JULY 1999

Boston via Chicago, destination: Tokyo
David spent the night before cleaning up all of his outstanding client stuff. When the sun began to come up, it was time to get ready. A quick shower, a change of clothes, checking and rechecking tickets, last minute packing, and we were off. Our friend, Kyoko, stayed at our apartment the night before, the three of us got into a cab at about 7:00 a.m. Traffic to the airport was light, as it always is in the morning, and our cab got us to Terminal B in about 15 minutes, plenty of time to check in before our 9:15 AM flight. Or so we thought. The American Airlines ticket counters were packed with at least a hundred people ahead of us. Then we saw an insignificant hand lettered sign on a little stand, directing Chicago-based passengers, like us, to the south check-in counter, not the main counter. There were only a few passengers going through Chicago, so we checked in easily, and our baggage was checked through directly to Tokyo.

We waited about an hour, watching at the gate for our plane. Finally it showed up: a "Super 80", really just an old DC-9 with a paint job. We were assigned to Row 19, three seats on the starboard side. David got the window because he went in first, Kyoko sat on the aisle and Beth was in the middle. Pushback from the gate was five minutes late, and we taxied for another ten. We got a nice tour of the airport with views of Boston across the bay through the lifting mist. A 767 was ahead of us. He took off, a 727 landed in front of us, and then, the point of no return. We made a perfect run to the east into the rising sun and lifted off over the bay. The ocean mist and cloud cover were probably similar to the conditions JFK, Jr. had run into over Martha's Vineyard, but we climbed through it without incident and made a 180 degree left turn to head west. We crossed back over the shore, where the clouds broke up into cumulus puffs, and the land features were barely visible. We could see the contrast of the white of the clouds against the pure blue sky above, where it changed from the normal light blue to the deeper, richer hue that hints at the blackness of space. But at 32,000 feet, we are still closer to earth than we are to deep space that is defined as beginning at 250,000 feet or so. The only thing better than flying on a clear night is flying on a day that is clear enough to see the towns and cities as we pass over. We like to wonder about the parallel lives that cross like this, the people on the ground going about their lives. Who was down there? Who was looking at us, watching our contrails while we hurry along above them. Even though we hadn't had much sleep in the past few days, we felt awake and alert, probably the adrenaline making up for the fatigue. We didn't have the energy to carry on a conversation but we don't want to sleep and miss the sights outside the window. It was clear and hazy over Lake Erie, so the lake just drifted off to nothing. The horizon was not visible, and it was hard to correlate the actual landscape with a map because of the haze.

As the haze lifted, the Canadian shore of Erie was in view. Around Cleveland the rivers seemed to be very silty with gray plumes of silt extending way out into the lake. Going past Detroit, we saw trucks and cars on the highways. As we get into the Midwest, we could see many undulating rivers, oxbow lakes, rectilinear farms, and nearly straight county roads. One could probably figure out the crops by color if you knew how. The land is inhabited by maybe one or two families on a 640 acres section, with maybe 10 or 15 people per square mile. Fallow, unplanted land made up about 20 percent of the land area. Lake Michigan was vast and blue, with some haze obscuring the north end of the lake.

The density of land use picked up dramatically around Chicago. The landing pattern was a series of right-hand spirals, which pivoted directly over another airport, maybe in Milwaukee, and we crossed over at least two airplanes on their final approach to the smaller airport. The landing pattern gave us a good tour of the north Chicago suburbs. Finally, a solid touchdown at O'Hare Airport amid 747's and wide body planes. After deplaning, we made the obligatory bathroom break, and then had Chicago-style pizza (what else?) before the main flight.

We had only about an hour to wait for the continuation of our flight. We were scheduled to fly to Tokyo on a 777, the newest plane manufactured by Boeing, a wide-body plane with a 2-5-2 configuration, and we were in Row 32. Beth and David had the two outside seats, while Kyoko had the seat directly across the aisle. Pushback was at 1:15 PM EST. There were lots of kids on this flight, strategically arranged all around us. The Captain told us that we had a take-off weight of 630,000 pounds, so we would need the full length of runway 32L. We had to wait on the ground for lots of little guys to take off ahead of us. We waited for about a half-hour on the ground. We did not have to make other connections, so this delay was no big deal, just a little boring looking at the same strip of runway. The map on the screen at the front of the cabin showed Tokyo to be 10085 km (6267 miles) from Chicago. Finally, we turned onto the runway for our takeoff. We used the full length of the runway and the screen showed our ground speed to be 212 mph at liftoff. We wobbled all over the place as the plane fought for altitude. We were behind the engines, so we heard and felt the exhaust. The screen at the front of the cabin started ticking off the altitude and speed, and it showed us a little map with our position pinpointed. Each seat had a personal screen, and Channel 11 showed the continuous map readout and flight data. The flight attendants gave us embarkation and disembarkation cards to fill out for Japanese customs to review. It was official now; we were really going to Japan.

Airline food gets a bad rap sometimes, but today was good. We had a choice of steak with tomato butter or mustard crusted chicken served with Americanized sushi, pickled ginger and a salad, just the right meal for a long trip: not too heavy, but fun to eat and enjoy. The kids were generally settling down after eating. We heard minor screaming at times but voices with laughter and fun too. We passed between Lake Winnipeg and Hudson's Bay, probably the flattest part of the continent. The clouds were generally heavy with some breaks. Lake Winnipeg was visible for a while to the west (left) side. On a flat map our route did not make sense, but on a global scale we were following a direct line on the sphere. We followed the sun on our east to west route and it changed position slightly but was always with us. Our route avoided all of the Rockies, except for the stretch through northern Alaska.

10:00 PM EST The ride over Canada and Alaska was uneventful, and we slept for a good part of it. The sun on the clouds was very bright, too bright to look at and most of the good features were hidden anyway. The window shades were pulled down by the flight attendants to enable people to sleep, so it was dark in the plane with little crescents of bright light coming from under the shades. We were somewhere over the North Pacific, kissing the international date line, fighting turbulence that started over the west coast of Alaska. We were projected to be in Tokyo at about 4:00 PM local time (3AM our time) which would put us in Tokyo at the height of rush hour. We watched a Japanese comedy with subtitles on the little television screen. It showed that people are the same everywhere: quiet, irrational, fearful, blustery, and two-faced. All you have to do is to change the names, circumstances and cultural references. The plane became totally silent at times with just the sound of the engines. Everyone was feeling the effects of over nine hours in the air and was either asleep or quietly reading.

The Pacific was covered with clouds, and we could have been over Georgia for all we could see. According to the map, we crossed the date line. Happy tomorrow, just like that. Our ground speed varied from 475 to 550 mph, depending on the wind speed.

2:20 am EST: We were within 250 miles of Narita Airport, finally smoothing out after about a half hour of rough turbulence. White-capped waves could be seen directly below us. The clouds had partially cleared away and we were still cruising at 39,000 feet. As we descended there seemed to be a feeling of anticipation throughout the plane--window shades went up by one as people became curious about what they could see. We put away our US money and pulled out our Japanese Yen. Japan was close. We pulled out the camera to snap pictures of the Japanese coastline.

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