It rained early this morning, and while it's still winter, it smells different than the snow, and sometimes, but not always, of the sea. Which made me think of Sydney which has a much stronger relationship with the sea than New York City.
Right before I left to go down there, it occurred to me that the book I wanted to read on the airplane was Cyteen. I didn't know why, and I decided against it because it's a book on rereads that has made me angry and intense and enhanced my least friendly (although potentially most useful) characteristics. Ultimately, it didn't matter one way or the other, the flights were for the most part far too bumpy and cramped for me to even open a book, much less focus on the printed word without vomiting.
The westward flight to Australia is different from the eastbound route which those in Europe take. They pass over a great deal of land, and while that last leg from somewhere in Asia is over a great empty expanse of water, it's not as long, or as stark, as the westbound route.
Either way, it's a coveted destination for flight attendants and on my flight the attendants were young and giddy. Without much prodding they explained that the industry veterans get the flights to Oz, and you've got to have twenty years in service to even have a chance, but with only five years and eight years, they'd gotten the flight over the holiday season, and it meant a couple of glorious days in Australia before having to return to the States. Another passenger asked if they do anything special for New Year's on the flight and they said no, and shrugged, saying the international dateline made it too difficult.
It's just gotten dark when you leave Los Angeles, and that dark stays with you for most of the flight. You can watch on the map they project up between movies where you are over the vast empty ocean, and you can see that there are a few small island groups, but mostly, there's a plane, on a patch of blue and numbers telling you how high the plane is (high! I've never been on a flight that went above 39,000ft before, and this one was up at 43,000 for a while), its speed, and the temperature outside the cabin. Although you can feel nothing but vague vibration and occasional turbulence, the numbers are frightening and beyond comprehension, and the display chart is something you're unused to as it's not used for domestic or even most European flights. And when you look out the window, it's just black, and no matter how long you stare, that beacon in the desert, Las Vegas, never materializes to make it better. After three hours it seems weird, six hours disturbing, and eventually you get used to it, and Australia becomes like another planet that you accept you may or may not ever get to. Your mind, which learnt to be afraid of the dark when our ancestors first crawled out of the ocean, convinces you that the earth is flat and that you have sailed beyond its boundaries. The cabin is cold, the screen tells you it's -50C outside the plane, and you wonder if you're just freezing slowly on your way to Titan.
You fall asleep for a few hours, and wake to more food. You've never been fed so much or so often on any airplane ever, and you wonder if it's to stave off boredom or hostility, or if they're drugging the whole passenger compliment in hopes of making the three year journey to Mars more tolerable.
Finally it's dawn, and there's still nothing below you. With the cloud cover, you can't even see the sea, but figure you must be landing soon. But you're not... there's four hours left, and dawn seems to go on forever, hurting your eyes and making it impossible to sleep.
This is when the passengers start talking to each other, talking about why they're going to Australia. The stories start casually and get more personal. These are trips people have been saving their entire lives for -- retirees on three month tours of Australia and New Zealand, young Aussies returning home after their year trip around the world, honeymoons. Finally, finally, there is land to see out the window, and people start crying, lots of them, soft gentle, silent crying, because they have waited their whole lives for this moment of discovery that the earth isn't flat even if all the maps have always said "here be monsters."
Sydney, aside from being a harbour city, a seaside city, is also a city in the bush. And as you land, and you see a landscape of red brick and dark green plants covered with tenacious dust, you wonder if Australia will be beautiful at all. It seems ugly, that first glimpse as you speed along the tarmac. And it seems primitive -- a colony, not in the sense of England and the Commonwealth, but in the sense of an outpost of human civilization here at the far edge of our world, or perhaps, on the near edge of another.
But you smile anyway, you look at it with so much pride, that you've loved this place sight unseen, that maybe all the saving or the daydreaming has somehow gone into making it real, like it were Tinkerbell, or maybe a play with particularly bad cardboard sets. She's a miracle, and instantly a woman whispering to you her true names.
Apparently all of this is normal; it's the flight people cry on, the stewards told a few particularly embarrassed people. In a few days, you will get the rhythm of the place, you'll feel comfortable and urbane. There will be less dust and red brick than you thought, and lots of beauty that's easy to see.
But it's that prideful possessive sense over the strange beauty not just of the place, but of the journey, that makes reading Cyteen the sort of thing that makes sense on that flight, because I think of Ari -- all those moments on the planes, staring out the windows at the strange plants in the strange and beautiful new world, that she owns not just with money, but with flesh, and you can imagine it, know it even, after a trip like that.
A few weeks into my trip, I went to the Powerhouse Museum to see the Lord of the Rings exhibit. While examining the snack options in the cafe, I noticed a series of signs, alerting us all to a special opening of the museum's theater for live reports from Titan via Huygens. I looked down, and children were tackling each other at my knees, people were drinking coffee and families were marching down the ramp to the theater for the news from another world. They seemed proud, and full of smiles for the serendipity of being there for the event, the landing, the news. And I knew those strange, silent tears of the flight again (as I did many times in Sydney) with the realization that every moment of my delirium and fantasy as I travelled over the arc of the world had also been true.
We are fierce creatures, risen out of fierce and teaming seas and harbouring memories of so many things our race has yet to achieve.
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