Here’s a shitty photo of an airplane wing, shot through a dirty, scratched window with a point-and-shoot digital camera. You’ve seen a million of these before.
It’s also an amateur aerial photo of New York City. Jamaica Bay, specifically, during a typical descent into JFK. I think that’s Rockaway Park in the bottom-right. You’ve definitely seen a million of these before.
Fortunately, I’m not posting it for its photographic or artistic value.
I’m posting it because this view makes me happy every time, and I always look out the window like an excited child seeing a city from an airplane for the first time. It’s my “welcome home” view, and it’s incredibly impressive regardless of how many times I’ve seen it before. (Pittsburgh residents are familiar with the sudden, amazing view of their city when entering via the Fort Pitt Tunnel. This is the New York version.)
Whenever I return to New York from a trip, I look forward to this, and it reminds me how lucky I am to live in a city that I like this much.
My return to England a few days ago was an overnight flight, which initially irritated me (nobody wants a 7am touch down), but I was pretty glad of it when we reached the coast of the UK: I mistakenly thought it was pretty light by that time, but as we dipped below cloud level, I noticed that England was still twinkling below us, very much in the dark. And it was beautiful. The mixture of darkness, long and snaking British roads, and the headlamps of almost-gridlocked (as ever) early morning commuters made for a remarkably attractive visual (that prompted me to wish, not for the first time, that Heather had not lost my camera). The US from the air at night is not without its charms, but I’m afraid it compares very badly to the UK.
Mistakenly thinking we were over Brighton also induced a fairly overwhelming sense of wistfulness, and I have since vowed to visit it at least once before I go back to Heather. It is, however, geographically unlikely that I was over Brighton at any point; more likely we flew over Ireland, and after a quick skip over some more water, nosed over the coast of England somewhere in the Midlands, possibly going through Wales first. The very first flight I took to the US in March this year was with Delta, and had a screen in the back of the seat that provided a graphical overview of our flight (that time, at least, we went over Ireland, but I don’t recall where we arrived in England). I haven’t been afforded such conveniences in the 3 international flights I’ve taken since, unfortunately.
Nevertheless: shit from the air at night is a wonderful sight to behold. Everyone should get a chance to experience it, since actually being there is rather more magical than seeing just a photograph.
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