What I wrote on the plane to keep myself sane...
8 hours into the flight. Nick and Mark are asleep. We're above the arctic circle and according to the map fairly dead on to the North Pole. I walk to the back of the plane where there's a little standing room area and eager flight attendants who even here in coach offer fruit by the bushel. I have some strawberries; they're amazing. I stretch my left foot out... I hurt my leg a few weeks ago and bruised it so badly they almost thought I had a clot, but instead I apparently damaged a nerve and my foot has this odd pins and needles sensation sometimes and I guess I'm always going to have it. This from just a bruise. Its driving me crazy in my seat. Need to go walk on it.
Singapore airlines is pretty cushy. This has to be the most comfortable experience in coach I've ever had. We even have leg rests. Kinda. Like most things designed for passenger planes they do 10 percent of the job they're supposed to, as they only extend to your knees. So you end up with your legs bent at the knees hanging over which is silly. But it was really really nice to eat rice on an airplane. And goddamn there's a lot of space for coach. We keep seeing ads for their new first class experience, which is apparently a self contained 10 x 8 pod with a bed and a 42 inch plasma flatscreen with two people waiting hand and foot. We riff on it having its own starbucks franchise and paper shredder, fireplace, and heated towel racks. We have been cracking each other up so much someone finally complained.
But I am walking to the back of the plane to eat more strawberries and duck under a curtain and open a window and look down at the north pole, so I don't disturb all the sleepers in the cabin.
I've seen this before; I used to fly from London to Seattle, which takes you over the pole - the most direct route. Usually in summer.
The impossibly pretty stewardess asks me if I see any polar bears. That would be one ginormous polar bear. I wish I did. But instead I'm fixated on something I've never seen before.
The biggest cracks in ice I have ever laid eyes on. And as lo fi as my in seat map is, we are generally at the top of the arctic circle. The little I know about sea ice, it does start to break up at this time of year, and the North Pole is much more unstable than Antarctica, not resting on a continental shelf, but this year a massive Canadian ice shelf disintegrated. I thought it dissolves into pack ice at the edges. Here in the center of things are canyon sized cracks. You can see into the water and actually look at the enormous walls of ice going down into deep blue forever. I know my camera can't even catch this - I'm staring at it out a tiny porthole with my neck craned through layers of dirty plastic.
It's still epic and grandiose and humbling. The first time I ever saw ice from horizon to horizon I got that peculiar sensation where you're so moved by something you get the sort of tightness in your throat of crying but nothing else. That sense of being made to feel really small but comfortably.
I get a little of it again. I'm probably wrong but what I see is unsettling.
RIP, Santa.
And polar bears.
8 hours into the flight. Nick and Mark are asleep. We're above the arctic circle and according to the map fairly dead on to the North Pole. I walk to the back of the plane where there's a little standing room area and eager flight attendants who even here in coach offer fruit by the bushel. I have some strawberries; they're amazing. I stretch my left foot out... I hurt my leg a few weeks ago and bruised it so badly they almost thought I had a clot, but instead I apparently damaged a nerve and my foot has this odd pins and needles sensation sometimes and I guess I'm always going to have it. This from just a bruise. Its driving me crazy in my seat. Need to go walk on it.
Singapore airlines is pretty cushy. This has to be the most comfortable experience in coach I've ever had. We even have leg rests. Kinda. Like most things designed for passenger planes they do 10 percent of the job they're supposed to, as they only extend to your knees. So you end up with your legs bent at the knees hanging over which is silly. But it was really really nice to eat rice on an airplane. And goddamn there's a lot of space for coach. We keep seeing ads for their new first class experience, which is apparently a self contained 10 x 8 pod with a bed and a 42 inch plasma flatscreen with two people waiting hand and foot. We riff on it having its own starbucks franchise and paper shredder, fireplace, and heated towel racks. We have been cracking each other up so much someone finally complained.
But I am walking to the back of the plane to eat more strawberries and duck under a curtain and open a window and look down at the north pole, so I don't disturb all the sleepers in the cabin.
I've seen this before; I used to fly from London to Seattle, which takes you over the pole - the most direct route. Usually in summer.
The impossibly pretty stewardess asks me if I see any polar bears. That would be one ginormous polar bear. I wish I did. But instead I'm fixated on something I've never seen before.
The biggest cracks in ice I have ever laid eyes on. And as lo fi as my in seat map is, we are generally at the top of the arctic circle. The little I know about sea ice, it does start to break up at this time of year, and the North Pole is much more unstable than Antarctica, not resting on a continental shelf, but this year a massive Canadian ice shelf disintegrated. I thought it dissolves into pack ice at the edges. Here in the center of things are canyon sized cracks. You can see into the water and actually look at the enormous walls of ice going down into deep blue forever. I know my camera can't even catch this - I'm staring at it out a tiny porthole with my neck craned through layers of dirty plastic.
It's still epic and grandiose and humbling. The first time I ever saw ice from horizon to horizon I got that peculiar sensation where you're so moved by something you get the sort of tightness in your throat of crying but nothing else. That sense of being made to feel really small but comfortably.
I get a little of it again. I'm probably wrong but what I see is unsettling.
RIP, Santa.
And polar bears.
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