Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
These Wonderful Scourges of Modern Life
I like contrails. Taking walks on clear summer days, when the heavens are deep blue, I love to tip my head back and watch aircraft passing overhead, leaving their long, white traces against the blue expanse. Someone, a pilot, explained to me that it was exhaust, up there so high that it freezes. The exhaust looks like clean, billowing cotton collecting behind the plane. I wonder how many miles of trail I’m seeing, wondering whether my distance from the plane is deceiving my eyes, that a space I could frame with my fingers is actually far longer than it looks from the ground.
I love planes. I like how sometimes you hear their hum before you see them. Their sound is not logical. Then you crane your neck and finally, you spot the tiny machine far off in the sky. It may be toward evening, the sun glinting off the metal. I think about how that craft is full of orderly rows of people, way up there, seats bolted to the floor, who are at this instant talking, reading, watching movies. The plane’s metal belly separates their feet from great heights beneath them and the wooded landscape below where a pair of eyes might be watching their progress.
I think too how they are probably closing their blinds against the evening sun at that moment. And how when they land, they will stroll into our airport having been in Salt Lake City just a couple hours before. Are they amazed at that miracle? Do they remember how other generations left their families behind when they moved, and how after their plodding months-long journeys, only slow letters would bring them news of home?
I love to watch airplanes take off and land, imagining what it would be like to have Jefferson or Franklin standing with me, glimpsing the future. You thought hot air balloons were something? (The Apostle Paul used to be my traveling companion, but once he got over his initial amazement, he would be right back on message. There were more important things on his mind than the advancement of civilization.)
I like to be in a landing plane, when I’m not too nervous, watching the buildings and streets come closer, the cars looking exactly like toy vehicles parked neatly in rows or trundling down little streets, turning near tiny buildings. Below me is not Salt Lake or Denver, but a miniature of a real town, where people play at going to work and doing errands at their sweet little to-scale destinations. How neatly the roads are laid out from here, in straight grids or occasional graceful curves. There are pale painted complexes, green tennis courts, blue swimming pools, cul-de-sacs. Then quickly objects grow larger as the plane descends, and the cars moving parallel to us on the freeways are almost big as life, boxy building tops coming up to meet us. The pilot, up there in front of us surrounded by controls, impresses me with his precision, maneuvering the giant bird safely to the ground. Then we bump down and race along the runway.
Speaking of cul-de-sacs, I love planned neighborhoods. I like how clean they are, with tidy green lawns and sometimes a small shade tree in the yard. I like how the houses are uniformly pleasant, the same and yet not all exactly the same. I like how these neighborhoods can be silent on summer evenings, how you can take a walk for several blocks on the neat sidewalks and see only the occasional neighbor out watering the plants, or children circling their driveways on training wheels. I love garage sales in these housing complexes–they always have books, educational playthings, and valuable household items. They are uniformly friendly and interesting so that chatting with them is half the fun of a garage sale outing.
I love city development. Modern skyscrapers are beautiful. I love improved areas of the city, with shops, theaters, and pleasant patio restaurants, new and hopeful. I like proud, ornamental arches over freeways, proclaiming the names of the cities. I love glassed-in walkways over streets connecting buildings. Long, graceful escalators are impressive. I love parks and waterfronts and planned adventures. I love careful landscaping. I like big shopping malls with gleaming floors, full of shoes, clothes, and interesting what-nots that I can afford. I love big chain bookstores with a generous bargain books section.
I love modern roads everywhere, even through the wilderness. To think of the churned-up muck and horse poop people used to travel through, and how limited the roads were, how hard it was to get around. And now this, smooth tracks crisscrossing the country, taking astonishing time and labor, materials and machines to build. I love pulling out from a side road to a wide open one, how the tires crunch at the turn and then the car switches to a fresh speed, gears changing and wheels whirring. Only yesterday I climbed into a cushioned car seat and traveled over a hundred miles to visit a family member. It was lousy weather, but we were warm and dry, drinking coffees, chatting, and listening to music. It took us two and half hours to show up at my brother’s apartment fresh for the day ahead together.
I love the good food the roads bring. Grocery stores are a miracle, with their mounds of colorful produce attractively arrayed, taking up a quarter of the store. Way up north here, in the middle of winter, there are apples, bananas, cilantro, onions, lime, tomatoes, and papayas. We can cook whatever we like, even ethnic meals. And there are cheeses, meats, breads, spices, nuts–anything you can imagine–stocked in just one grocery store of six in our isolated little town. It’s not perfect food, it’s not pure, most of it churned out in large scale and the growing process tinkered with. But I have little to complain about, simply heaping my cart with good things, paying for what I want, loading and unloading it a couple of times before going on with my day focusing on satisfying life endeavors far beyond mere survival.
