My Way Is The Highway

Betatakin: The Last Anasazi Frontier

Pat Joshevama asked me earnestly, “Are you disappointed?”

The slightly built but tough-as-a-gorkha park ranger of Betatakin was sitting with his elbows resting on doubled knees. His backpack lay next to him, a bottle of water half full balanced on a rock next to his feet.

I stood behind a juniper log that lay in my path. I was in a massive cave – about 400 feet tall and equally wide. A couple of hundred feet away the Anasazi farmer village of Betatakin rose out of the sandstone. The village itself as well have been the result of a few million years of erosion, so well it merged with the pink-orange rock of the cave.  I could smell the moist sweet of the Aspen and Fir trees below the ledge, trees that are virtually unknown so far down south. Overhead, the roof of the cave was crumbling. Several big cracks crisscrossed the sandstone, several slabs of stone ready to peel, poised to plummet.

Outside, the morning was young. Clouds crowded the sky, dropping the temperature to delicious seventies.

Was I disappointed?

Have you ever seen the landing gear of your flight deploy?

Today morning, as the flight banked steeply over the English channel, aligning to the Schiphol runway somewhere under the cloud cover, I heard the familiar groaning of the undercarriage detaching from its housing. As the hydraulics whined, I looked out of the port window and saw a shadow of the aircraft on the tufts of cloud. The landing gear was slowly extending. Ten years of flying and I have seen nothing like it!

Or may be I am a flying geek. I used to ask the airhostess to wake me up before we approached Logan airport because it was the only airport where I could see the landing strip before actually landing.

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Sunrise at 30,000 feet over Atlantic

Over the years, I have taken peculiar liking for specific seats on a flight.

For example, I always sit starboard on a mid-afternoon flight from the east coast to see Rainier bathed in evening glow. Or cascades, and more Rainier. 

I always sit port for a transatlantic flight to see the most amazing sunrise 500-700 miles from Amsterdam, 30,000 feet over atlantic

The photo, shot with an iPhone, is one random frame pulled from a 5-6 minute play of light. An hour away from Amsterdam, just before the stewardesses switch on the cabin lights to serve breakfast, I am woken up. As I take a sip of the fresh morning brew, a thin red line lights up the horizon. Right in front of my eyes, the band expands, incorporating new colors in the mix. Six, I count. Blood red, orange, Lemon yellow, ochre,fuchsia, pink: as if a rainbow tilted over and thudded on the horizon. The sky visibly lightens, itself a sea of shades of blue. Then a red dot appears, bloats and becomes a ring of fire. You can stare at it for a few seconds at a stretch and then it becomes sun.

I pull down the shade and try to catch a few more minutes of sleep, half the coffee still sloshing in the cellophane cup.