Painting lines in the sky

Jumbo overhead
Cote St. Luc, QC
March 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

I’ve spent the past couple of hours beside the food court of a dying shopping mall far from home, slurping their free Wi-Fi and trying to keep the work side of my work-life balance in balance. While having a laptop in a backpack makes it easy to work from anywhere, the realities of squeezing yourself into a tiny steel stool-and-table contraption normally used to scarf a Big Mac and a root beer mean my body is now paying, dearly, for the last 3 hours of productivity. It’s time to call it a day.

As I walk out into the near-empty parking lot, I hear the unmistakable sound of high-bypass turbofan engines far overhead. I look up and see a tiny dot tracing a perfect contrail across a stunningly clear blue sky. The sun is sinking to the west as the plane flies away from it, pushing into successively deeper shades of blue. I hope the pilots are enjoying an equally pristine view.

I take a fast shot with my smartphone - the one you see here - before I grab the real camera out of my backpack and try for something a little more close-in. I have to move quickly, as the plane is at cruise altitude, and is about to fly out of view beyond the mall. I have just enough time to zoom, compose and trip the shutter once before it disappears for good, but it’s enough for me to see that the tiny dot is, in fact, a Boeing 747-400.

I think about looking it up on an app so I might learn everything there is to know - right down to tail number and delivery date - about this aircraft. But I decide not to, because I’d rather hold onto the mystery of a large plane with hundreds of people on it, to wonder for as long as I have this picture and this moment who they were, and where they were headed.

Looking back at the long view I’ve shared here, I realize it isn’t much of a photo. But in photography as in life, the less spectacular is often the most intriguing.

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