Airplane Mode

I’m staring out the window and pondering the 30,000 ft view. Not the business jargon cliché, but the actual small rectangle of creation visible from the cramped economy cabin seat in an Air Alaska flight from Newark to San Diego.

It’s been a long covid while, and the airport experience still feels understaffed, harassed and strained. In-flight service has been curtailed to pre-ordered packets of cheese and crackers, and everything is late as a matter of course.

But the familiar rush of air against cabin walls and the slow scrolling sharp green ridges of Appalachia are soothing my jangled nerves. My wife leans against my shoulder as we settle in for 7 hours of airplane mode.

Truth be told, I have been flying cross-country and looking at this view since before the internet was invented. Back in those days, likely as not, I would have been reading Peter Senge and glancing out the window at intervals to process a particularly pithy or perceptive passage.

This time no book. Just the view and the time.

The landscape flattens to gently rolling farmland flecked with scattered cumulus cloud-shadows. All those scattered farmhouses and spider web of small roads. We must be over Ohio, or is it Indiana, or perhaps already Illinois?

It’s 2023 and I reflexively pull out my phone and open Google Maps. The small blue dot shows my location as somewhere near Zaro’s Family Bakery in Terminal B. Then suddenly — amazing — I’m in Circleville south of Columbus! Even in airplane mode I must be getting satellite reception. Wild.

And now the little dot is zipping across the map, like the shadow of some bird of prey, heedless of roads, rivers or train lines. It’s mesmerizing. I zoom out, and the dot slows to a stop, placing me on a great-circle route between New Jersey and southern California. I zoom in and truck stops, hotels, and fast food joints flicker past at 575 mph.

Is that the Mississippi shining like a national guitar? St Louis! Are they open yet at Fergie’s Bar & Restaurant…

Legend has it that in the early days of cartography, the monarch of a small kingdom commissioned a map of the country on a 1:1 scale. This map would be perfectly accurate and would allow him to know everything there was to know about his domain.

The project proved impractical, however, when the map was first unrolled. The farmers objected that the paper blocked the sun, and the king found it more expedient to simply use the country as its own map!

It occurs to me that Google has revived this ancient dream of overlaying reality with annotation, and I find the experience both exhilarating and exhausting.

There is something in me that just wants to pull up a barstool at Fergie’s and breathe in the smell of toasted ravioli and soak up the local chatter and the muted clink of honkytonk on the juke box.

Some day I’d like to use the country as its own map. Just get in the car and point it to the west. Leave my phone behind.