Fog at the Gate
N38°20.40′ W123°31.29′
0325 ZULU
Thousands of feet beneath our belly, a textured layer of clouds floats in the fading light like a quilted sheet. The ride has been smooth since we made our climb to 40,000 feet two hours ago and left below us the unstable winds and swirling air mass that had been buffeting the airframe since we coasted out. A maintenance delay early this morning had caused the plane to get behind schedule, leaving us with only 40 minutes between its previous trip’s landing in Honolulu and our scheduled departure. With that in mind, pushing back on the rain-dampened ramp only 20 minutes late had felt like a victory.
With our dispatcher’s approval we traded fuel for time and bumped up our speed, shaving eight minutes off the 2,500 mile crossing. That extra speed has put us just off the coast of San Francisco as the sun drops its last few degrees to the horizon. With our nose pointing eastward, the last gasps of daylight are visible to us only as a changing palate of blues and grays stretching across the world ahead. In the far distance, individual points of light take shape out of the murk below as the ground lighting of the coastline rolls towards us. Rivers of clouds push through the Golden Gate and smother the City by the Bay to its south. But to the north, the steeply rising Marin Hills have kept the fog at bay, and the landscape is a soft painting of dark and light.
As we begin a slow descent from our lofty perch, I follow the undulating sweep of the Richmond Bridge westward to where it joins the dark, rocky shore of San Rafael. This was my home for several years, and I am hit with a sudden sense of nostalgia as I trace the path of the 101 northwards. The spaghetti tangle of lighted roadway twists and turns across the dusky landscape between patches of humanity, each one glowing faintly orange from the subdued urban lighting. I see the straight line of 2nd Street heading westward to where it splits and becomes Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. A flood of memories comes rushing back of driving this road at dusk, heading out to get Chinese food in Fairfax, or a burger at the brew pub in San Anselmo.
The controller hands us over to the next sector, dragging my attention from the past, as the landscape of my former home drops underneath our nose and we go feet wet again, skimming the northern shoreline of the North Bay. I turn sideways in my seat, watching the last of the lights on the Richmond Bridge disappear out of sight. In the far distance, past our wingtip, the fog pushing through the Golden Gate hasn’t reached all the way across the Bay yet, and although San Francisco is nothing more than a yellowish glow beneath the clouds, the lights of the East Bay twinkle brightly as the last of the sharp-edged features of the city fade into the murk of night.
We continue eastward, flying over the very southern end of the Northern Coastal Mountain range, its twisting tendrils of rock stretching 400 miles northward to Del Norte County. Ahead, the flat lands of the Central Valley stretch off into the far distance, where under the light of the sun we’d be seeing the peaks of the Sierra Nevada start to rise into a hazy sky. This evening, however, our view is nothing more than darkness, broken only by the scattering of ground lighting. The sky is slightly lighter than the ground—a soft canvas of bluish gray. The rising column of smoke from a massive wildfire burning hundreds of miles away mars the otherwise straight line of the horizon, its lumpy exterior a barely visible pale white that is only distinguishable from its background when it is lit by the strobing sparkle of lightning across the pyrocumulonimbus clouds that carry the smoke with them as they billow above the flames.
The airport comes into sight, first as a cluster of lights surrounded by nothing but darkness, and then as the more familiar and orderly layout of runways, terminals, taxiways, and parking garages. I visualize our path downward—an arcing curve that will cover about 12 miles and 3,000 feet, and then factor in the two other airplanes that we are supposed to be following. The math seems to work out, so I turn off the autopilot and call for the first notch of flaps. After almost five hours of watching the world go by, it’s time to get back to work.
