epiphany

North of Noon

I left the US for my second semester in China yesterday.

My flight left Chicago at 11:55am Central time, and I finally arrived in Dalian the next night around 8:00pm, China time (fourteen hours ahead of Central). I had to get up at 4:15am to make my flight from Madison, WI, to Chicago, sat in O'Hare for three hours, sat in another airplane for fourteen hours, wandered around the Beijing airport for three hours (which is remarkable for its lack of seating), and finally made it to my city.

The main flight was bearable, length-wise, and enjoyable, seat-companion-wise. I had the window seat just at the back edge of the airplane wing, and beside me on the aisle was an older man who had been a commercial pilot. His company is trying to set up an alliance with a Chinese airline, so he was going to Beijing to continue negotiations. He told me a lot about how airplanes and airlines work. He seemed to know just about everything about the kind of plane we were on (Boeing 777), yet seemed awestruck and really interested in it still. He was just a lot of fun to chat with.

The flight took us along the polar route, and we went far north of Alaska. The in-flight map would occasionally show a polar view of the world, and we were definitely going in a straight line. From the view on the normal map, though, we seemed to be going WAY out of the way: straight up from Chicago, turning over the Arctic Ocean, and straight down again through Siberia and Mongolia to Beijing. It was, technically, daytime for the whole trip, but we went so far north that the sun was just below the horizon. I had the southward-facing window, so I was able to view the sunset for about four hours.

The sky was remarkably clear from the Northwest Territories all the way to Beijing. When it wasn't dark, I could look out my window and watch the Great White North go by underneath. And it was indeed both great and white. The further north we got, the harder it was to tell what was ground, what was water, and what was just snow dunes. When we passed over Hudson Bay, I could see huge cracks and channels that told me the whiteness was ice (same for north of Siberia, once we got some light). Other than that, I could see the shadowed outlines of great mounds ripped and torn from north to south then softened by snow. But whether those were mountains or islands was impossible to say by sight alone.

I was completely surprised by the landscape in Siberia. The very north edge was a lot like northern Canada with nameless mounds and shelves of snow. But soon graying reds were peeking through the snow. At first I didn't believe it, thinking that nothing more than scrub could survive so far north, but when we came to the first mountain range, I knew that I was seeing trees: they climbed partway up the mountains but faded just below the glacial caps. I could see their shadows and bare forms piercing the snow throughout the valleys.

South of the mountains, I was stunned at the number of rivers, all frozen at this time of year, but unmistakeable still, as far as the horizon. They appeared to have twisted and rounded the hills. There were meandering areas that must have been marshes in the thawing time, vast swirling bends and crooks bent back upon themselves all the way to the horizon, a graceful, swimming land. Then came the greatest shock: five rectangles forming a square cut into the forest. Surely it was an abandoned prison camp. But no, not far away, maybe a mile or so, stood a town at the edge of a river. I could see individual buildings, and a long road or train track cutting across the land. I didn't see any more human activity for probably two hundred miles, but then another town popped up. This one I noticed because of a clearing similar to the first one, but this clearing held definite mounds of rectangular snow, several buried buildings. That clearing's town was farther away than the first. The town appeared to have been cleared of snow.

Crossing the mountain range near Mongolia, I noticed another geographic oddity: the sunny southern side of the mountains had more snow than the shadowed northern side. The north appeared to be bare rock (the first absence of snow I'd seen since coming across Siberia, apart from the towns), but the south was completely covered. I don't know why that would have happened.

As we crossed Mongolia and northern China, the ground became a frosted red. I assumed we were crossing the eastern end of the Gobi Desert, though I'm not certain of that. The land looked barren, almost Martian. Water or wind had rounded the ancient rocks. Little or no snow lay over the landscape. Only in the shadows could I see hints of blue and white. Again, we came to mountains, bare and brown. Cities occasionally appeared in the valleys. Toward Beijing, the mountains began to sprout scrubby trees, and I think I saw part of the Great Wall. We landed soon after.

Posted by at February 10, 2004 10:10 AM