W. Scott Olsen - Prairie Sky: A Pilots Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude

Walking Chaucer

Here is a question:

What must the angels think of the earth?

Imagine, for just a moment, the leap of their arrival. In the moment before, they are ethereal, weightless, timeless and light, the moral sparks of eternity. In the moment after, they have atomic weight. They have mass. They have capillaries and tympanum and knees. They have synapses that do and do not fire. When they inhale, they smell juniper or sage.

What must that moment be like, I wonder. To come suddenly into a body, into a physical world, and then be faced with Everest, Atlantic, Sequoia, Rift. Bearing whatever message, do they tremble in front of a prairie thunderstorm? What sense do they make of le vent rouge? What must that first gasp mean? Is the first emotion of the arrival humility? Fear? Awe? Gratitude?

We live on an unsteady planet.

Every day forward from the last Big Bang, the material that is us has been moving. Light-years in microseconds at first. Then slightly cooler. Then slightly slower. The gas cooled to dust. Gravity, the weakest force in the universe, arrested everything. Dust collected onto other dust. Stars became stars. Galaxies lit up the void. Planets got themselves together. The whole inexorable dance. Dark matter. Radio waves. Creation versus Entropy. The tug and pull of being.

Movement became everything. Animate means alive and it means able to move. Temperature is a measure of movement. Absolute zero, the coldestpossible temperature, is the point where all molecular motion stops. The hottest temperature is the come hither look of the beautiful other.

Our landscape seems stable, the grocery store remains where we left it yesterday, but we know it is not. Underneath our highways, our lawns, our soccer fields and oceans, we live on a sea of molten rock, a fluid in motion, thrusting and strike-slipping our tectonic plates around the globe. The air above us roils from one season to the next. Tides rise and fall. Sparks turn to fire and the wholesale exchange of matter into energy.

The magnetic poles wander around their landscapes, sometimes as much as eighty-five kilometers in one day. More than once, the whole magnetosphere has slipped the whole way round. More slowly, but inevitably, the planet wobblesthe geographic North Pole points toward Polaris, and then does not. The earth orbits. The earth spins. Every middle school student learns about the Coriolis effect and the deflected paths of storms.

Our language is filled with the ways the earth resists the stationary. Mud slide. Rock slide. Downpour. Torrent. Tremor. Cataract. Conflagration. Inferno. Blaze. Tornado. Hurricane. Gust front. Blizzard. Earthquake. Fault. Riptide. Whirlpool. Maelstrom. Volcano. Flood. Cold front. Storm. Tsunami. Cyclone. Monsoon. And our stories carry the tremulous weight of the gods.

In Norwegian, Tordenvr, literally thunderweather, or better as thunderstorm, is the sound of Tor (in English, Thor), the god of thunder, and his hammer. Thunder is rare in Norway, and the sound of it rattles marrow.

In the Caribbean, Jurakn was a god of the Tanos, who lived on what are now Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, the Leeward and Windward Islands. He had a temper, like Zeus and Thor. The Spaniards heard about him and called him huracn and from there hurricane.

In the book of Job, God speaks from a whirlwind. Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now gird up your loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you instruct Me! Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

In West Africa, the Hausa people refer to a particular wind as iska zahi, the hot wind. Iska, which means wind, also means ghost. It also means spirit. It means the movement of the air has meaning.

Beyond the gods, this same Harmattan wind is the source of the famous le vent rougethe red wind. Red quartz from the African deserts is carried aloft, and then north, and then falls in rain across southern Italy, France, and Spain. There are stories about rain gutters along the streets of Marseille running maroon after rain that blows in from the Sahara across the Mediterranean. There are stories of le vent rouge turning the snowfields of Scandinavia pink.

There is a proverb in Japanesea list of the four most fearful things: jishin, kaminari, kaji, oyaji. Earthquakes, lightning, fires, and father.