Being woken by the dog at 2:30 in the morning is never a pleasent experience. The awakening this morning was ameliorated by the fact that Thunder the Wonder Dog woke me by sound rather than by smell. Yes, anticipating the storm surge which may at this very moment be overtopping the Battery sea wall, that seven pound mound of hound has visited us with another poonami. No, it is not really all that funny, especially when the scent is strong enough to awaken a person just as his dream was about to go lucid and his fantasy of a blisteringly fast run through the streets of Beantown with Bill Rogers in his prime were about to come true. No, last night the warning sirens of the poonami let me know that a preemptive evacuation was in order.
So out we went, Thunder and I, into the crystal darkeness under and appalachian sky brushed clean by the bands of Irene. At that time of night, one wonders who else is awake and what they are thinking. The lights in the house that those kids rent were on of course, but that’s not really a surprise. All the other bungalows were darkened, waiting patiently for the time to pass when burgerlers are wont to intrude and before the residents stir within. The only motion in the night was across the landscape of stars.
North to south, two planes crossed the French Broad watershed on their way to Atlanta. It’s possible that they had left from some point in North America, but much more likely that they were completing trans-Atlantic journeys. The first shift flight crew, having been relieved somewhere between Iceland and Greenland, stuck around the flight deck to gaze down on Irene from the safety of 45,000 feet. It must have been an eerie sight with almost no moon to illuminate the cyclonic clouds.
By the time they reached me, however, the fun was over. The prime crew having retreated to quarters to walk around in their sock feet and drink coffee, the secondary crew kept watch over the autopilot and surveyed the night sky. Doubtless the lead plane knew of its companion several miles behind. That’s what the radar is good for, but the trailing aircraft, having made visual contact, probably made initial voice contact, assuming such was made.
What do they talk about up there as flight attendants clean up breakfast dishes and help groggy travelers fill out customs forms? Are the pilots like truckers, in a convoy through the night? Do they make randy comments about coworkers or disparage their human cargo? Perhaps they are all work, calculating vectors and headwinds and such. Or on this incredible night, did they talk about the awful destructiveness of nature? Did any of them look down at the terrestrial darkness and, picking out a speck of light, wonder if there weren’t somebody out there, awake, walking his dog and gazing skyward?