Flight of fancy over a vast and sunlit land

I flew in an airplane for the very first time when I was 8 or 9 years old. It was a vastly different era back then, one so trusting that I, along with my sister, Sandy, just three years older, could be led right to the gate at Akron-Canton Airport by our mother and entrusted to the flight attendants until arriving at our destination where we were gently handed off to our oldest brother, Tim, who we’d be visiting for the week. The flight was all of 35 minutes, but that was plenty of time for me to fully smudge the window with chubby cheeks, intent on seeing everything below from Akron to Pittsburgh.

Unfortunately, I could only see the ground for maybe five minutes before heavy cloud cover blotted out the view and brought on a wave of motion sickness that I still remember to this day. I puked for the ensuing half hour and swore if I ever had the chance to fly again, I’d do a much better job of keeping myself together.

It was many years until I flew again, but by that time I’d learned that the greater part of keeping down my cookies was keeping a good view of the ground. The most common cause of motion sickness is a conflict of signals between the senses. Your inner ear knows you’re moving, but your seated body tells a different story. Your eyes take in conflicting messages as well. When you look about the passenger cabin, you’re going nowhere relative to all the other passengers. Your inner ear tells a different story, however, and trouble may soon ensue.

There are plenty of “cures” for motion sickness. Some work and some don’t. A lot of it comes down to your own sensitivity to motion. Put me in an airplane now, and I’m good to go indefinitely. Stick me on a carnival ride, however, and it’s going to get ugly in a hurry. This observation brings me to my own, personal remedy. If I can see the ground below me, I am glued to it, not in an effort to hold my guts together, but because I am absolutely thrilled and mystified by the sight of the world passing below. On a carnival ride, everything within my viewscape is whizzing by so quickly it’s impossible to focus on any one thing. Nausea ensues, and the fun ends forthwith.

I can’t think of many things that can keep me more entertained than looking out the window of an airliner and watching the landforms change below me. On a recent flight from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Dallas, Texas, the sky was crystal clear, and I remained glued to the small oval window beside me for the entire distance. One thing that I really love is trying to figure out exactly where I am on the map at any given moment. It’s not so easy while on the fly, but if you take pictures and compare them to a map later, you can check your guesses.

Another great joy is following the course of a river through the landscape. You can learn an awful lot about the weather of a region by observing the type of agriculture that’s taking place on the land below. On this trip, I saw a whole lot of hay land irrigated by pivot, alongside a whole mess of the very same soil outside those mile-wide circles that remained brown and dry.

In many instances, that “unused” brown space was occupied by electricity-generating windmills or solar panels — both technologies that harvest and convert the energy of the sun just as any other crop. In that regard, even the dry ground was living up to its potential as an energy conversion site. Not a bad way to go when the most abundant resource in the area is sunlight.

If you have comments on this column or questions about the natural world, write The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email jlorson@alonovus.com. You also can follow along on Instagram @railtrailnaturalist.