Flying is often a misery these days: huge, unnavigable terminals, long waits, flights jammed with the annoying and the malodorous. But flying home from Boston this week was pretty sweet. Ten folks in a little turboprop, flying home to a flyspeck of an airport tucked between the mountains.
Flying into Lake Clear
As we fly at ten thousand feet over New England
skimming the top of a shining white cloudscape,
the sun, invisible to those below, blares out from
the southwest as it falls slowly down to evening.
We are only a handful, including the pilot,
like riding a family station wagon across the sky.
All white below, all blue above: a simpler world
than the one behind us or the one before us.
For the moment, we float above all that, bobbing
on a cotton sea, carrying no cares, having left
them below. We are flying in between our lives
and will only take them up again once we land.
No one talks above the roar of the turboprops,
but lean cheeks against the plexiglass instead,
eyeing swells and troughs, rifts and cliffs of cloud.
We could be anywhere, be heading anywhere.
Until the clouds flatten, thin, and break into shreds,
revealing Whiteface trailing a veil of fog, Lake Placid
shining in the last of the sun, the Adirondacks, bristling
with pine below granite summits, ringed by dark water.
This is the way we come back, dropping down the air
onto a single runway at Lake Clear, taxiing the tarmac
toward a tiny rustic terminal with one lone gate. There,
we take up our baggage and go home our separate ways.
Mel Elliot our Multigraphics repair man was from Lake Clear.