By the time I could see again, the captain had announced the final descent into Seattle. Couldn’t they find a less ominous phrase for it? I don’t like flying as it is, even without the implication that before landing I might want to have all my worldly and spiritual affairs in order. I pressed my head against the window so I could see the ground when it came into view. Maybe I could convince it to let us land without it being our real final descent.

Or maybe not. The plane banked abruptly and began to climb again. A moment or two later the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom.

“Sorry about that, folks. Little disagreement over who got to land next. We’re going to take another spin around the Emerald City and then we’ll have you at the gate right on time.”

Why do airline pilots always call passengers “folks” ? I don’t usually take umbrage at generic terminology—I’m one of those forward-thinkers who believes that “man” encompasses the whole darned race—but at whatever o’clock in the morning, I thought it would be nice to be called something that suggested unwashed masses a little less. Ladies and gentlemen, for example. Nevermind that, being an almost six-foot-tall mechanic, I had a hard time passing for a lady on a good day, which this wasn’t.

I watched lights slip away beneath us as we circled. If I have to fly, I like flying into cities in the dark of morning. There’s something reassuring and likable about the purposeful skim of vehicles, zooming along to their destinations. The whisk of cars meant that the people driving them had a goal, somewhere to be, something to do. That was a hell of a lot more than I had.

I stared down at the moving lights. Maybe I didn’t like them after all.

The plane dropped the distance that made me an active voyeur in people’s lives, instead of a distant watcher. I could see individuals under the streetlights. Trees became sets of branches instead of blurry masses of brown.