The Deep Breath

It really hit me at about 11:30 last night. I’m going to Italy. No, seriously. I’m going to live in Italy for a month! I’m not just packing my bags for a few days’ stay – this is the real deal. In less than 24 hours from now, I’ll be around thirty thousand feet in the air off the coast of Greenland.

It *is* less than 24 hours from then, and I *am* around thirty thousand feet in the air on a reclining chair off the coast of Greenland. Thirty-seven thousand, to be exact. Wow. That’s really high. Like, if you took the Empire State Building and stood it on its end, it would take twenty-five of them to reach this high.

I’m technically supposed to be asleep right now, because it’s 3:30AM in Italian time, and I’m supposed to get my body on that schedule. No way. There’s too much excitement in the air. Since this plane is taking me to Frankfurt, the intercom comes on in German and English. The flight attendant is definitely German, not English.

Twenty minutes after my dad dropped me off at the Philadelphia International Airport, he called me on my cell phone. “Mommy says that they’re in the middle of a lightening storm with pouring rain, in Lancaster. Let’s hope it doesn’t come your way.” Twenty minutes later, “I stopped to eat in Exton, and the storm’s hit here already. You better get off the ground soon.” Before long, I could see a great grey cliff sweeping its way toward us. As I settled down into the vastness that is 17B, the rain was already spattering against the glass, but the stormy part of the storm hadn’t reached us yet, so our intrepid captain led us out onto the runway.

At last the engine shifted from a whine to a roar, and the rain turned from droplets into streaks. By the time our wheels lifted from the ground, the glass was covered with a thousand tiny rivers, scurrying furiously across my view of the Philadelphia skyline. Once we hit the clouds (and I was allowed to take out my camera), we were above the rain, and we entered an entirely different world.

Huge, billowy mountains flew by us – not just one big mass, but hundreds of great bunches and bundles of cloud. We would burst through one and find ourselves in a great cave dim, an unknown realm of misty, grey twilight. We sped through immense caverns, sometimes lit from above by a fading blue sky, sometimes roofed by rolling hills of cotton. The plane would break through a cloud, we would catch a glimpse of a vast plain, a single spire walled by heavy cliffs, and then we’d plunge back into white nothingness. How many beautiful, peaceful worlds me missed! How many will never even be seen by human eyes?

At least we rose even above even the tallest cloud-mountains, and as the sun finished setting, we caught up with the lightening. By this time, there wasn’t light enough to make out one cloud from another, except when the lightening struck. For an instant, one valley or hill would be filled with light and all of its curves sharp against the sky. Then a moment later, nothing but a dark blue sea.

Now the light has all but gone, and the horizon cuts a blue line through darkness. It’s quiet and still, and it makes me think of the photos I’ve seen of earth from outer space. A journey to a different world.

Here goes