Great vistas of green

The vast majority of us commute to the airport by car. Whether our goal is to board a wide-body airliner to travel across the continent or to fire up a modest two-seater for a trip around the pattern, we tend to drive to the boarding area — whether it’s a multi-million dollar terminal in a major city or a shade hangar on the outskirts of some Podunk town.

On that journey there is an almost universally accepted belief that our world is over-developed. It’s excessively crowded. Steel and glass and concrete surround us everywhere we go. We’re hemmed in by our own construction projects. Cramped and confined to areas with heavy traffic, ceaseless noise, and crowds of strangers. Asphalt pathways lead us deeper into the chasm of our communities, yet make it nearly impossible for us to find our way out.

Balderdash. Absolute rubbish. If perception is reality, then a realignment of our perceptions is in order.

This nation presents us with remarkable great vistas of green and blue or various shades of brown, depending on which part of the country you are in. Ground transportation gives us the impression of persistent infrastructure everywhere we go. Yet for anyone who has elevated their view by 1,000 feet or so, the picture we see is very different from that our ground-hugging brethren encounter.

I live in a small southern city, if Florida can be considered southern. Believe me, that claim is in dispute — often with good reason. But, be that as it may, my hometown includes plenty of sprawl, at least a handful of buildings tall enough to require elevators to move between floors, and enough roadside signs to annoy even the most casual observer.

Conversely, I lived in New York City years ago. My apartment was in the Greenwich Village section where bohemians, beatniks, hippies, and artists of questionable capabilities tend to congregate to celebrate the heartbeat of the Concrete Jungle. It is that, too. A veritable maze of concrete, asphalt, brick, and glass that stretch out for as far as the eye can see.

And in Manhattan, as far as the eye can see can often be measured in yards, not miles. Something or other always seems to be blocking the view. Even if you look upward where the skyscrapers block out the sun, leaving parts of the city in permanent shade.

That’s not true when we look down from the air, however. The view is very much different from altitude. More invigorating. More inspirational. Just more.

Then again, that’s not the case for all of us. As with the work of the artists I disparaged a paragraph earlier, it is necessary to open your eyes metaphorically, as well as literally, if you wish to truly see.

Some years ago, I was on a United Airlines flight to Washington D.C. Positioned in the aisle seat, a man and a woman who appeared to be a decade or so older than me were in the center and window seats. We departed Orlando in the early morning hours. The sun was rising over the Atlantic, casting bright light across the peninsula as we climbed into the blue.

The airplane banked left, turning east. Shortly after crossing the shoreline it turned north, exposing the landscape and coastline to those of us lucky enough to be sitting on the left side of the aisle.

I leaned forward and turned my head to the window in an effort to catch a glimpse of the world below. The shallows of the Atlantic Ocean rewarded me by showing off almost unimaginably brilliant shades of blue that stretched for miles beyond my field of view. Easily visible white sand beaches established a solid delineation between land and sea. Civilization was evident as high-rise hotels, condominiums, and office buildings paralleled the shoreline, giving way to diminishing urban sprawl to the west, then a band of suburbia, followed by forests and a tangle of wild sub-tropical growth that stretched to the horizon.

“There’s nothing to see out there,” the man in the window seat announced to his partner. He shut the blind, apparently unimpressed by the sight of the world below. Exposed in all its glory, the Earth brought him no wonder. Not the natural world in the near distance, or the space port directly below us, or the beaches that people flock to from the world over.

“There’s nothing to see out there.” Seriously? There’s everything to see out there. Literally everything.

Over the course of my career I have been fortunate enough to fly small general aviation aircraft across approximately half of this country. Most of my flight time is local. I rarely wander more than a couple hundred miles from home. But sometimes I get to stretch my legs and wander a thousand miles distant.

Whether I’m in my home county or five states away, I often come away with the same impression: This world is so big, with landscapes so diverse, and resources so rich that we humans have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. Our population centers, densely packed as they are, appear to be little more than man-made islands in a sea of green.

Farms and forests and large expanses of grasslands far exceed the square acreage taken up by our construction projects. That still surprises me, what with the planet being populated by some 7 billion people or more. But that’s the sight that keeps being reinforced every time I fly: Vast horizons of nature dotted with relatively small pockets of modern civilization.

There is far more out there than a quick, superficial peek might suggest. So, keep your blinds raised, your eyes open, and your mind engaged. The wonders you encounter just might alter your way of looking at the world, on the ground and in the air.