Lessons from a window seat
I'm never pleased to hear jets rumbling over my Somerville neighborhood. But I'm thankful for the reminder, and lesson, they provide. Air travel can simply be about Point A to Point B, or it can serve as a meditation on space and time and real estate.
Next time you fly out of Logan, grab a window seat. Out there, past the wing, is a unique story of our city and region slowly unrolling like a painted scroll beneath the belly of the plane.
Take a good look down. Not only can you see Middlesex and Suffolk counties bathed in a rose-gold wash from the setting sun, you will also see the origins of towns. On a clear day with few clouds, you can watch each pattern of creation, each tidy parcel and house color-coded and blocked like a faded board game. You will discover the bald spots and disguises of our made world and the patches of nature caught in between.
Not long ago, I was flying from Chicago back to Boston. The plane's flight path took me directly over what I assumed was Central Massachusetts. I saw a square-block village center, mostly houses and a compact Main Street. It was a perfect grid, as if laid out from an engineer's specifications, preassembled and dropped down at once. This locus was surrounded by more chaotic commercial and residential development, ringed farther out by helter-skelter industrial parks. The original main road, now probably called Old Route Something, still threaded the needle of downtown, but its glory had been usurped by the bypass, which faked right, then left, then right again around the center like an elusive running back.
Air travel is the story of America on speed. It's a drama that spans geology, urban planning, and abstract painting all at once. It's an epic poem of development, complete with imaginary heroes, gods, and monsters. It's a thousand-page novel of labor movements, planning commissions, and real estate tycoons, absorbed by the air traveler faster than on any train or automobile trip.
For this lost Massachusetts town, the writing was on the wall. Or, rather, a message could be discerned from the pattern of expansion that looked like scratches on a blackboard. I saw fields turning into subdivisions. I saw swaths of glinting asphalt and the bright blue and gray roofs of fresh megacenters. I wondered about the fate of the town's Main Street, how well it was faring in the wake of these Ikeas and Wal-Marts sprouting by the four-lane highway. I wondered how long before the forest would grow back. I even felt sorry for the old abandoned mall.
Closer to Boston, as we began our descent, the suburbs sharpened, and socioeconomics became stratified like the clouds the plane passed through. In some well-to-do communities, McMansions were accompanied by kidney-shaped pools. One stately subdivision abutted a Rorschach golf course. The spaces between each house seemed immense.
But other, less fortunate neighborhoods, just a few hundred yards away, had no paved driveways, no streetlights, no gate houses, no in-ground pools. These working-class ranches sat right behind shopping malls. Developers tried to hide their handiwork by sticking a thin line of cheap trees between the homes and a junk yard. This approach may have been halfway passable on the ground, but from the air everything was bare. I could see right through the smoke and mirrors.
As the daylight faded, neighborhoods lost color. We lowered over Somerville, Everett, Charlestown. The amber glow of streetlights suffused the air. The last landmark I saw was the Bunker Hill obelisk, sticking into the dusk like an ancient talisman meant to protect us -- or to remind us what some men and women fought for two-and-change centuries ago. Then we banked over the harbor, dipped to the runway, and reunited with planet Earth.
Perhaps flying is an evocation of childhood. Strapped to our high chairs, we see our country's public works as splotches of strained carrots and beets, dropped forks and knives impaling fields, and rusted drinks spilling in winding snakes from broken bottles. No one is there to clean up the mess.
There is nothing to cover it -- not until winter and its blankets of snow. But that is months, and miles, away.
Ethan Gilsdorf is a poet and freelance writer from Somerville. He can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com. 
