It's a long way

I tracked my progress to the Middle East by the cities that drifted by far beneath the plane, cities whose names were beamed up to us via the plane's onboard tracking map. I started feeling far from home when the balance of vowels to consonants in the city names began to fall out of whack. Munich and Berlin I recognized. But then the cute flight attendants passed out a snack and when I looked at the map again, we were passing over places called Brno and Plzen and Iasi.



The flight from New York to London traced a lovely straight arc across the Atlantic, then wheeled south over Europe. People have been asking me for months whether I was nervous about my trip, and the truth is I never was. I kept waiting for my nerves to make themselves felt, but they stayed quiet all through November and December. It was the moment that the last recognizable city name -- it was Prague, actually -- finally disappeared off the little map screen in the back of the headrest. That was the moment I got nervous. I looked down and saw the lights far below in eastern Europe and realized I'd never been farther away from a single person I knew.

Watching "The Bourne Supremacy" instead of the scrolling map took the edge off somewhat. When the movie ended, I checked the map again and was relieved to once again see a city I recognized. The relief didn't last long. The city was Baghdad.

You can see on the map above that our flight path only deviated from its smooth curve one time, towards the end. That little zig was Iraq, and I think we can all agree that the pilot showed wisdom in that particular move. When we zagged back, we were over Saudi Arabia and the sun was coming up. I stretched my neck to see the sand but the desert was covered by clouds. When the clouds finally broke, we were over the Persian Gulf -- Emirati locals call it the Arabian Gulf, because Arabs despise Persians -- and the plane was low to the water. I saw oil derricks and one giant boat that seemed to be leaking a huge amount of green sludge into the water. When Dubai appeared on the coast, the one thing that struck me about the aerial view was the sand. It's a city built entirely into sand.