Trans-Atlantic flights

Time was, going to bed early, I'd lie awake counting the number of times I have flown across the Atlantic Ocean—more flights than some people; fewer than others; always an adventure.

- BY TODD NELSON

Whether flying east in a night-flight, or west during the day, going away or returning home, I count 22 crossings starting in 1970, Boston to London.

I was 14 and moving abroad with my family, an open-ended trip. It inaugurated all the subsequent flights back and forth, in one way or another, for a still-evolving myriad of reasons. On that flight, I mostly struggled to get comfortable on the floor between the seats when I couldn't stretch out, nor sleep sitting upright. It made the flight arduous, until the momentous, after-breakfast glide path in the fog to land at Heathrow.

The plane flight-sensations were what Mark Vanhoenecker, a commercial pilot, describes when he writes, "Through the wall comes the sound of steady rushing, the sense of numberless particles slipping past, as water rounds a stone in a stream," he writes in Skyfaring, "but faster and more smoothly, as if the vessel parts its medium without touch." I could be the stone and my memories the rushing particles streaming past...as daylight wanes on our way up the great circle route up the east coast and over Newfoundland to Europe-memory as fluid dynamics.