Just out of Minneapolis-St. Paul, we briefly seem to stall as if to shadow all the wispies drifting below. The mazes of cul-de-sacs have given way to assorted squares of barren fields, whiskered homesteads glued to odd corners like stamps. Our passing depicts a wide ribbon slipping backward and away or the silent terrain under an aimless canoe.
Now the sun cast a gray ghost of our plane down and to my right. It’s framed within the awkward porthole and sliding shade and backed by a rainbow halo and a ridiculous filigree of angels, filmy leagues camouflaged in ether, special recruits that mingle and network like secret agents: the FBI of the sky.
But when we soon tilt and ascend to the high status toward Denver, I know all this silliness will vanish. The angels will fade, becoming the thin air, and the fields will retreat to compose vast sheets of stamps and impose some perspective, that inevitable severance from everything that’s then re-imaginable.