You sometimes can see millions of points of light when sleep eludes you on board an airplane that lumbers through the sky during night hours.  We were lucky to have first class seats although the plane was a “people as cargo” carrier. I was not sleepy and uncomfortable and did not want to put my light on to disturb Carol and other passengers.  I looked about and could not see another light on so I acquiesced and settled for lifting the window shade and trying to make sense out of this end of our trip to Hawaii.  We were coming back to routine and reality. Flying so I could see the millions of points of light of American cities at night densely packing the landscape made me aware that this was a huge country and it was only settled thickly at both edges along the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific.  What I saw in the middle was little since some of the trip was too high and above the clouds.  I did get to see the tops of clouds and as we approached the city of Mobile, the horizon was lightening so that the curve of our globe was clearly outlined.

I may have been seeing things that were not there. More correctly, I might have been seeing things that were there in ways I had never seen them before.  I was awake at night and could not seek my computer to record my thoughts as they surfaced.  I am writing this, using notes I was able to scribble without actually seeing the page of paper I was writing on.  I thought it necessary to do this for I hate to waste time in not reading or not writing.  Just sitting without even the ever-present television was intolerable.  So, I flew into the sunrise, the pilots and I, awake.  I don’t suppose they ever recaptured the first experience they had in the sky at night.  They were our drivers and had to stay awake.  I was driven and wanted but could not accomplish sleep.

What I did see was worth the cramped and uncomfortable first class experience. Through clouds and at times when we flew at lower altitudes, I could see great cities splayed like giant urban cephaloids with rippling tentacles reaching out into suburban America. These creatures were alive with lights seen from above and they were awake with sentinels to show the way home for the night crawlers down on land. There were so many lights stretching from horizon to horizon.

It seemed inconceivable to me that this mighty land with so much open space was still not settled from sea to sea.  I thought that it was equally unthinkable that some other people from other parts of our globe could ever invade it. Even the great mass of Islamic peoples who think of us as an enemy and scream “Death to America”, how unlikely it would be if they were to invade and try to fill our empty spaces.

Flying into the sun at night while not being able to sleep makes you think of such things.