Air Lines

Point a camera at the sky and leave the shutter open for a while. Delicate patterns will appear like figure skaters' tracks across a frozen pond. Parallel but distinct. Graceful sweeping turns and slashing straight lines. Staccato dots and solid bold streaks.




According to the National Air Transport Association, a quarter of a million people are airborne at any given time worldwide. It's easy to ignore the ceaseless comings and goings over our heads, but a pause to look reveals the metropolis of motion we've created in the sky. Miles above our heads, every hour of every day, there are families and business people, rich and poor, the hopeful and the disappointed. They're laughing, talking, watching movies, eating, drinking, arguing, embracing, texting, and sleeping, just like those in the cities beneath them.

The evening high-rise worker, busy populating a spreadsheet by the Caravaggio light of a laptop while the custodians bustle past the cubicles, may not notice the jetliner burning past the office window's square of sky. But 35,000 feet above, someone's doing the same, while the flight attendants collect the last of the headphones and plastic cups.







The airlines talk of interconnectedness, of stitching families and businesses closer, of tying the world together. A look into the night sky reveals how literal those notions have become. We cast a net across the world and pull it tight, trying to squeeze the planet down into something smaller and more manageable.





It's easy to decry this endless hurrying to and fro as merely evidence of a global obsession with being somewhere we're not. But I think it's about more than just getting from one dot on the map to the next. Though no one individual dwells in it for more than a a few hours at a time, humanity has built a home in the sky. We've colonized the clouds. Our jetliners, military planes and light aircraft bring commerce, government and recreation up from the world below. Our civilization races over our our heads now as surely as it stands at our feet.









And it's spectacular.

Sun to Seattle: It's Not You, It's Me.

It's the official: We've broken up.

In hindsight we should have seen it coming.

For weeks now things had been cooling off between us. Sure, the days were bright and blue. Every morning the mountains glowed pink, and every afternoon Puget Sound blossomed with sails. But we could tell there was trouble if we'd really bothered to look.

Each day you were away for a little longer. We kept finding brochures in the mail for Hawaii and Tahiti. If we asked you about it, your answer was always, "Look at those gorgeous dahlias I brought you!"

So we ignored the darkening mornings. We shivered and put on extra layers of cotton and linen, leaving the wool tied firmly in last May's dry-cleaning bags. We dodged the fattening spiders and wiped the dew off the windshield and picked blackberries after work by flashlight.

But today we woke up to find you gone. The bed's cold and the lovely naked sky has pulled on lumpy gray fleece. The furnace kicked in with a faint cough of dust and the cats burrowed further under the covers. The lawn furniture we used to enjoy together is rattling in a cold breeze that's callously flipping the pages of the gardening magazine we left outside last night. There's a rippling curtain of rain on the horizon.


It's over, without so much as a post-it note or a text message of goodbye.

We hastily fold the furniture, drag the potted lemon tree under the eaves and dig the extra blanket out of the linen closet. We look at the sky and mutter, "Sure, we'll give you space. When your phone doesn't ring, it'll be us here in Seattle. But you'll be back."

Gimme Shelter: Lodging and dislodging on Long Island

Everything I knew about Long Island I'd learned from Billy Joel songs: Real-estate novelists dined in Italian restaurants and boys from the wrong side of the tracks longed for uptown girls. Never mind that my husband, who grew up there, seemed to fit nowhere within the Piano Man's oeuvre. I had all the information I required.

One day at the dawn of the new millennium Steve was suddenly seized by a desire to revisit his boyhood haunts. Since I'd already dragged him to all my life's key historic spots ("Look! There's the hospital in Portland where I was born!") I figured he was overdue to be indulged.

This being the pre-smartphone era, I dutifully booted up Expedia. The Northeast was sort of an amorphous muddle in my mind, the reverse of the famous New Yorker cartoon that showed the world petering out into China once you crossed the Hudson. Wasn't Boston just a suburb of New York City? Weren't all the towns embedded in a quaint matrix of New England countryside? Billy Joel notwithstanding, I pictured sunny rambles through verdant countryside dotted with white-spired villages. We'd stop for antiques and apple cider, share blueberry pie with taciturn but warm-hearted locals, and stumble upon a lovely old inn run by Bob Newhart.

Steve stopped me while the hard drive was still whirring. "We'll be there before Memorial Day," he said. "We don't need reservations. Let's be spontaneous."


