A lovely girl I know named Amy contributed some imagery to my morning today. It was great to wake up to. Wisdom about the properties of water and how it eventually comes back to it’s source.
So, I set out yesterday at about 4:30 am to go coast to coast, arriving by lunchtime. I love it.
I hopped a commuter flight to Boston first thing in the AM. I think commuter planes are built with me specifically in mind. Built by a sadistic person. Having visited the production plants in Japan where alot of these things are made, I know just what goes into them; short people. Everything was juuuuust too small.
A headache and some cramped legs later, we were taking off and i was chatting amiably with the young lawyer-to-be on my left. Noone would have called her a beauty queen but she had an engaging personality and a willingness to talk, which I capitalized on immediately.
We chatted about nearly everything, from international travels, to school, to books, and my love for lawyers (they beat traffic tickets). We were both catching the same flight to san francisco at the Logan airport in Boston. Her name was Amelia A*****.
then about halfway through the flight, Amelia yawns, turns away, puts in her headphones and simply ceases speaking. When we land at Logan Airport, she jumps up, rushes down the aisle as far as she can, and waits for the deplaning to begin.
I’m no rocket scientist, but I think I said something wrong. Though for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it would have been. No worries, though. I already ascertained that we were not sitting near one another on the next flight.
Anyone who has traveled with me knows I am pretty nonchalant about flights. I generally know what airline I am flying on, though not always. I usually know what hour of the day my flight leaves. Though that’s about as precise as I get. At RDU, I walked up to the gate as the guy yelled, “Last Call for passenger Nilson!” My timely arrival at my connecting gate at Logan airport was no less timely.
The flight to SF, I spent finishing a book called Emergency: This book could save your life. It’s the latest by one of my favorite recent authors: Neil Strauss. the book was a godsend and was exactly what I was looking for at this point in life.
Flying in to SFO, i was rapt, staring out the window. Seeing the water below, knowing it was the Pacific. It was West Coast water, and therefore better than any water I might encounter in NC. I felt warm and happy and excited to get back on the ground and back to a land where things seemed to make sense and I felt connected to the people around me.
The silently amiable guy to my right must have sensed what I was feeling, cuz he turned to look at me with a knowing grin on his face and nodded, before settling back in his seat to give me an unobstructed view of the water below.
The same adrenaline junkie friend of mine in NC that hooked me up with the battery for my laptop described something to me that I had seen, but never understood: ‘Blue Water.’
When you get far enough from the coast of any land mass, the bottom of the ocean falls far enough below that the algea and debris cease to come near the surface. This creates water I have rarely seen, and only on trans-oceanic flights. Water that is simply blue; perfectly, crystal blue. The water below me was not blue, but a sort of frothy coastal jade, but it looked beautiful to me.
I flow and crash and evaporate and rain back down, but eventually I come back here… to the Sea.
