FLIGHTS OF FANCY

The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.¹

I wrote this, as you will see, back in 2005 while flying to Calgary to first visit my cousin and family then to attend a convention for a business I was then involved in and selling their products. It is fanciful, but it was what I actually imagined as I looked on the view around and below the plane. I have also incorporated some of this in the novel I hope to publish soon. I hope you enjoy the imagery.

WestJet flight 558, London to Calgary. Departure: 7:50 a.m., Monday August 8, 2005. The day is warm and clear. We have a good take-off and are airborne on schedule. I watch for a few moments as the plane steadily rises, then take out my book to fill the time. Part way through the morning I take a notion to record descriptions of what I see from my window seat.

Amazingly, I love flying, even though throughout my life I have had to grapple with a fear of heights. My heart starts to do flip-flops if I climb past the third rung of a ladder. Getting near the railing on a balcony beyond the third floor is out of the question. If I manage to get through the door at all, I remain all but glued to the wall while my stomach flutters. Looking through the window on the eighteenth floor of a Vancouver hotel years ago was well-nigh an impossibility. I was overcome by a strong sensation of falling. Yet seated by the window in a plane I remain unaffected, even at its highest altitude, and feel no fear. I cannot explain it. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, I have not, until today, had the opportunity to fly for many years. The last time was my flight to Calgary in 1981 when I joined with a small group of travelers for a bus tour through Alberta and British Columbia. My trip this time is partly business, and partly a visit with relatives. I am enjoying this flight and am anticipating the week ahead with great delight.

Beautiful are the heavens

Looking down, I see land divided into well-defined shapes, some perfect rectangles, some squares within squares, others strangely irregular. Deep green contrasts with wheat color and steel blue. Muddy brown rivers snake onward, cutting fields into uneven portions. Roads, some straight as a die, others making softer contours through the landscape, lead to places unseen. The few buildings my eyes encounter appear to be many miles apart. Once in awhile, a city with countless buildings is splashed across the scenery. Roofs reflect the brilliant sunlight. Regions of swirling color appear, breaking up the monotony of geometric shapes. It is like a well-laid-out patchwork quilt made from dull earthy colors, with stains from some dark liquid spilled carelessly over the surface.

One area resembles tree trunks with bare branches, arms outstretched, reaching into the quilt patches and looking much like rivulets of dark-colored ink trickling from a large spill as the quilt is hung up. Inky blots of color over a smooth, very flat surface make a curious sight.

Above, in the distance, a haze of cloud with no definite outline hovers over the quilted land. Like

a glacier-blue lake at winter’s end, mounds of a slushy mixture of bright white snow and ice are

Unusual shapes and design

scattered randomly over the celestial landscape. The whole panorama sparkles in the sun as it does on ice floes breaking up in the arctic spring. In the distance, the white horizon stands out in striking contrast to the clear, deep blue of the sky above. Closer, the clouds look like wads of the soft white polyester fiber used to fill quilts and craft projects. Other cloud forms become a wide stretch of desert rippled with dunes, the difference being that the sand in the sky is white with blue-grey shadows rather than the golds and tans of a real desert.

Suddenly we are flying over a soft sea of fog. No sharp margins are discernible, except at the horizon, which is a knife-edged line between deep azure sky and the grayish-white blur of mist. As far as the eye can see (how far is it between plane and earth?) stretch the snowfields, solid-looking and flat except where small hills and, here and there, larger mountains of cloud mass protrude above the surface. The ever-present celestial horizon sports a lower band of delicate turquoise with a gradually deepening blue rising high up into the atmosphere. I expect to see polar bears, dog sled teams and igloos scattered over the acres of snowy wilderness until, waking momentarily from my reverie, I realize that we are some 40,000 feet above the earth and this snow is only a vaporous accumulation of minute water droplets and ice pellets suspended high above the earth.

Huge puffs of grayish-white clouds now loom up below, broken at intervals by menacing dark grey crevasses, unfathomed voids ready to swallow anything that comes their way. Far below, geometric fields are once again visible between masses of cloud sweeping past the window. Patches of pale yellow light appear scattered over green and brown fields where the sun manages to peek through the cloud, reluctantly illuminating the ground. Here I see brighter greens in the squares and rectangles.

We are beginning to descend. Buildings, though still tiny, are now quite obvious. Several fields are dotted with what, from this perspective, looks amusingly like a meadow full of toadstools. Larger patches of sun light the fields here, and clouds are now above rather than below us as we continue our descent. Now that the toadstools are closer, their identity is revealed–bales of hay. We are quickly descending into Calgary, a city sprawled over miles of gently rolling land. We have now touched down safely on the runway. I turn my watch back two hours to Calgary time and look forward to the coming week.

1 Psalm 19:1

I am sorry I did not think to take photos through the window of the plane. It would have been much easier to understand my descriptions. But I did not, so have to make do with photos I have taken of other skies which are probably not quite as interesting.

I do hope you enjoyed my tour of the skies. Watch for the next part–the Return Flight.

Thank you so much for stopping by. I do appreciate it. And I would love for you to leave a comment in the box below to let me know what you thought. If you are not already following me, please click on the “Follow” button at the top to get e-mails for each new post. I hope you are having a wonderful week. God bless you.