One of the things you notice when flying across the US is just how much geology is going on down there. From 35,000 feet (10,668 meters), looking down on the West is like looking at a large shepard’s pie that’s been heated and dried out and reheated. Flow zones and cracks and shifts are all evident.
Somewhere over Nevada you start paying attention to great north/south strata, and then more and more meandering river canyons and mesas. From your lofty perspective, you imagine the vast shifting of the land, and see the evidence in the shapes far below. Then you’re over Utah, and see you see a hard ridge stretching off into the distance — a solid spine looking like leviathan’s backbone jutting up from the plain. The inflight entertainment system has a clunky interactive map, which, after some effort on your part, informs you that you’re looking down on the Capitol Reef. You can’t help but boggle a little at the sight.
But, before long, clouds obscure the lands below, and you’re left to wonder what it must have been like to live in that land before airplanes and satellite photos made it all into a single big picture, which (while still vast and impressive) is somehow smaller and nearly comprehensible. When you’re down on the ground, there are many small details to see: twigs and insects and pebbles and footprints and cigarette butts. When you’re far above, different patterns emerge: fault lines and erosion and uplifts and maybe even ancient seas. You can get lost thinking of the big fractals and the little fractals.
That’s what happened to me, anyway. It was a good distraction from the folks who weren’t wearing masks, or the woman in the next row with the deep, wet cough (Manon & I have to put our faith in our elastomeric P100 source-control masks).
Then I dozed off, and the next thing I knew, we were over the tail end of a Great Lake and flying over misty expanses of farmland. We came up to the St. Lawrence River, did a big turn to the south, and then I began to recognize things.
Disembarking at Trudeau International Airport, we made our way through the immigration automats where we scanned documents and had bleary-eyed photos taken. We were directed into the Imigration 2 office, where we took a number and a seat. Before long were standing in front of Officer Champagne, who went over our permanent residence forms and teased us “why would you want to come to Canada?” in a droll, Québecois way. Then he stamped our forms, and welcomed us. We high-fived, and Manon observed that we had celebrated our new PR status with Champagne.
Just like looking at a landscape from high elevation reveals things that might not be obvious on the ground, moving to a new city will reveal new things to us about our world, the people in it, and maybe ourselves.
If so, we’ll post about it here.