Looking Out: Wonder of it all lost at 35,000 feet

One cloudless day not long ago, my beloved wife, Marsha, and I were fortunate to fly from Seattle to Detroit. We were sadly unfortunate to have non-window seats over a wing but delighted nonetheless to know there was a wing. Wings on airplanes are very desirable but do occlude the view.

The airplane held 11 passengers who quickly stowed their trim luggage in the overhead bins and then immediately sat down.

It also held hundreds of people who stumbled along the aisleway as slowly as possible, pausing to remove and carefully fold sweaters and jackets even though it was hotter than a skillet, while stuffing suitcases twice the size of the overhead bins into said overhead bins before pausing an hour or so to survey their seats before at last putting fannies to the foam.

This agonizingly slow parade of humanity was doing its best given that they were offspring of snails, while the flight attendants, using an overloud public address system, yelled at them to hustle up and stow luggage in already-filled compartments so the airline could then brag about its on-time record.

Finally, the airplane moved out to the runway after waiting for a dozen other planes that were scheduled to take off at exactly the same time as ours. (My love for the airline industry is boundless.)

Looking up and down the airplane, I noticed that two-thirds of the people with window seats had closed the shades.

“The shades are closed,” I said to Marsha.

“It’s hot. It’ll keep things cooler in here,” she said to me. 

I nodded approval as I mopped my head with a big red bandana, part of my usual sophisticated wardrobe.

“In a few minutes, we’ll be up at 35,000 feet where it’ll be -70 degrees,” I noted as we took off into the west wind, over Puget Sound. “Then they’ll open them.”

They didn’t.

The TV monitor in front of my face was set to show a route map, so I knew that passengers with unshaded windows could see the Pacific Ocean as we made the turn to the east.

We flew eastward at over 500 mph, over the Coastal Ranges, the Cascades, the Rocky Mountains. deserts, foothills, rivers, lakes, tiny villages and big cities. We flew over the vast landscape of the heartland, the Great Plains.

Beneath us, the Mississippi River flowed southward, its silver ribbon certainly in plain view to those lucky people with un-shaded windows.

We flew over Chicago, Lake Michigan and the green, green land of our home state.

As for Marsha and me, we were stuck looking at maps on a screen. Sure, we could crane our necks and lean way over to see the windows in the rows in front of us. We did. What we saw were window shades and the screens on the seat backs displaying movies and bang-bang-shoot-’em-up computer games. Nary a sliver of a view of the United States of America and its fabulous continent. Not a hint.

Even as we bounced on the pavement at the airport in Romulus, none of the Window Shade Crowd opened their blinds to ascertain whether we had any hope of survival.

To their credit, it was clearly important to them to see the final credits of their shows. It was important to vaporize one more cartoon bad guy with a ray gun.

“Where has the sense of wonder gone?” I said to Marsha as we rolled to the gate, sitting in the gloom of shaded afternoon daylight.

“I think it is all kneaded into Wonder Bread,” she said.

Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Wonder of it all lost at 35,000 feet