What we learned from the air

I look at the sky differently now. It's not up there somewhere, a bowl of blue or a soft ceiling of inconsequential clouds. Rather, it's a robust environment in which to operate, a playground and a testing ground, a place to be.

I look at the globe differently, too. Here is where the men casually carrying AK-47s asked to see our passports. There's the place where ice began to build on the wings, forcing us to turn back. Over there, a family invited us home to dinner. And here we saw a flock of snow geese below us, headed east over the tundra toward Hudson Bay.

In "Cat's Cradle," Kurt Vonnegut writes that "Peculiar travel plans are dancing lessons from God." Our travel plan - from Southern Africa to Fairbanks, Alaska, in a light aircraft - certainly was peculiar. And although dancing was hardly possible in our cramped cockpit, fancy footwork was required to dodge bad weather and appease aviation authorities. Whether we have learned the holy lessons that Vonnegut alludes to is another matter - one that may take a lifetime to sort out.

One thing is sure: A flight like this, with all its challenges, puts things in perspective, highlights the things that count. Things that don't count when navigating a single-engine Cessna through storm clouds: the ups and downs of the stock market; whether Microsoft will be split up; how much the recently traded quarterback will make under his new five-year pro-football contract.

Things that do count: Knowing that your family is pulling for you under circumstances that are probably more trying for them than they are for you; feeling confident that there's enough fuel in the tanks to reach your destination; hearing from friends and strangers who e-mail everything from weather reports to poetry to flying stories of their own; seeing first-hand that the amount paid the recently traded quarterback could sustain an African village or an Inuit town in the Arctic for years.

While the comforts of Europe in the middle of our odyssey were enjoyable, it was the beginning and ending regions that were the most interesting. Here, people and communities get by in circumstances that most of us would find unpleasant, if not intolerable. And yet many are doing so with a grace and sureness that is humbling and sometimes inspiring.

When we were getting to know each other by e-mail eight months ago, pilot Arthur Hussey noted: "I find the starting and ending points of the trip, Namibia and Alaska, to have enormous similarities.... Both are heavily natural-resource-based economies, largely controlled financially by metropoles outside their borders (Cape Town and Seattle), with substantial Caucasian-indigenous splits, in very fragile natural environments that are, on the whole, sparsely populated...."

This is all true, and was made clear. And yet as I draw together mental images of the trip, it is not the geography but being in the sky that is strongest - as it apparently was for our fellow travelers.

"Learning to read clouds and skies intrigues me," one friend e-mailed when we were stuck on the ground due to Arctic weather. "I've been noticing in the Bible how close those folks were to the sky - especially as they went out on the ocean in pretty little craft (like you in the sky) or stayed out all night with livestock. You can see why Jesus wanted them to be as expert in reading mental currents as they were in reading the sky."

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