Flight

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

At dusk the small birds – robins, finches, bluebirds and a sage thrasher – who have been at the bird bath suddenly scatter. In one fluid and decisive motion a cooper’s hawk lands on the bath, it’s strong yellow feet and steel grey talons grasp the edge without any adjustment. It sits on the bath for a few moments without drinking. Master of it’s element, the hawk then spreads and pulses it’s wings, lifts, turns and with the same confident motion is gone.

Every evening a dozen or more aircraft pass high overhead. They are six miles away, straight up. More often than not I’m outside watching them go by, amazed and thrilled by what I see.

I wonder what it would be like if I could somehow sit quietly in a chair out in the open at 35,000 feet while a 747 passed by. Six stories tall and four hundred thirty seven tons of aircraft passing at 567 mph. From a tiny speck far away, it would come, this aluminum behemoth, flash by, again to a tiny speck and be gone. What would the sound be if that of the engines could be deleted? Perhaps only a slight hiss.

A pressure wave builds before the aircraft as the atmosphere parts at the nose and airfoil’s leading edges. Once broken it slips around and comes together aft with a minimum of turbulence. The parting and gathering goes on and on, the work of sixty three thousand pounds of thrust. All this and four hundred passengers sip coffee, read, daydream or nap. In a matter of hours they could be on the other side of the planet as though nothing had happened. Remarkable.

Gordon Bunker