Taking the cheapest flight meant going to Las Vegas before heading east to Baltimore. We then flew over the Grand Canyon, the colors so Monet’ed from that height as to mostly blend together. I thought of a few friends who are colorblind and wondered if that’s more like how they would see it up closer; I don’t have the context to know. I wondered how much of that vast landscape was the actual park: it went on and on, horizon to horizon to horizon, a great collapsed sand castle of sheer cliffs falling straight down, a meandering blue flashing in and out of sight at the bottom. At the eventual edges, there were some softer-curving areas where the erosion of the water had been more spread out: one mountainside facing me looked like a Georgia O’Keefe ginkco leaf in fading fall colors. Glorious.
My newspaper put the hold on home delivery a day too soon: I wanted that November 5th paper to take on the plane! While we waited for our luggage, Richard bought me a late-printed Washington Post Special Election Edition in the Baltimore airport, which made me quite a few instant friends as I held it in my hands and people commented on the headline. By this morning, a pristine copy was being sold on Ebay for $400, according to the Post’s amazed online edition; yesterday was a very good day to be a print newspaper.
The air got fairly turbulent as we flew into Baltimore, but that pilot placed that plane down just exquisitely so. Well done.
We’re home.