Concealing the Canyon

For myself, the pulling power of the North America lies not in its cities, characterised by highrise and grid like streets layouts, but by natural landscapes that sprawl across several rail routes linking one side of the sub-continent to the other. I say rail routes, as this is the mode of travel through which I have viewed these expanses in the past – the Rockies, the Prairies and the Pacific coast, to name but three. Of course this is just my opinion, my own stereotypical view, informed by a couple of mammoth treks in the 1990s.

A different breath taking perspective of these landscapes might be viewed from the air, possibly one of the few occasions when the sprawl and height of metropolitan sky-scrapers looks spectacular, as its vast spread opens up beneath you. But of course being able to get a prolonged view from an aircraft is dependent on cloud scarcity and a fair bit of luck.

My luck was certainly in when I last flew to the USA, en-route to Mexico. We flew across the Atlantic, and kept going before turning left at Winnipeg and heading all the way down to San Diego at the tip of California. On leaving Winnipeg, the transparent view down to the ground was uninterrupted for the rest of the flight. For three hours cities, towns and wildernesses appeared unhindered beneath; a bird’s eye view from one side of the USA to the other.

There was a slight complication though. In fact it was infuriating. The best view will always be had by those passengers with window seats, but this should not normally restrict too much the view of those sitting in the middle or the aisle seats, just a case of them having to lean over a bit extra to look outside – a bit of give and take between neighbours.

On this flight though, my surly neighbour in the window seat had a strange kind of aversion to daylight. The amount of time that his shutter was up during the ten-hour flight could be measured in minutes. Events usually went something like this:

Neighbour decides to visit the gents. No need to ask his fellow passengers to move. No need to communicate with them. Rather he uses the occasion to demonstrate his nimbleness. So with a sudden jerk, he positions one foot on his arm rest, moving the other foot onto the next arm rest, and then the next, until with a hop, skip and a jump, he lands in the aisle.

I quite came to look forward to his regular visits for a tinkle, not because I was amused by his unorthodox manner of getting there, but because it at least presented a chance to flick up the blind and absorb the clear view down below. Alas, five minutes later Mr. Selfish Git (for this is what I had now named him) would land back in his seat. I would continue to stare hard out of the window, just to let him know that some of us actually did like day light. He would grimace and hold a hand up to the side of his face, as though to block out any rays of sun shine, expecting me to say, ‘Oh dear I am terribly sorry, I did not mean to dazzle you with some natural light. Well why don’t I just hand back complete control of the window shutter to you (you selfish git). After all, it must be your exclusive right.’

And with each passing minute, following his return from the loo, he would continue to grimace, hold up a hand to shield the light, and gradually move the shutter down a couple of inches at a time, until the thing was closed.

It felt like the clear views on offer , which covered hundreds of miles, could only occur on a tiny proportion of flights that I might make in a lifetime. So who was this kill-joy?

I just put it down to bad luck. But then things started to really grate inside me. You see on Selfish Git’s penultimate visit to the loo, up went the shutter, and the glowing sand stone colour of the rock formations below made me gasp.

Surely it couldn’t be. Surely if it was, the pilot would have drawn the attention of passengers to it. Not that they were likely to have missed it. What apparently lay several thousand feet below was a segment of the natural phenomenon known as the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile Selfish Git returns to his seat and in no time has pulled down the blind.

Oh well, I thought, you must have been mistaken. It was probably just another set of rather nice rocks. However, a couple of minutes later, the lights were turned full on, awakening a section of passengers from their siesta. The pilot announced, ‘For those of you on the right hand side of the plane, you can see a fantastic view of Los Vegas in a minute’s time’. The interest the announcement generated was considerable, lots of people leaning over to peer out of the windows – sharing views, just like one should. But surely if we had just passed over a section of the Grand Canyon, the pilot would have made a similar  announcement shortly before, even if people were having a snooze.

And then I looked at the route map on the TV screen in front, which alternated between grand scale (view of the entire USA, with a handful of principle cities indicated) and micro scale (zoomed up map indicating the local features over which we were passing). There on the screen was evidence enough of what I had just missed. Our current position was indicated by the words Los Vegas and a couple of millimetres away from this label was a further one that read Grand Canyon. I was furious that I should be denied an aerial view of this natural wonder. And how could Selfish Git (although by now, I wanted to call him something much worse) fail to have been impressed by the view he surely saw as he came back from the loo, unless he flew over it every week.

There was also something telling about the way in which other passengers had made much more of an effort to get a view of glitzy Los Vegas than of the Grand Canyon – money doesn’t talk, it swears.

Ten years earlier, Pacific coast bound, I had stepped off the overnight California Zephyr Express from Denver to Los Angeles, onto a Los Vegas platform, having already travelled a thousand miles. A large proportion of passengers made their exit here. Equally, I am sure they could have said to me, ‘What? Here is Los Vegas and you ain’t even gonna spend half a day looking around.’ I got back on and continued onto more natural land and seascapes. Still each to their own.

But back to my current flight. Selfish Git, with one hour to touch down, summonsed an air hostess by snapping his fingers. He demanded that she obtain for him some shaving gear, the likes of which are only included in Club Class kits and off she toddled. Journey’s end, and as passengers started to exit the plane, he remonstrated with her,  ‘You did not even bother asking,’ he barked.

‘Perhaps you should fly Club Class next time,’ I wanted to interject.

At immigration, I found myself at the back of a rather slow moving queue of passengers. Fortunately so did Selfish Git. I derived some satisfaction from thinking that maybe he loathed queues to the same extent as myself.