Scars on the surface of a bruised planet hold deep secrets of past events. What amazing forces caused these pockmarks? What mysteries lie buried without ever revealing their stories -- disaster stories from years, centuries or even eons ago?
Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, Venus? No, my recent vision during some restless waking moments in the middle of the night was not from scanning the heavens for distant moonscapes or photos from a robot rover. Rather, it had me replaying captured moments from my own flights across this very planet. Criss-crossing continents for business (including military business) and pleasure over some 60 years, I was looking down fairly frequently on some remarkable scenery on our planet earth!
We have been told that the world-view of most of us was radically altered following the showing of the first photographs of planet earth. Floating in blue space, our globe was at last photographically captured at a distance. Knowing the world was round is not the same as seeing its wholeness in an actual image of the orb we call home. Astronauts with the “right stuff” clicked the shutters as they sped toward the moon in the late 1960’s.
From an aircraft, earth’s own surface scars can sometimes come into focus. For me a profound discovery occurred in late August of 1945 when I flew with a dozen others in our Navy patrol bomber crew over the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. The atomic era had begun only days before and we suddenly had the freedom to explore the land below us from the modest height of about 10,000 feet. We found Nagasaki, now famous, on our maps and wanted to have a look. We headed for the spot and we searched the scene below where the city was supposed to be -- and no city was visible to us. A mystery. Years later I understood better when I saw a before-and-after photo of the site in an official U. S. Government Printing Office report.
It clearly showed that on August 9
I was reminded of this in September of 2001 as I was flying back to New York on the first plane available to me after all flights had been banned for days. It was already night as we descended into the LaGuardia landing pattern and suddenly I realized that we were flying right over lower Manhattan – over the rubble of the World Trade Center. The fabled twin towers had vanished! It was an eerie sight: brilliant lights flooding the awesome cavity below where smoke was still rising from the ruins.
In the immediate years after World War II, I recall another sickening sight on a flight that was landing in Berlin. By the hundreds, skeletons of once-proud structures still stood naked in block after block. A ghoulish reminder of the blanket bombing from Allied aircraft.
A “scorched earth” phenomenon has been a legacy of many wars but it also has resulted from exploitation of the environment. Sometimes this comes from the deliberate seeking of selfish gains for human pleasure and comfort. In other cases wasted resources follow slash-and-burn tactics of hungry tribes; both can result in erosion and flooding -- an ironic reward. Flying in for a documentary filming at Mindanao in the southern Philippines one time, I looked down on the brown-singed hills and saw for myself just such a man-made disaster zone.
Nature can be very cruel even without human help. How can I forget the view on a bright sunny day flying out from Seattle and climbing above the low-layered clouds? Then, as we headed south and east, our pilot called attention to the view of a now-topless Mount St. Helen off to our right. Its volcano had erupted just days before lifting the lid off the mountain and spewing ash far and wide. I even carried a sachet of grey volcano powder in my luggage.
Enroute to Nairobi in 1989, we flew over the endless wasteland of brown Sahara sand – parched, barren, wind-swept and sad in spite of its bittersweet beauty -- surely a scar on the withered flesh of Mother Earth. And later in a low-flying aircraft of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship, we left lofty Mt. Kilamanjaro in Tanzania behind us as we followed the long-jagged path of the Rift Valley – a deep geological slash along the axis of the African continent as a scar without borders.
Whatever their origins for good or evil, there is beauty and a majestic aura in the formations that likely evolved from nature’s ancient convulsions. I have been permitted to see the majestic fjords of Norway, the towering monuments of the Andes, the steaming volcanos in Mexico, and the proud glory of Mt. Blanc in the Alps. I can’t forget the thrill of viewing Alaska’s Mount McKinley poking its hoary white head through the cloud blanket below us as we were flying past it to the Orient and we were more than 10,000 feet above that 20,000 foot peak – the tallest point of land in the United States.
There is a lesson, at least for me, in all of this metaphoric revisiting of past visions during flights of passage from place to place. Various lessons, it would seem: geological, political, economical, philosophical, ethical, moral and even spiritual. While the past has passed, the future is open. Do I meet it with confidence and hope or with fear and dread?
As a person of faith, I take courage from the Bible’s collection of psalms. As I reflect on the images that came to me in the middle of the night, I sense symbolic resonance from these visions within Psalm 46:
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult … The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Lee, retired from directing film, broadcast and communications projects for USA Lutheran churches, continues as a free-lance writer and consultant. He lives in Baldwin, Long Island, New York.
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| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 7 June 2004 |
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