Gone are the days when flying was a fun and unique adventure. We now have to cope with lines of people at security; no more travel agents combing through airline schedules for the best deals; we now have to do that for ourselves. And, we hope there will be enough room in the overhead bin when we finally get to our seats for our carry-ons. Today’s guest, a long-haul commercial pilot, is an impressive genius in reminding us how magical it is to take to the sky. When asked about how he arranged the topics of this memoir/travelogue he said, “[H]ometown is your first language because it’s where you first learn all the elements, whether it’s bridges, streets, rivers, or even cafes and houses of worship. They are a kind of arrangement of basic forms that I like to think of as almost chromatic, grammatical arrangement pieces, which you can then identify, even as you’re exploring places that seem so different. I thought that the structure of city of gates or a city of snow was a way of saying that I understand these places are incredibly different from the place I came from. I also see in them the structures that I came to recognize growing up even in a small city that most of the people in this city probably haven’t even heard of.” Vanhoenacker opens our vision to a more expansive landscape. He says, “Every pilot sees more of the world from above and then we get to explore the cities we land in. I get to see so much of the urban world, in particular, and it’s a joy for me to share it as best I can … Travel is a miracle and is something that would have amazed almost all humans who have ever lived to be able to travel the way some of us do now.”
