I hate to travel. When Tradewinds became popular in 1968, we were doing a lot of travelling. The first year or two was fun, but after that I hated it. I certainly loved seeing new places and particularly going to all these lovely islands I had read about and meeting Caribbean people I would not otherwise have known, but the actual travelling – I hated that. I still do. Nowadays, with all the security rigmarole, and the delays, it’s even worse.
The one thing about being in aeroplanes, however, that is a bonus for me, is that I truly enjoy seeing things from the air and although on some trips the clouds can put you in a world of white there are some spectacular sights, and the perspective is so different that it can take your breath away. From that telephoto view, half a mile in the sky, you can grasp the layout of a country in a way that no map or video can convey.
I recall like yesterday a LIAT flight from St Lucia to St Vincent where we flew in at 10,000 feet, clear day, no cloud, bisecting St Vincent from the north on the route and in those 20 minutes you came away with an instant understanding of the layout of the island – you could drive around it for days and never get that clear picture in your mind.
Coming in from Trinidad at high altitude on a clear day, you can see the coffee-coloured water of the Amazon meeting the blue Caribbean not in a blended fusion, but it in clear curving line, as if drawn by a pencil, with the brown water washing back to Venezuela and the blue running away northward to Trinidad. You can actually see the silt armada that eventually lands on Guyana’s coastline.
To be at high altitude approaching Toronto is to understand the formation of Lake Ontario by glaciers into that huge bowl of water with the St Lawrence River like a ribbon winding northeast and funnelling water all the way to the ocean.
With no clouds about, to look down on a clear day at Cape Canaveral, 35,000 feet below, is to be impressed with how magnificently mankind can do some things as the enormous span of the design and its complexity, come clearly to your mind. No coffee-table book, no documentary, can show you that.
The other thing that is operating, apart from the long distance view, is that you are seeing the world as through a telescope – things reveal themselves differently – and, in particular, the absence of sound allows you to contemplate the place in a different way than if you are actually there.
In the air, the feeling of life, the presence of man on the earth, comes across very strongly as you watch from another dimension with no sound. The elevated view, and only the view, provides for a very powerful connection.
Flying out of Timehri, to look down through the clouds and see the zinc roofs of Wales under the left wing and a car going along the road, and some smoke from a field nearby rising in a dense, dark mass and turning into wisps and disappearing, transports you to the place as if you’re there.
There is the message of motion, a picture of life, coming strongly to you from those completely silent images, made more powerful by the silence. You can’t hear the car but you see it move in slow motion, and you can picture the driver at the wheel, and the lurching from the potholes, and perhaps hear the horn aimed at a wandering cow.
You can’t hear the cackle of the grass fire, but you can see the flash and surge of it, and you recall the experience of the heat on your face, 20,000 feet away from it in a soft seat. Not a sound comes to you from horse cart going by, but you know the clip clop of the passage and the smell of horse dung, landing and rolling. It is as if the silence strengthens the particulars of the view.
It is the same way with memories of persons loved or experiences shared. You recall them most vividly in silence, in those quiet moments when you are seeing the picture in your mind and no sounds or other images interfere. In those pictures without sound, the moods and sensations of that time come back vivid and true.
The millions of lights on the New York highway as I flew in for Joe Henry’s funeral; the muggy heat on that day on a hillside in Utah with my Caymanian wife and our three children; the blinding sun on that canoe trip in Alberta with my first wife and Canadian daughter and son; the swirling, blowing, bitter cold the day my mother was buried in Toronto – I see again the priest, standing in that blizzard, with his white tunic flapping in the wind, and I wonder again how he endured that frozen hell.
We practically ran back to the cars, cold and sorrow fused into one howl in the throat. In silence, the memory is sharp and clear.
The most striking memories are like that; photographs you show yourself, in your mind, in absolute silence.
And the long, slow-motion views from the air are like that; I look down at Hague with the Middle Walk road snaking away, or the yellow sand beach at Baganara, and I’m there again – I can smell the food, I can hear friends laughing.
Try it the next time you’re in the air and the clouds allow it; look down on the silent view of places you know from then or now. You’ll be surprised at how far back those views will take you, and how sharp the remembrances are.
