River of Light

N2°31.83′ W166°35.98′

0525 ZULU

We fly south into the night, a tilted Southern Cross sitting low on the horizon ahead of us. In the cool darkness of the cockpit, I adjust the brightness of my primary display screen, causing it to flare slightly and then dim. My map display is already turned down and I focus on it as the point marking the middle of our flight drops off the bottom of the screen. As it disappears behind our virtual tail, I lean back into the sheepskin cover of my seat and roll my shoulders. Across the cockpit the Captain sits quietly, contemplating the darkness that passes us by at eighty-one percent of the speed of sound.

Directly off our nose, the spiraling arm of our galaxy rises into the night sky, its billions and billions of stars appearing as nothing more than sprinkles of dust across a black canvas. With our internal lights turned down as far as they can go, besides a new moon that is still hiding well beyond the curve of the earth and only empty ocean below for hundreds and hundreds of miles, there is nothing more than starlight illuminating the outside world. I press my forehead against the heated glass of the front windshield and stare upwards, following the ethereal shape of the Milky Way to where it fades into the nothingness of the void.

An hour ago, with the sun just having slipped behind a tattered wall of clouds to our west and a line of low altitude thunderstorms, looking like whirling dervishes spinning well below us, headed east, I took down the sunshade that had been covering my side window for the last thousand miles. Our flight path had been due south almost since the wheels had retracted into the wells after takeoff, and the late afternoon sun had burned hot against the right side of my face as we climbed into thinner and thinner air. The sunshades had gone up once we settled into cruise, leaving the cockpit dim and cool as the longitude continued its slow count down towards zero.

With the view outside no longer sunshade-filtered, the cockpit suddenly felt much larger, and in response I slid my seat back slightly while I watched the sky out my side window. For several minutes, my view aligned with a scattered rip in the distant clouds where light from the newly set sun leaked through and flowed towards us like a river of orange gold. In the far distance, a rain shower gliding above the ocean’s surface caught the very last rays of the day’s sunlight, turning it into a cascade of molten lava caught between cloud and sea. As we continued south, our alignment with the gap in the clouds changed and the sheet of rain disappeared—the paths of light and lava fading to nothing more than a memory.

Now with full darkness embracing our metal home, I continue to stare forward into the night. Somewhere ahead of us, still several hours away and on the other side of the equator, the island of Tutuila, American Samoa, our destination, floats in its puddle of dim light on a darkened sea. I lean back in my seat again, and my eyes sweep across the display screens, briefly settling on the engine permeameters and fuel burn. We are a thousand miles from anywhere, in the full darkness of the night, and the calming soft green glow of the readouts provides a moment of reassurance that pushes back against the constant “what if” that lives somewhere in all pilots’ minds. Satisfied with the current state of things, my eyes again move upward to the darkened glass of the front windshield. In the far distance, the Southern Cross continues its slow climb, tracking the line of the bright Milky Way as it rises higher into the tropical night sky.