01 July 2007

The Lights Below



The Dog is a more regular fellow than I. He was happy enough to se me just after Midnight, part of a complex canine maintenance plan that spanned two oceans and two continents. He knows nothing of jet lag, and was up again this morning just after six.

He was in the dark at the lower unit where my son had left him, before the sun went down and he went off to work the night shift at the pentagon.

 I was somewhere over the Four Corners of the American West, looking down. The landscape was brown and the mountains there were black-tipped on the ridges like an old boar.

I was still working though the implications of the Glasgow attack. The lay-over at LAX had been filled with the images of the Glasgow attack, and the fragmentary connections to other operations.

Gordon Brown, the new Prime Minister, had one of those awkward encounters with the global media. He has been waiting for ten years to be the top dog, and now he has it, along with three attacks and dozens more in the planning stages. I am quite happy to be a private citizen.

It seemed dreadfully amateurish and all the more ominous for that part. The connection with the London car-bombs that weren't seemed clear enough, and CNN helpfully displayed images of the tower at LAX across from where I had been sitting in the Admiral's lounge of the American Airlines red carpet facility.

It is never good to see yourself on television, or a place where you happen to be at that moment. At least that has been my experience, I don't know about you. At a minimum it means traffic problems, and no good can come from it. In this case, there appeared to be no earthly connection between the airports of North America and what was going on in the British Isles, except for one thing.

With all that aluminum hurtling around up there in the near stratosphere, it is altogether too apparent that we are now so intertwined that anything can be anywhere in less than a day.

Even me.

It had been nearly fourteen hours from Sydney, and on final, coming down from 37,000 feet, my ears did not want to join the rest of us. They finally cleared in an internal thunder clap, and dazed and slightly deafened, I managed to work my way through customs. I saw no particular panic in the lines, which made the news from Scotland that much more surprising. I had hoped for an update on Paris Hilton, her atonement, or something about Lindsey Lohan, who was in some sort of rehab crisis but the bad girls were driven off the news by the bad boys.

I had the luxury of a shower in LA to go along with the news, and a host of small delights. A phone that worked. Brusque Americans instead of bluff Aussies. It is an interesting variation on travel, the east-west thing.

Going out, we had chased the night. We captured it somewhere over Kentucky, and cloaked ourselves in it until the Austral dawn came up east of Sydney, darkness that lasted the length of a whole day.

Coming back we chased the light, rushing into it, north across the old watery battlefields at the Coral Sea, and over Palmya Island where those pesky murders happened so long ago. Still bright over most the broad Pacific, and morning in California, though I could not see the sparkle of the light on the vast blue below our wings. We had to have artificial dark to watch the movies. I was on a five-movie epic, the blinds pulled down tight.

In order, the Collapse of the West was captured by: The Shooter, The Dead Girl, Music and Lyrics to break the spell of dark mayhem, Shakespeare in Love, and Wild Hogs from Oklahoma across the east. As cinema the line-up was mostly appalling, and as the last film wound down to the credits, my seatmate pointed out into the first night and the twinkling lights of the East Coast. Flashes went off down below like miniature battles.

“Fourth of July weekend for a lot of folks,” I said, "must be early fireworks.” I asked him what he was coming back for, business or pleasure.

He said he was going to bury his father at Arlington. I told him it was a fine place, and where I intended to go, too, at some point.

If I had anything to say about it, that is, I amended, which was not necessarily the case. He nodded and looked at the explosions below that went on from Ohio right across West Virginia.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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