Its always delightful to take off in a jet plane- the exhilarating acceleration- the rumbling bumbling run down the run-way, the last jolt as the tyres part company with the ground, the swaying motion as the nose of the jet points skyward. You look out the window and you realize that you must be hundreds of feet above the ground already. The city is spread out like a diorama beneath you, and it all looks too life-like to be real: the plane banks around and you can recognize the Horseshoe, the downtown buildings, and you try and pick out the street you live on. This is easily the most dangerous time of the entire flight, for if a wing were to fall off or something, we would all be goners, for sure. There is just no way you could survive a crash from such an altitude, and why they go through that nonsense with the seat-belts is beyond me. Nobody ever survived a plane crash because he was wearing seat-belts. What we need to do is climb up high enough so that if the plane crashes we won't hit anything. The plane moves so slowly in relation to the ground - even though surely we must be doing at least sixty, seventy mph by now- that there is no possible way we are going fast enough to remain airborne. I always get uneasy at take-off.

We gain altitude: the individual houses and cars blur and become indistinct and then disappear altogether. The regular checkerboards of the inner suburbs give way to the curvilinear streets and cul-de-sacs of Pickerington and all the outlying subdivisions, and you begin to notice the major roads assume the larger pattern of section lines. We rise, and the scale imperceptibly shifts and now the roads are no longer roads at all but elements of the vast grid of township, range and section lines, overlaid upon an irregular geometry of fields and shining snaking rivers, impossibly flat, impossibly vast, which stretches half a continent. The plane is no longer flying above anything near so dangerous as the surface of the Earth (certain death to fall upon from any great height) in fact we're not even flying at all: we are drifting serenely and detachedly above an abstract quiltwork of mist. We are only going at a walking pace now, and if you could open the window I bet you could almost reach the ground from here. A cloud drifts below us, solid enough to walk on. It is now safe to walk about the cabin.

We were late taking off, of course, but even so the sun sets remarkably fast when you're flying away from it. I'm not sure exactly what ground our flight plan passed over- possibly Zanesville? Crooksville? Scranton PA? Bleak places all I'm sure, and scattered in between all the appalachian burghs and hamlets, all the dreary nowheresvilles in the middle of nowhere that no-one ever wants to go to. With darkness falling all over the hills and hollows of eastern Ohio they glitter like handfuls of spilt diamonds. I'm flying to NYC to see my sister.