fact is the only place where the mid-Atlantic ridge juts above the water line, so it’s a geologist’s wet dream, spewing and sputtering and bursting at the seams. That is where new land is oozing out and spreading the continents apart. There are places where you can see that graphically. I’m more interested in the movements of the sun and moon. When we landed there a month ago a fresh snow had just fallen, so it was pretty surreal. Accordingly the sky was pretty cloudy that day, so it was hard to fix the positions of the sun, but it didn’t seem so weirdly dark, just like a very grey day for about six hours. They’re on GMT, so the timing seemed strange, too.
So the return trip started off uneventfully enough. I showed up early at the Marseille train station to catch the TGV to Paris. The station is not closed off from the tracks so it’s pretty cold, but not as bad as my arrival, raining like hell. The only heat are a few vertical space heaters that people crowd around till done, kind of like human Doner kebabs turning from red to brown. What is that stuff, anyway, mock leg of lamb? It tastes OK, so I’ll reserve judgment. The TGV runs like clockwork, over five hundred miles in three hours fifteen minutes. It’s like a plane taking off that never really leaves the ground. All in all, it’s not a bad deal for the buck, just enough time to pause and reflect before the fast rewind from Paris back to the US. So it’s all over but the Visa bill, or is it? The flight to Iceland and the connection there went smooth enough, down from the sunny skies on to snow-bound landscape, parallel realities that have co-existed since time immemorial. Skies are usually sunny at 35,000 feet, unless it’s night time. Down below it’s different. We occupy a thin stratum of habitability here in the troposphere, where solids and liquids and gases can coexist and light breaks into a full spectrum unknown and unknowable five miles up or five miles down.
For some reason I got a window seat on the final leg from Reykjavik to JFK. I don’t know why. I almost always get the aisle, the faster to make my connection. \After we took off, the area around Iceland was cloud bound for more than an hour, ho hum. I never got to see the northern lights either. Fortunately I saw them my first hour in Fairbanks. I need to see them again. We connected. It’ll have to wait. Then the clouds broke below. The water looked strange, like cottage cheese, the homemade kind, not pasteurized, where the liquid has separated. It must be ice, little wavelets frozen into lumps and ridges. We’re moving into a different part of the Atlantic, out of the Gulf Stream’s soothing waters that keep England green at latitudes that delight the polar bears in Canada. The ice thickens, not because of anything happening to it, but because we’re moving closer… to what? I look up and there is a massive ridge of ice on the horizon, but not horizontal. It’s vertical, cold and erect in a permanent salute to a higher power. I break my gaze long enough to check the flight map on the video screen. Oh my God! It’s Greenland! While the rest of the crowd turns their attention to the opening credits to Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Magorium’ or some such Hollywood fantasy, I watch as the wall of ice comes nearer and nearer, transfixing me in the process.
I was not prepared for what came next any more than I was prepared for what came in Mali. We proceeded to fly directly over the southernmost corner of Greenland and some of the most ruggedly beautiful landscape I have ever seen in my like, the world’s largest island, distantly related to Antarctica, unspoiled by the machines and machinations of man, virgin landscape proud and defiant. Only Antarctica itself could have been more comely, but I haven’t been able to justify a Buenos Aires to Melbourne flight yet. I will. Imagine what a flyover of Greenland or Antarctica would cost should you want to purchase such! In a word, the cost would be prohibitive, and that would be low altitude and high risk. This was the bird’s eye view from seven miles up where the troposphere pauses before becoming stratosphere and I myself pause in deep reverence to something much larger than me and my silly mental feedback. If there is a God, then He looks a lot like Greenland, solids subliming into gases, patiently waiting their turn until summer when they can get liquid again, warm wet and wild. I gaze spellbound as the plane continues on into the sunset; leaving Iceland at 5pm and landing in New York at 6pm, the whole trip is in sunset. Nobody seemed to notice. It’s almost as if nothing had really happened. I know differently. I’ve seen something you don’t normally see, unless you’re an airline pilot, and not likely even then. Greenland is the opposite of the northern lights, solid and forbidding, the perfect husband to Aurora’s electric mood swings, they making love over the northern landscape where humans don’t dare to tread, not lightly at least. The trip has had its epiphany at the last moment, and I’ve been thoroughly rebuked. Everything is NOT the same at 35,000 feet. It’s nice to be wrong. But it’s not really over yet, is it? Next week I go back to Thailand.