Published in General
In 2011, my husband and I flew back from France with a group of private pilots flying together. This is a photo of contrail shadows on the snow in Greenland. One of the pilots ahead of us decided to do a circle (just because he could). I thought it made a cool picture.
When I was growing up in the late 1950’s, model railroading, particularly the HO gauge, was very popular. While flying with my Dad in a small plane, you sometimes thought it was a model rather than real.
As a pilot in the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Young Eagles Program, I’ve flown close to 600 children between 8 – 18 years old. Most of them are not familiar with model railroading, but like you, I always remind them about the people down there.
Young Eagles in the background waiting to fly
Missouri from 20,000 feet on a December night
Snowstorm over Kentucky from 35,000 feet.
Or if too much alcohol has been consumed, rows of disorderly people.
I think of exactly that kind of thing myself. Think of the ordinary things we take for granted – like microwave ovens – that would have baffled the brightest minds from a couple hundred years ago. And you can buy a used one at a garage sale for $20. It makes me wonder how far we will go 200 years from now. Cities on the moon? Enormous space stations scattered throughout the solar system, made from materials mined from asteroids?
Very nice essay, Sawatdeeka.
Ha, ha. I meant the rows were orderly, not necessarily the people.
When I was a lad we could see the B-36’s and, later, the B-52’s refueling high above our Northern Wisconsin farm. I don’t know where they were from, or where they were going, but I always loved to see them.
This was lovely, lovely, lovely! Thank you for sharing this reverie of travel and the blessings of modernity.
In fact (if you don’t mind – I’ll attribute it:) I’m going to print this up to pass to a few people.
What a coinky-dink– I saw a loooong white jet trail a few days ago, the first I’ve seen in a great while. Seems to me I saw a lot more of them when I was a kid–but maybe I just had more time to gaze at the sky.
Planned communities? In our state they are referred to as “mini-governments” and increasingly, people have no choice but to accept this kinda “government by contract”. But okay, I see what you mean about ordre et beauté/ luxe, calme, et voloptué..
Grocery stores! Or rather, supermarkets! Yes! People don’t realize that this system didn’t just grow, it was invented. Great warehouses collect the comestibles and produce, and trucks dole it all out, three days worth as we all learned during Y2K. Strawberries in January! This is one of our greatest accomplishments , and, it seems to me, one of our greatest vulnerabilities.
In general, though, you are so right about the many, many comforts and luxuries of our civilization. You are to be congratulated on commemorating these amenities while we still have them! So far we have come close to the precipice looming over privation and chaos, but never gone over. But it could happen and likely will:
“Comfort, content, delight,
The ages’ hard-fought gain–
They vanished in a night.
Only ourselves remain.”
—Kipling
Great timing. I was watching Blazing Saddles last night and caught glimpse of contrails in the sky in one of the scenes. I don’t know how I noticed it but then was distracted for the rest of the flick wondering how many historic movies have them in the background. My buddy said that Ben Hur and Dances With Wolves both have em’. I hope I don’t spend the rest of my movie watching life being distracted by looking for contrails like some sort of nut job!
Oh boy.
My mind needed a break from gorgeous writing this Ricochet Friday morning, after reading about the milking-barn in winter, and now this. You are digging around in my memories and sentiments as if they were your own.
How did you get past security?
We live in a magnificent time, @Sawatdeeka!! I’m pretty sure that there are many who, having only lived in this era and this land of luxury, don’t realize how lucky they are.
I too love airplanes and always try to spot them at the end of the contrail. Although we live on an old farm about 35 miles away, we see many planes on their way into or out of Dulles International Airport. Sometimes, we are directly in the flight path. My wife and I used to wonder where they were going and like you, how high and far away they were. I found an App (FlightRadar24) which runs on an iPhone or iPad which has two modes.
In the first mode, it shows a map of the area centered on your location with symbols of all the airplanes in flight around you. If you tap one, it tells the type of plane, the airline and flight number, departure and destination airports, speed, height, take off time and landing time. For most flights, it also shows the track.
For some planes, such as small private planes, you get less information, but every now and then, I see what is obviously a student pilot flying out of one of the smaller airports. Once I saw a plane clearly flying some sort of grid pattern- probably mapping. My wife and I now guess destinations for the larger (and louder ) planes. Sometimes, it is the West coast, but sometimes Narita (Japan), or Paris or Dubai.
The other mode which requires the compass and level to be calibrated lets you aim the camera at the plane as if you were going to take a picture. The screen shows the planes in the view you are looking at and labels them with a summary of the flight information. If you tap the plane, you get the same information as the first mode.
