At 30,000 feet above the Mackenzie Country, it all looks very different. A landscape that took two days to traverse on foot a few weeks earlier suddenly looks orderly, as if you can skip across it in an afternoon in a pair of sneakers. You can take it all in in one glance.
Looking around the aircraft’s long, sleek cabin, I notice there appear to be two kinds of air travellers. A handful, like me, are transfixed by what goes on outside the window, fascinated by glimpses of terrain from above. The rest pay no heed to any of it and would rather read the newspaper. Perhaps it is boredom born of familiarity or outright denial, but the view of the landscape from high altitudes does not seem to register as a miracle with this silent majority.
You can spot us window-gazers on any flight. If we haven’t been able to secure a window seat, we’re constantly craning our heads around the other passengers in our row to get a view of what’s going on outside. Flying for us brings a kind of child-like joy, especially because it transforms our perception of the world.
Caged Power
Only half an hour ago, we were stationary on the runway, waiting for our turn to take off. As I looked from my window seat on the port side, the landscape had a familiar scale and form. The cars and buildings were as I always experienced them. The windows and trees were perfectly in scale with the person walking their dog beyond the perimeter fence. The view of the horizon was obscured by the clutter of buildings and trees, foreshortening my view of the world to a few hundred metres.
Suddenly, the aircraft’s engines roared with caged power, the overhead lockers shook and the coffee pots rattled in the galley. The scenery whizzed past the window with increasing pace until it disappeared before my eyes could take it in. As the nose of the aircraft began to rise, in one clean movement the plane transformed from a fast-moving earthbound object into a flying machine. This is fossil-fuel capitalism at its best. Only massive amounts of energy kept the whole thing in the air. Our safety was in the power of the engines.
From a new high vantage point, and as the noise of the engines retreated to a soft whine, the sensation of speed was lost and the landscape could be seen as a united whole. Roads, rivers and paddocks formed grids that bowed only to the enduring certainty of a hill or a river. The window-gazers like me tried to match this view with the experience of travelling across it by car, boat or foot. There was a lot of deciphering of mountain peaks and towns now seen from an unfamiliar angle.
Temperamental engines
The power of flight has been with us for only a short time, yet it has had a large impact on the way we understand the landscape. Most of this was ignored in the early years of flight, as pilots had their hands full in negotiating dubious construction, ever-changing weather, navigation requirements and temperamental engines.
With no time to do anything but keep the aircraft flying, it fell to their first passengers to truly observe what was happening below. Anne Morrow Lindbergh was one of the first to do so in her 1935 book North to the Orient. She accompanied her famous pilot husband Charles on some of his early flights and recorded her impressions of their 1931 flight from the United States to China via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. She was initially uncertain about what she was seeing, and commented, “The familiar landmarks below me had no reality, robbing me of the realisation of life and therefore much of its joy.” She missed the slow pace of the landscape as viewed when walking and cycling. “The great speed of flying meant that recognition of landscape features often happened a while after they had been passed over.”
The Lindberghs pioneered many of the air routes that have become a familiar part of international travel. Very quickly, Anne Morrow Lindbergh considered herself an old hand at a game that was new to everyone else. In 1948, she flew to Europe on a commercial airline. She viewed her fellow passengers as detached and disconnected from the landscapes below them, describing them as “comfortable, well fed, aloof and superior”.
She commented on the “curious illusion of superiority bred by height, the illusion of being God”, and condemned it as “a terrible thing” that reduced the image of landscape to a mere carpet pattern. It was this illusion of superiority that allowed Allied bomber crews to devastate the industrial cities of western Germany in the later stages of World War II and was most definitely aboard the Enola Gay as its crew jettisoned the atomic bomb Little Boy over Hiroshima.
Grand designs
Flight, and the aerial view it permitted, transformed the human perception of landscape. It reinforced the power of the plan view that dominates to this day and cannot be beaten out of students of design. With no foreground, the aerial view shuns the conventions of the picturesque, but is too distant and abstract to register as sublime. It has become the preserve of the planner, landscape architect and urban designer wielding the eye of god and his heavy hand to design everything that can be seen from above. The view from above has become so dominant, it is hard to imagine how people conceived and mapped their landscapes before. As with the Earthrise picture taken in 1968 by an Apollo 8 astronaut from lunar orbit, it was one small step for humankind, but a giant leap forward for landscape perception.
Now, from my window on the port side of an aircraft flying over the South Island, I have no desire to bomb anything, nor do I feel any god-like superiority. All I feel is wonder that what seems like a disconnected mess of individual spaces at ground level becomes an orderly, connected landscape from up high.
The woman seated next to me has picked me for a nervous flyer. “Is this your first time flying, dear?” she asks. “No, not my first time,” I reply, slightly wide-eyed and still looking out the window. “But that is the Mackenzie Country down there … I walked across it a while ago.”
It’s very easy to misinterpret the look of a window-gazer. She pats me on the hand and whispers, “Oh, it will be all right, dear.”
Matt Vance is a Banks Peninsula writer and lecturer in landscape architecture. His new book, Innerland (Potton & Burton Publishing, $39.99), is out now.