Thinking At 30,000 Feet

I am visiting Idaho.  Always, when you fly long distances in a very short time, you think about being high in the air, changing time zones and accepting the fact that you are someplace not in your usual routine.  You think about a machine that can fly a few hundred people and their suitcases from state to state, remembering that only a few short minutes ago, you were down there on terra firma, gravity keeping you leashed to the ground.

Then, klunk, you're on the ground far from home and you join the stream of humanity in that new place.  The space you fly over is nothing to you.  You have no sensation of it except as it looks to your eyes, a big wide map of geographical features and then clouds that shelter your view of it here and there.

Snow had sifted lightly over tall mountains, especially in the Sierra Nevada range, and it looked like an investigator had dusted for fingerprints with flour.  Being so high over terrain I probably will never walk on instilled a feeling of distance, detachment and even of lofty solitude.  I could easily imagine I was simply my soul flying over a green lumpy blanket looking for the gateway to heaven.  I wondered if my sense of unfeeling about the earth below me and my lack of a physical sense of how it felt down there could be how a lot of people go through life.  It seems likely or else how do you explain being indoors  and staring at TVs instead of standing on the plain dirt and listening to birds sing?