Flying home on Good Friday

Crossing the Sierras, by moonlight at 30,000 feet, I can make out Tahoe by its rim of light. I can see Reno, the Bay Area. A canyon weaves down from a vast lake. I’ve been following a long glaciated valley, perhaps it’s the Hetch Hetchy? Or Kings Canyon?I can trace the course of the river canyon by a string of light that begins like a lone flame, and crescendos into a candelabra of light as it tumbles down the mountains to the Central Valley, ringed with lights along Highway 99, like a bathtub ring, light reestablishing the ancient shoreline of the inland sea.

Sacramento, a pool of light as if the earth glowed from within. The crossroad contemplating resurrection with light.I can even make out the edges of San Pablo Bay, the north country. The amber sodium vapor and the green fluorescent lights. Mt. Diablo’s silhouette, filament of moonlight. The freeways like cells moving through capillaries on 580.

The geometric patterns of industry and suburbs like ideograms of light for the moon to see. I try and recognize the constellations from this height. I can make out the Big Dipper, but the suburbs snaking up the canyons in dendritic formations, industry’s strange calligraphy of light abutting up to the edges of the Berkeley hills rob the sky with their light. A spillage of light up the canyons of the nobility’s territory, the privileged herringbone of empty parking lots, and the strange glow of stadiums lit from within, though the games been long over. 

Stray renegade light slices the night as we descend, Dante-like. I can begin to make out the contours of the land as we enter from the south along the black bay, to bow before Moloch on this eve of Oestare, looking like basilisk lizards about to run on water but land replaces the water at the last minute. Blue eyes to ward off the evil eye, greets us and guides us home to the portal.

Good Friday