Robert Gerst: O Beautiful River!
From 35,000 feet it’s hard to see what’s on the ground and nobody on this airplane is looking. We are heading back to Chicago and I am remembering that Carl Sandberg poem about the train rushing to Omaha. “I met a man on a train and asked him where he was going and he said, ‘Omaha.’”
I flew from Boston to El Paso via Chicago on Sunday and the scene on the plane then was a little different but essentially it was the same.
On the first leg of the flight, from Boston to Chicago, though it was summer and dawn, everyone drew down the shades over the cabin windows and took out their handhelds and fell into them so that there seemed to be no world outside, no world around us. There was nothing but the rows of seats facing in one direction and slumped heads and the glow of tiny screens, a constellation of little screens that glowed but bore no starlight.
In the airport in Chicago, men in shorts and women in halters streamed down the corridor in a ceaseless stream heading God knows where while the voices on the TV monitors inveighed and indicted and then we filed again onto the airplane.
On the second leg of the flight, morning now, from Chicago to El Paso, the shades on the windows were already drawn and no one thought to open one. The handhelds emerged. We were a congregation of dreamers looking nowhere but inward. We landed in El Paso.
So I flew across a continent on a sugar day of summer nullifying America. Where birds are hatching and people live and love, I saw nothing.
But when you stand with your legs on the ground and behold what’s before you, the world shimmers with beauty. This photo shows me (that’s my shoulder intruding into the lower right of the image) standing at the bank of the Rio Grande River near Las Cruces, New Mexico. In reality, a glorious mountain rises where this photo shows merely a pale white sky. It’s hardly a photo. It’s all I could capture while I held my laptop in my hands and snapped a shot as the glare from the sun made the screen invisible to me. It’s an intimation of what is.
O beautiful river!