Long Island in the flesh did indeed conjure up an old TV show, but not the Newhart variety. The Archie Bunker houses of Queens fled past our rental car's windows as Steve dodged and swore at a torrent of traffic. Suburbanization gradually increased as we drove east, and by midday we reached a shade-dappled town called Huntington.

After a pleasant afternoon with cousins we needed a place for the night. We wound from highway to parkway to throughway to turnpike, but nothing presented itself. A gas station attendant finally pointed us toward a blowsy two-storey structure in the middle of a vast parking lot.
If you squinted you might have gotten a vague suggestion of Colonial architecture from the brick trim and the white weathervane-crowned steeple tacked onto the roof. But if you didn't squint the overall impression was the structural equivalent of a small-town homecoming queen fallen on hard times after a couple of bum husbands, and bitter at getting laid off after the auto-parts store closed.

At reception a doughey young woman with auburn roots and glistening acne looked up from a copy of Glamour.

"A room? Everything's booked. No, I mean the whole area. Long Island's a popular place. Uh, I guess I could give you our bridal suite. It's all we have left. $300 per night." We dragged our luggage up to the second floor, suitcases banging on the worn wooden steps. Steve fumbled with the key.
Sniff, sniff.

"Do you smell smoke?" "It's nothing," my husband grunted as the key at last slid home and the door    swung open.

I am not one of those delicate sorts who swoons if someone lights a cigarette three blocks away. I grew up around smokers. My first summer job was in a late-1970s city engineering office so smogged by blue plumes coiling from the draftsmens' Kools that their loudest polyester shirts were nearly invisible on the far side of the room.
But the nicotine-saturated backdraft that poured out of the Bridal Suite would have felled Jean-Paul Sartre. The gouged, decades-old furniture, the peeling linoleum, the fly-carcass-speckled fluorescent light fixtures, all were tanned to various shades of ochre. R.J. Reynolds could have packaged and sold rolled-up swatches of the upholstery.
Without a word Steve grabbed our suitcases. We banged back down the stairs. Steve snatched back the credit card, piled me and the luggage back into the car and sped out of the parking lot in a hail of gravel.
By now it was getting dark on the Jericho Turnpike. Ahead, nearly obscured by the glare of oncoming headlights, a neon sign sputtered "Vacancy."
The quiet young woman behind the desk assured us that the motel was clean. "It used to belong to the state. Low-income housing. It was thoroughly renovated before the motel conversion."
We groped our way along a neat line of ancient bungalows illuminated by a single streetlight. Finding our unit, we opened the door. An acute stab of bleach and fluorescent lighting flashed out. Everything was indeed spotless, scrubbed raw as if by meth-addled Furies on work release. "It'll do," we said to each other, lobbing the suitcases onto a creaking twin bed. I fell asleep imagine the parkway's roar as crashing ocean surf.
Things seemed to improve the next morning. The tide of strip malls receded, revealing shoals of potato fields and islands of flowering dogwoods. Porsches and Mercedes crowded out Saturns and Subarus on the highway. We detoured into F. Scott Fitzgerald country along the North Shore, passing old mansions with white colonnades and new ones with towering arched entryways. We went for a short walk in a nature preserve filled with singing birds. We spent twenty minutes frantically brushing off the ticks we found creeping up our clothes.
As afternoon settled in we headed for the Hamptons. The week before the Memorial Day start of "the season" found the fabled enclave nearly deserted. We wandered past cypress battlements hiding mansions from commoners' gaze. Landscaping trucks rumbled by on otherwise deserted streets. We peered into the windows of closed shops, our reflections blurred by the cashmere and chintz and horsey wealth arrayed inside.
Now it was time to find another night's accommodation. "Riverhead," said Steve. "It's near here, but not snooty." We barreled back up the turnpike while darkness spread across the sky.
Just off an exit ramp a cheery chain motel beckoned. We cruised confidently into the driveway and up to reception. "I'm sorry," said the clerk. "We're completely booked. Long Island's really popular." "Is there anyplace else nearby?" I asked. The clerk winced. "There is," he said, "but I wouldn't go there."
"He just doesn't want to give his competition any credit," I said to Steve as we walked back to the car. "I'm sure it's fine."
The Greenwood Inn was set back from a secondary road in a dark grove of trees. A few lamps glowed feebly. We parked in the lightless gravel lot. A group of men lurked in a particularly dark corner. I was suddenly conscious of how the loudly the remote's chirp cut through the still air.
The reception office was suffused with a powerful smell of cooking: An oily, vaguely chickenish aroma with no obvious source. Intent on a portable television under the desk, a balding clerk in a dirty suit barely acknowledged us. "Sure," he grunted. "I'll give you our best room." In a scene straight from an old movie he took a metal key with a plastic-lozenge fob off a hook behind him. Scribbling our credit-card information on a pad, he pointed to the second storey. "Watch the stairs."
Under the lurkers' watchful gaze we unloaded our luggage and dragged it up a flight of splintered steps. The door creaked open to a room lit by a single overhead fixture. Somehow the chicken-cooking smell had intensified into the space, imbuing the air with an almost tangible greasiness. The carpet, which might have been red in some earlier decade, was a fantastic landscape of cigarette-burn craters, slashed valleys and threadbare basins. The bedsheets were merely the thinnest suggestion of tissue tucked under stained pillows. The blanket appeared to have been salvaged from the dumpster behind a medium-security prison. The floor yielded in places, spongy with dry rot. I flicked the bathroom light switch and got a lightning zap but no other illumination.
It was nearly midnight. Manhattan was a hundred miles away. We stared at each other. "Let's do this thing," said Steve. "Years from now we'll laugh about it."
Neither of us closed our eyes all night. We lay fully clothed on the bed as if our jeans and sweaters would somehow protect us from bugs and microbes. We breathed the chickeny air. We listened, tense and ready to spring into action, to the gravel crunching with nightlong comings and goings. Were those footsteps on the stairs? Was that a key scraping in the lock?
At last dawn filtered through the gray windows. We grabbed our suitcases and scrambled unshowered down the stairs. Relieved to find the rental car in one piece, we sped out of the parking lot and back onto the modern familiarity of the Long Island Expressway.
On the plane home we rubbed our sleepless sandpaper eyes and scratched at imagined bugs. The other passengers kept a respectful distance. Long Island fell away from the plane window. It was lovely; miles of forests and fields and sandy shores. Not a motel to be seen.
It's years later now, and Steve was right. I do laugh at the experience. I learned that even Billy Joel can't sum up a place in song. And that spontaneity is vastly overrated.

