June 30: Coming Home

The clouds stretched out below me, all silver-blue. Above, the sky was clear and the 737 rumbled down the Atlantic coast of Florida, maybe five miles or so offshore. I was coming home from North Carolina, returning after several days away. And I was ready. I watched out my window as the jet began to bank now. I could feel it in my body, a sharp turn by commercial aircraft standards, and then we were descending into all that silver and into that blue. For a moment, I could see nothing except the pale color in a haze immediately outside the window until the haze opened up abruptly into a dreamscape. There was no horizon, nothing beneath or overhead and nothing distinct either, only a swirl of majestic shape floating out beside me in variations of the very same silvery blue.

The clouds had blended into the sky in a way I'd rarely seen before. If I hadn't known I was flying, I easily could have imagined I was underwater somewhere, within the sea among a sifting fog of sunlight and white sand maybe. It was surreal, like being in a film. And it was beautiful, very beautiful.

It broke apart as abruptly as it had appeared when we dropped below the clouds and I could see clearly the dark blue ocean under me now. It was calm, not a single wave or whitecap visible, undulating gently. The water's surface was textured in a way that resembled the weave in a tightly knit fabric. As the jet approached the runway from the east, we passed almost directly over a ship that was trailing a broad wake - a large commercial fishing boat, as best I could tell. Then I noticed what seemed to be both charter boats and private boats crisscrossing a mile or two from land. The high-rise hotels and condos that line the shore north from Fort Lauderdale felt welcoming to me somehow. I watched them grow larger as the plane steadily neared the coast, losing altitude so that the ocean came closer and then I saw a tanker ship gliding into the channel toward Port Everglades. A thin tan strip of beach rolled away from me, outlining the lovely coast as far as I could see. We passed low over John U. Lloyd State Park, over the palmettos and mangroves, and then over the Intracoastal and the runway was in sight at last and the airport was spread around me and then one hard bump and we were down. I was home.