Window Seat View

I usually choose the aisle seat when possible - makes for less awkward multiple trips to the bathroom (thank you airline bankruptcy for scrimping on in-flight beverages, by the way. I'm not missing those extra few rounds to the VIP water closet up front.

When aisle isn't an option, I'll still usually opt for a middle seat, believe it or not - for the same reason (climbing over two people is way trickier than just one. It's worth being a bit more crowded if it means a bit more mobility [oxymoron?]. You can sneak past one sleeper, as long as their tray is clear, but two? Good night! Better to pass on the Ginger Ale and hold it til landing).

So I don't often make it to the window seat, even though I live for views of clouds and erosion lines. But the regional carriers for American Airlines offers the one-two layout where there are no middle seats and the lucky passenger assigned to seat A gets both a window AND an aisle (pure luck).

My seat was over the wing, so my view was still somewhat obstructed but what a view. I like being reminded that we are small and that our whole lives make up the tiniest fraction of the world, but our tiny lives still shape the landscape and patterns of our world make up the patterns of the whole world.

Jagged highways and winding lanes sliced through patches of trees or across mountains;

Suburban sprawl- with Walmart rooftops and well-planned cul-de-sacs;

Where are there bridges, which cities are hubs...


My favorite bird's eye views are farms, which seem to go on forever on the ground but have such obvious lines from above, especially out west. The flight from Cambodia leaving Siem Riep back to Bangkok showed me that even the most rural of farms (and I mean in the middle of Nowhere) clearly delineate property and crops, usually with precisely straight lines. The grids over the Great Plains are multi-colored. In the South they seem much more haphazard. These grids don't just decorate the land, they're proof of little lives.

These grids don't just decorate the land, they're proof of the little lives.