Beware! Mars Not at All Like the Brochure

To: TripAdvisor
From: Mars Curiosity


Based on glowing reviews posted earlier by members "Spirit" and "Opportunity" I booked a visit to Mars. "Spectacular!" they wrote. "Magnificent!" "Red."  They praised the off-roading opportunities, the lack of crowds and the long dry season. "Never a wait for a tee time," they said. "And no bugs!"

Big mistake. I'm here here to tell you Mars is not as advertised.

First, there was the promised "pillow menu" at arrival that "Spirit" raved about so effusively. Never materialized. Instead I was left dangling for ages when I got here, hanging around while I waited for someone to acknowledge my presence.

Second, I don't know where "Opportunity" found that "party atmosphere," but it's nowhere near me. This place is totally dead from an activities standpoint. I can't even surf the Internet; the wi-fi's so abysmally slow that I haven't been able to download a single cat picture.

Third, while I like to think of myself as an unfussy sort of traveler I cannot ignore the deplorable standards set by housekeeping. Dust everywhere. I've called the front desk about it repeatedly, but nothing's been done. There's no way I'm leaving a tip.

Speaking of the front desk, I've never encountered one so rude. They have the unmitigated gall to ask ME to do things for THEM! "Look around." "Take pictures." "Send us an email." Honestly, you'd think they'd never been here! Phoned-in service like that is absolutely unacceptable in a five-star resort.

But the last straw is the swim-up bar. Evidently it's been closed for eons.

All in all, cannot recommend.

The Four Seasons: Seattle's Cool

Here in Seattle we like cool.  Not the finger-snapping, head-bobbing, dark-sunglasses kind. The contemplative gray weather, subdued clothing and any-car-color-but-red kind.  We believe in elegance over flash, doing over bragging, and pocket protectors over gold chains.  A special occasion calls for a microbrew by the fire with friends on a rainy night, not Cristal on a sundrenched Malibu cliff with helicopters clattering overhead.

Which is why the Four Seasons Seattle is perfect.  It's everything a celebration-minded local could want, and everthing a luxury-minded tourist needs for a glimpse into our character.

Rising in a discreet block of stone and glass at the south end of the Pike Place Market, the Four Seasons does not dominate Seattle's skyline. Instead its shape echoes that of the Seattle Art Museum directly across the street. The hotel's location makes it possible to step directly out of the foyer to two of Seattle's major attractions.

