If you sit in a swing, an ordinary playground swing, and pump it a few times, and then really lean into it, when the swing reaches its apex it will stop for a moment while gravity ponders: pull you back, or let you go? In that moment of pure potential, it seems that you could come untethered from the laws of nature and traverse the layers of heaven like a staircase of glass. But gravity is a very predicatable referee. Down you come, backwards, saved from an embarrassingly intimate reunion with Great Auntie Earth by the chains of the swing.

I’ve tested the upper limit of a swing many times, and well I know the feel of it (what other point is there to a swing?), so when I came upon it again I knew what to expect after that moment of delicious hesitation. But this time there was no tether to keep me back from the face of the earth, and I was ten times as high up as a swing had ever brought me. The moment of doubt was proportionately longer. And then we kept going.

Instead of the simple conceit of a swing playing games with me and gravity, an obfustication of steel and aluminum and jet fuel had muscled its way through the bond between man and earth. I went up in the air; I looked down and saw the print of man thickly on what had once been comfortably lonely hills, miles of what had grown up cut down, what had run free boxed in. I went higher, and saw the secret caverns of the clouds, and observed their undisturbed herds ranging over the miles, not yet guessing the plague the fleaspeck aircraft carried. I looked around the cabin, and saw that we had alreadly learned to be heedless of these wonders, to feel so bored that we read tawdry novels of mundane things, or insipid merchantile airflight magazines, or televised trivia that had the gall to represent knowledge, here, amongst the clouds.

I returned to the land in a sprawling airport. I watched the disinterested minions of the airline conglomerate, transporting this baggage which had so recently been in the rare air of heaven as if they were fedual peasants and the luggage, pig manure. Everywhere you looked there was the imprint of the conglomerate, on rain slickers and baggage tractors, airplane tugs, flight attendants, jetways, jets. The amount of monogrammed clothing, the amount of paint used in stenciling, probably cost more money than my family sees in ten years. I couldn’t guess how many men or how much time it had taken to mitre the metal casing around the countless windows, to set the concrete forms for the architectural profiling. Great skeletons of steel supported the endless concoures, and everywhere led somewhere that was still the airport. Who knows how much of the structure was invisible to the traveler? And to think the whole thing was run through with a maze of electrical conductors carefully planned to allow signaling the aircraft and the passengers. And everywhere, everywhere the airline employees with such thinly veiled contempt for the travelers and boredom with their jobs that I marveled the whole system had not collapsed into a endless wreckage of concrete and steel long before I had ever arrived.

The grace of God supports the futility of man, and it will be a terrible day when that support is removed.

Yes, it was my first flight, and yes, I can already tell that with a few more I will be as bored as anyone else on board. As is almost usual, I gather, I spent more time in flight than I did in the meeting I flew out to attend, even without taking account of the time I spent waiting in airports. Ask if it was worth it and I will say I suppose so, because the business world has grown accustomed to flight and regards it neither as a fetish nor a taboo. We were meeting to discuss a very important client from whom we have been distancing ourselves through our habitual faults, and a number of intersting things came to light during the meeting that somehow had not come up on the infinite conference calls preceding the meeting.

So much of all I saw was permeated with waste and disregard, with gratification rather than diligence, that one must appreciate the sentiment of those who hurl invective at the industrial world and all that comes with it. In some eyes the sin is a matter of scale, and then industry is indeed wholly guilty; but in principle the chastiser of coporations is like the preacher who inveighs against the casual hook-ups of this age while he entertains a mistress. I have seen as much of independent living as I have of global business, which is to say not much and not the best, but I have detected a degree of vanity in washing dishes and mending fences. Back-to-the-earth people looking for life without waste are looking for Eden; and could they ever find the forbidden garden, how long before they reach for the forbidden fruit?

People say that the native Americans wasted nothing. That may be resaid: they had nothing to waste. There is always waste; one of the phyiscal laws that lifts our planes into the skies dictates so. We say the Indians did not waste, and we look with disgust on the white men who shot through multitudes of buffalo so the trains could pass. We say the Indians lived in harmony with nature, and venerate them for this miracle, but we don’t understand how they did it or what it cost any more than they would have understood if they had heard that white men could fly.

One day the bill will come due for the American way of life. If you want to know what the airports will look like at the end of that dark hour, look up Chaco Canyon. You could even fly out there for a first-hand look.