I guess it is not as poetic as just enjoying the contrails, but we really enjoy the extra information
Wow. Thank you for the information. I will certainly track this one down. I would love to have a summary of airplane destination, etc. Woo hoo!
Go right ahead! Thank you, Trink.
There are three major ways the Air Traffic Control (ATC) tracks aircraft. This might help explain the difference in information you mentioned:
The newest, called ADS-B, relies on each aircraft to send messages that state “I am here, this is my ID, I’m traveling in this direction, etc.” Both the ATC and other aircraft can use this information to avoid potential mishaps.
The oldest method uses an aircraft transponder to respond to radar with a code and the pressure height above sea level. The ATC communicates via radio to the aircraft it controls. For small aircraft not using ATC tracking, our code is 1200, and we are responsible for “see and be seen” with other aircraft
Another way is to use the “primary” radar returns from aircraft without ADS-B or a transponder, like my aircraft in comment #2 above. I also follow “see and be seen.”
Thank you, Trink. Oddly, I thought of you as I wrote it. I’ll often mentally target my post toward a specific Ricochet member, and that member will show up in the comments. Yes, you are a frequent sawatdeeka commenter (which I so appreciate). But even a member with whom I rarely associate will come out of the woodwork when I aim the post at him or her. Strange, huh?
@vectorman – thanks for the details. Last year, I played with a Software defined radio that let you program details like frequency. There are some applications that let you use that to track the ADS-B. I didn’t get very far with it, but may take another look
The ones I’ve experienced didn’t have many rules. I hate the idea of rule-bound communities. Although my parents lived for years in a condo complex where you weren’t allowed to park a bunch of cars on the street, etc. I had to appreciate the peace and beauty in that place.
I’ve reflected often on those vulnerabilities. I think our system is more fragile than we realize. It’s entirely possible for truck and train passage to get cut off from this part of the States. If so, we’d need to rely on locally grown food, deer, and bunny rabbits. We’re fortunate to have too many deer around our place, but hunger would soon bring townspeople (as long as the gas held out) to cull our woods of whatever they could find to eat. I foresee conflicts as landowners would fight for the hunting rights on their property.
Many people garden out here, but a.) the growing season is short, and we’d have to plan ahead to store potatoes and apples; b.) I’m not sure they’d grow enough to feed everybody; c.) yields are usually low and scraggly up at our place, so growing is best lower down. My husband would be good at basic survival, so we’d be fine in a shorter-term crisis of a year or two or three. We’ve got food saved up, too.
These are amazing pictures. Thanks, SkipSul. Years ago, we flew in a huge thunderstorm in a flight from Florida to Missouri. The massive clouds were awe-inspiring, but it was frightening. The pilot came on the speaker after we got through and intimated that we had been in some danger.
Yes, I feel undeserving. So much work went into these things that we casually carry home from a Saturday outing.
I didn’t know you flew, Vectorman.
Nope :) In our family we know that human hearts and minds connect over space and time.
Reminds me of a poem, Night Take-Off:
Beneath our wheels the flares and glim-lamps race,
Each goose-neck stretching taut,then only space
Descends as now the leading lights are past
And three-dimensioned darkness holds us fast.
We are of night,and night hugs close her own,
The long black caverns of her sleeves are thrown
Around us,and she bids the circling clouds
Encompass us with vapour as with shrouds.
While the jet-trail contrail is the most common, propeller planes and even gliders can leave contrails under the right conditions.
Changes in air pressure cause the pressurized air to heat and to absorb more water vapor from the surrounding (cooler) air. When that air cools back down to the ambient temperature, there is nowhere for the extra water vapor to go, so it condenses. If the ambient temperature is cold enough, it freezes. Jet engines both compress and heat the air, but as you said, just the pressure variation caused by wingtips and propeller tips can cause the phenomenon.
It helps if it really humid out.
In very rare circumstances, contrails have been seen off the spoiler tips of a race car.
I think what is happening is that I’m visualizing my audience as I write–something emphasized in composition courses. I’ve always dismissed that piece of advice, because it sounds mundane, but the Ricochet writing community has helped tremendously with carrying that out. Writing to an audience is actually energizing.
Lovely, lovely essay.
One app I really wish existed was something that would label what you are seeing down below as you look out of your airplane window. I always see some fascinating or surprising landscape out my window and wonder, now what on earth is that? Where are we in California (for instance) that there are so many lakes? Is that the southern tip of the Grand Canyon? What is that great mountain? There is a very general map, typically one the seat-back screen options, but I’m curious for much more detail.
Ohhh, great idea! One less reason for the pilot’s voice to crackle over the system and deliver an unintellible message, making you uncomfortably aware that not only were you interrupted from your nap, your movie, or your book, but that you missed some bit of info.