That foyer pays homage to the location - housing a museum-worthy collection of works by promininent Northwest artists. But in keeping with Seattle style, the art never calls attention to itself.  You'll notice it when you look for it. Maybe while you're sitting by the sleek modern gas fireplace or headed to the hotel's ART Restaurant for dinner. There, behind a ceiling-high screen of stored Northwest wines a mix of locals and hotel guests are silhoutted against the shimmering bay. Servers glide back and forth lofting plates of Pike Place Market delicacies transformed into colorful arrangements like culinary versions of the bouquets sold by the market's flower vendors.

For our first visit to a Four Seasons hotel, my husband and I stayed in the least-expensive room we could book. Even so we found the level of luxury bordering on alarming. Twice-daily service, a pre-filled ice bucket and a view of ferries and freighters sliding across a section of Elliott Bay were some of the surprises. Also remarkable for a luxury hotel was the complimentary wi-fi. 

Best of all was the bathroom - a palace of warm brown marble with a separate room for every purpose.  Between the dual-headed shower and the bathtub big enough for snorkeling I would have begun to look like a Shar Pei puppy if I had remained much longer.

Not unexpectedly there was no in-room coffeemaker. We briefly toyed with the idea of pulling on jeans and sweaters to walk to the Market, but decided that we hadn't distilled an eternity of long work hours and late meetings into a night at the Four Seasons to do what we could do any other day.  So we called room service. The coffee setup arrived to the minute of  when it was promised, and another staffer arrived later unbidden to whisk away the empty dishes. 

For a luxury visit to Seattle it would be hard to top the Four Seasons.While the rest of the country broils, the Four Seasons is as cool and collected as a Seattle summer.

Nickeled and Dimed

On July 18 the New York Times ran an article on the pros and cons of "cafeteria" pricing for coach airfares. You know, those beguiling palm-fringed ads for cheap flights that morph, by the time you've "chosen" to pay for "extras" like checked (or in some cases carry-on) baggage, water and toilet paper, into less-alluring deals.

This fee structure has been lauded for giving customers the freedom to choose only those services for which they want to pay. It's hard to fault that argument, and perhaps I'm just revealing myself to be a dinosaur (maybe pterodactyl is a better metaphor) by my struggle to abandon the notion that little comforts and amenities like pillows, blankets and luggage transport are as inherent and non-negotiable a part of the flying experience as jet fuel and landing gear.

I now imagine Michael O'Leary, CEO of the legendarily "no-frills" Ryanair, thinking "Hmmm, jet fuel. Perhaps the flight attendants should pass the hat up and down the aisles a few times before takeoff. If enough passengers kick in, the pilot will fire up BOTH engines!"

But I digress.

The Times article noted that in a recent poll of air travelers 16 percent of respondents said they would pay extra to be first off the plane.

I'd pay extra to be first off the bus, or first in line at the discount lingerie bin at the start of Nordstrom's half-yearly sale, but that doesn't mean it's right. The problem with the airlines' ever-growing list of fee-based "amenities" is that they further separate the "haves" from the "have-nots."

Of course air travel itself is hardly one of life's necessities, and the world has far more pressing problems than whether Delta should charge for blankets. Airlines, like ocean liners, have a long and glorious tradition of charging extra for services. It's always been possible to pay double or triple the coach fare for the privilege of turning left when boarding the plane, to swill Champagne in an airborne BarcaLounger while the masses behind the curtain jostle for the armrests.

But the coach experience used to shared equally by all. The thrifty business traveler, the young family and the backpacking student had the same chances at a window or aisle seat, overhead bin space, exit-row legroom and boarding priority. Some flights you won,some you lost. But everyone was in the same boat, or plane.

Today, with the opportunity to buy your way ahead of fellow slightly-less-flush coach passengers, the creeping class-stratification of American life is reaching into Economy. Travel, even its vicissitudes, should be something that brings people together. An airfare policy encouraging cash competition for basic amenities at the expense of one's seatmate, seems like abandonment of a fundamental business commitment to provide a quality experience for all customers.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spread my leathery wings and turn my long, pointed head back home.

Rendezvous With a Shadow

Hidden under a thick pack ice of clouds for much of the year, the Pacific Northwest might not seem the ideal place for amateur astronomy. Weeks can pass without a break in the roiling mass of gray. But such conditions breed a certain combination of patience and optimism ideal for one particular aspect of the science: Eclipse-chasing.

A map of impending solar eclipses shows curving brushstrokes across the earth's surface:



These lines mark the path traced by the pinpoint tip of the moon's shadow, sweeping along the ground as the planet rotates.

