three stages of matter

In the year that I’ve been in the air I can’t help but look around when I’m outside and wonder if this day would be a good day for flying. I think about the ceiling, the wind, the rain, whatever the sky has to dish out. Sometimes I spy small aircraft over my head and look up with envy.

Sunday morning, after what seemed days of wild weather I was almost amazed to feel the stillness in the air. It hung about me, damp and cold, to be sure, but still. The bare trees were motionless against the high white clouds. It suddenly occurred to me that the main wonder of flying was to glide suspended in the third state of matter – gas.

We spend most of our lives weighed down by gravity to the solid ground, and I bore witness to this as my feet were falling one after another on the gravel of the Snoqualmie Valley trail.

I have been buoyant on boats and I have waded in rivers while fishing and felt the pressure and current of the water around my body. But in the air, when I flew on the last day of the last year in that very still air, air like today’s, I was balanced by speed, atmosphere and the 36 foot wing span of the Cessna and found myself turning the plane (by the graciousness of my host) first right and then left, my tentative fingers on the yoke and feet on the rudder peddles.

My epiphany came when I flew crookedly in a straight line over the snow dusted ridge east of Issaquah with the towers rising up among the trees like toothpicks below me. Then as we flew over the crest and the land dropped below – I saw the tiny jewel of Snoqualmie Falls dug out of the earth with a teaspoon on my right.

After flying around a cloud, I headed for the man-made topography of Bellevue and I saw the layers of the world – the air I was in and the water of the lakes embedded in the land below me.

At the end of my walk Sunday the sky lowered and wet snow began to fall and I sensed something of the complexity of matter and its phases and what a complicated and layered  planet we live on – and I was profoundly aware that I had traveled on the solid, liquid and now gas.

This must be the intoxication of aviation.