Message-ID: <7B9018C6292CD311A6550090274F3C5B61D383@HQ-MAIL1.corp.itn.net>
From: Dan from the Arctic Circle <dan@itn.net>
To: dan@itn.net
Subject: Ruminations before a peanut
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 12:49:41 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2656.59)
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----_=_NextPart_003_01C23A45.552B4A10"


------_=_NextPart_003_01C23A45.552B4A10 Content-Type: text/plain

Ruminations before a peanut

It's dead-on noon in a cloudless blue sky 7 miles above the
earth. The plane is somewhere between, or rather above, the
Arctic Circle and Hudson's Bay. I'll have to check my map, but
by any reckoning it's the most desolate place I've ever seen.
It's late April and the seasonal ice that covers
this part of the planet is starting to melt. Cracks are forming
in the ice sheet and it's breaking into rough circles. It's
like one of those color blindness tests that they give you
from time to time where you're supposed to read the red number
seven in the green background, except that everything is made
up of spots of various sizes and if you can't tell your colors,
then spots is all you see.

Yes, the world in front of me is like a big color-blindness
test administered to a color-blind person: all jumbled spots in whites
and greys and with no big number seven in sight... stretching as
far as the eye can see, curving away right into the very horizon.
I half imagine that Virgin Atlantic has flown me to another
planet--that while the window shade was pulled we left the earth
and now are circling for landing on Venus or Pluto or wherever
the hell weird shit like this exists.

The big ice spots are all different sizes, all the way from great
big ones that so fill up my airplane window that I've got to
crane my head this way and that to see around them, to medium
sized ones and little ones that fill in the gaps. They have no
thickness, there is no ripple or topography whatsoever to this
world. It's a bit like painting a giant blown balloon and
then blowing it up a little more till the paint starts to crack.
Except this is even thinner, like mist on a glass maybe, and these
cracks are ten times fine and numerous.  It seems like i've woken up
and now i live on a giant aging cue ball... no features in sight.

I imagine myself on the surface as a polar bear, trekking
across this icescape, moving from one ice island to the next
catching whatever seal or fish I can in the gaps between. What
an odd life I have as a furry white bear, knowing only ice and
water and cold for most of the year. I think of the moonlit
nights and the wind and the terrible terrible cold. And they
say the wolves howl and howl and howl....

I can't even imagine the ocean underneath. Yes, there's water
under this thinnest of skins, and it's perhaps the most
ominous thing in this whole image--if only because one can't
really get a good look at it, like the shadowy man turning the
corner just as you turn your head to look at him. Yes, as the plane
moves, the sun glints off the water in between the cracks in the ice, and
you realize the more massive, hulking thing is the water underneath. 
it looms, if looming is the right word, black and brooding.  It seems a
solid, not a liquid-- the black substance under the thin skin of this old cue ball.

And Mom, you taught me that even the Ocean is only so deep. That
if you peel it back, you'll find an eerie seascape at the bottom,
puckered with knobs and spikes and ridges. Could it be?  Under this
featureless perfectness?  Such fickle fantasies of the mind... but why not?
I strip all the world's seas off and toss them away, spinning into space.
Now I fly over a naked world without the
vanity of its mother ocean, all prickly and wrinkly. And what's left now?
To pry into the very center itself and let the hot molten
core pour forth into the cosmos like the glassblower's unkempt drip?

No, not yet. The engines hum quietly, blissfully. Peanuts are
served.

Dan