If the sun, moon and earth had perfectly flat, circular orbits like CDs lying on a cosmic coffee table we'd have a total solar eclipse at the earth's equator every new moon and a total lunar eclipse every full moon. But contrary to the neat diagrams I studied in the World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid, the orbits of all the planets and moons in the solar system are elliptical, and tipped at angles like a Calder mobile. (Also, protons and electrons are not, I've since learned, little spheres with pluses and minuses stamped on them as they were depicted in the Encyclopedia. But I still can't help thinking of them that way). The upshot of of all this cosmic complexity is that unless you are willing to stand very still in the same spot for about 400 years, you must travel if you want to see a solar eclipse.

But even getting to the right place at the right time is no guarantee. As any Northwesterner can attest, the weather can ruin the most carefully-laid plans. Imagine waiting months or years and traveling thousands of miles, only to have the appointed time come and go with the entire event hidden from view. It takes a certain strength of both spirit and wallet to keep trying, especially when all you have to show for the experience is photos. Unlike the big game hunter's house with its walls of glassy-eyed animal heads, the eclipse-chaser's home and hard drive are filled with Eye of Sauron-like images of black centers surrounded with flaming rays.




photo: Luc Viatour



Each is equally important to the stalker who bagged it, although in the case of the eclipse-chaser no animals lost any major body parts.

Determining how heroic an effort to make to watch a solar eclipse involves an equation of location congeniality (Honolulu or Mogadishu?), likihood of cooperative weather (San Diego in August, or London in February?) and practicality (Orlando or Easter Island?). Nature supplies an additional factor: Is the eclipse "total" or "annular?"

Because the moon's orbit isn't circular, its distance from earth varies slightly. The difference is not usually noticeable, but it creates two kinds of solar eclipses. When the moon is close to to earth at eclipse time it looms large enough in the sky to completely cover the sun's disk, creating the famous spectacle of a visible corona laced with raging fountains of fiery prominences.

When the moon is further away, it's small enough in the sky to allow a rind of the sun to show around its edges. This "annular" type of solar eclipse is much less of a spectacle, because if even a smidgen of the sun's disk is visible it's so bright that it completely overwhelms the corona.

Totality is the white-tie state dinner of celestial happenings, drawing important scientists, committed amateurs with imposing equipment, and vain celebrities in Learjets. Annularity is more of a local backyard barbecue; a few friends gathered around their telescopes for burgers and beer.

On May 20 of this year one of the brush lines on the map crossed through a swath of countryside in southern Oregon, 500 miles from my home. It was an annular affair, beneath the notice of the elite of the eclipse-chasing world, but worth a day's drive to me.


I needed a long head start on the moon's shadow, since it was traveling approximately ten times as fast as I was. The rain was unrelenting when I left, but I was trusting a forecast that claimed better weather awaited in Ashland. By noon, while I was on Interstate 5 south of Portland, jockeying for position through heavy traffic and clouds of semi-truck spray, the shadow hit the ground in Japan. Observers in Tokyo snapped pictures of the ghostly ring over their city's skies as the shadow began to slice across the Pacific at a thousand miles per hour.

An hour later, as the shadow swung over the Aleutian Islands and starting its turn south toward Oregon, the clouds began to break up and the air warmed. I accelerated over the final stretches of freeway, past columns of circling hawks teetering upwards on the bubbles of almost visibly hot air mushrooming from the lion-colored hills.

Sweating and glancing at my watch, I roared off at the Ashland exit and sped though town to the science museum where Twitter had promised the local astronomy club had set up public viewing stations.

Sure enough the parking lot was filling rapidly with parents who lofted their children onto their shoulders and or held their tugging hands. A line snaked into the museum building for free solar-viewing glasses.




One of the advantages of a solar eclipse is that it is easily seen via projection from a telescope onto a screen. So I had the good fortune to be able to crowd with the children around one projected image after another, watching the spectacle progress.

The shadow duly arrived about a half hour after I did, and the moon began to cross the face of the sun.






The bite got slowly bigger, as wisps of cloud drifted in front of the spectacle.





Soon the sun was nearly gone. The air cooled noticeably, and birds began to sing as though it was dusk.





Finally, the "ends" of the "crescent sun" joined into a ring.





People of all ages crowded around. I realized this was the first "Social Media" eclipse, live-tweeted around the world.



But plenty of people were just as happy to enjoy the spectacle in a more time-honored way:




The next solar eclipse in the Northwest will be the Big Event, totality in 2017. I hope to be there.