SEPTEMBER 28, 2019 – For years I’ve enjoyed the daily experience of walking in a place that affords a 180-degree view of the sky.
We humans spend most of our waking hours looking at the world parallel to the ground. You might say it’s a “down to earth” way of seeing things. If you’re an urban dweller, you simply don’t have that much access to open sky or much occasion to view it.
A lot can be said, however, for viewing an open sky. Psychologically, you can release lots of woe and worry by gazing skyward and . . . imagining a door on your forehead opening to release all that bad stuff into the atmosphere. (To facilitate the process, I imagine that while inside my head, the woe and worry is the weight of lead, but upon exposure to open sky, it converts to helium.) That release isn’t possible if you’re inside your home or office or walking between rows of skyscrapers or under trees along the boulevard, let alone driving around in your car all day.
Yesterday evening I experienced a kind of geometric dimension to this business of woe/worry release.
Just as I reached the summit of “The Eiger” of “Little Switzerland”—my “big sky” country of choice—I saw a small aircraft approach on a course straight overhead. The plane was low, and by comparing in my mind the size of the aircraft to an automobile, say, a long block away (in my neighborhood, 660 feet), and taking into account the FAA 500-foot rule (minimum altitude for small aircraft in urban areas), I estimated the plane’s altitude at no more than 800 feet when it passed over the summit of the Eiger—but still, bringing things down to earth, the height of an 80-story office tower.
For just a couple of seconds, I could see the windshield of the old Cessna 152 (I think, based on: single-engine; two-seater; wings over the fuselage; tricycle wheels without speed fairings) and figured the pilot (and passenger; instructor and student?) could see me, as well. I waved both arms high over my head and the plane’s strobe lights winked at me in response. I imagined the occupants greeting me with smiles. Our exchange was all too brief, as the plane sped west with noisy and determined pride. All too soon it was out of sight.
As I descended The Eiger, I contemplated the physics and geometry at play with that plane—how a person might calculate one parameter, such as speed, time, distance, angle of position, (plane to the summit of The Eiger) by way of the others. What struck me most about my brief encounter with that little plane was what a fantastic view the person(s) in the cockpit must have had of my “Little Switzerland” and “Europe” beyond.
Yet how to measure the rate of release of my woe and worry from the summit of The Eiger vs. the pilot’s release of the pilot’s woe and worry from an altitude of 800 feet above it? Call that airspace, “where physics meets philosophy.”
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
