An hour after sunset on a Dallas-to-LaGuardia flight last week, a mottled, blocky mass of gray slowly presented itself off the portside windows of our plane—a steeply vertical theatre of cloud rising at its top almost to our announced cruising level of thirty-three thousand feet and illuminating itself garishly from within with all the promise of a major out-of-town opening. “Overdramatic” was the first thought that came to me at my west-facing window, but as the plane moved closer I began to see that this was no ordinary midland midsummer night’s thunderstorm. Most of the sunset’s traces had drained from the sky by now, but this monster had brought its own light system. Nearly continuous flares and bloomings and fadings from inside its lumpy body suggested a north–south mass of perhaps forty miles, and the closer bolts—blinding-white tree trunks of lightning that threw out limbs and root systems and jagged tendrils and stemlike afterthoughts—revealed an almost sheer wall of storm facing us and falling precipitously away into the darkness. The front, still some miles to the west and mostly below us, was not an immediate concern, but its dimensions and statements did not permit us the customary half-lidded, sidelong glances of the airborne. “For those of you who missed the Fourth of July, there’s quite a show down there, off to our left,” the pilot told us, and when some people across the aisle got up and leaned closer for a look, the next crazed shot of light gave them the faces of night riders and clowns.
Our flight came four days and thousands of airline flights after the T.W.A. disaster at Moriches Bay, but I don’t think that a single person on our smaller plane failed to connect that unimaginably stopped journey with our own trip and its unscheduled present sideshow. Now this, I thought, and I reminded myself how many other airliners were headed for New York or Chicago or Sioux Falls or Ottawa just then, and how long the odds were that anything amiss would happen to ours. I wanted safety in numbers and anonymity; I wanted this storm not to notice us. Then, still staring out of my plastic oblong, I saw that this phenomenal airspace had come with lesser mesas and peninsulas of storm stretching away up ahead, still parallel to our path but closer now, and putting out their own spritzes and fistfuls of lightning, and this time a line came to me from that old Broadway biblical play “The Green Pastures”: “Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!” Under the foot of our cloud I glimpsed the faint yellow gleams of some Tennessee or Kentucky hamlet below, and I could almost feel the air suddenly becoming cooler down there, and the leaves beginning to stir, and some householders, peering up at the approaching familiar melodrama, getting up to move a flowerpot off the porch railing and to call in the cat or the kids.
Nothing happened on our flight. The storm, by now presenting a pinkish sheared-off anvil shape at its top, was pulled slowly offstage behind us; reading lights were snapped out; and our plane, now a tunnel of sleeping strangers, slid along on its homeward slot, comforting us now and then with a soft little jiggle. Because none of us could know what it is like to fall from the sky or be blown out of it, or to come apart into fragments, we could squirm lower in our seats, punch the dinky pillow and fold our arms, and, just before sleep, remind ourselves not to forget, not quite yet, the imperial beauty of that thunderstorm and the boring but generally ongoing solipsism of pure luck.
Unpublished, July, 1995