Republican eastern Washington was importantly shaped by FDR’s New Deal. The Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River is its genius loci, along with ten further dams downstream of it. The dams, which have turned the river into a string of inert lakes, were originally meant to transform the Columbia plateau into a quilt of small family farms, but now supply subsidized water and electricity to corporate acreages, whose circular fields, each a mile in diameter, are continually moistened by mechanical sprinklers, and whose vast yields of potatoes are processed onsite into frozen pre-cooked french fries and hash browns, before being trucked out in refrigerated eighteen-wheelers on the plateau’s narrow, rifle-shot-straight roads.
A year ago next week, Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger landed his US Airways jet safely in the Hudson.
In the current NYRB, James Salter reviews William Langewiesche’s Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson. Salter, in addition to being a fine fiction writer, is a pilot, and knows whereof he writes:
Fly by Wire is a story with two heroes, one of them the pilot of the stricken plane, and the other the man who had been responsible for the advanced control concepts of the airplane itself, an Airbus A320
Growing up, I remember engineer-relatives voicing great and possibly patriotically-inspired suspicion of Airbus automation, but the crash pictured above—not during takeoff, as labeled, but at an airshow with passengers on board, who’d been informed only that they were going to be circling Mont Blanc—occurred not, Salter writes, because of automated features, but because the pilot had disengaged them.
I hesitated initially about posting the video, just as it took me three years to bring myself to watch United 93. It’s a little too close to drone porn. To rubbernecking. Almost everyone survived the airshow crash, which at least tempers that significance. Somewhat. But I’m suspicious of the impulse to look away, the get-closure-get-happy-power-of-positive-thinking Oprah, Norman Vincent Peale, mega-church “what, me worry?” sensibility.
At one point in Evening the dying Anne Lord—or, Susan Minot, because Anne doesn’t really articulate it—feels separate from everyone around her not because she’s old, ill and dying, but because experiencing those things makes her aware of how people in the ‘prime of life’ go about their business as if it’s never going to end.
The first word that ‘airplane’ brings to mind for me is ‘flight’; the second is ‘crash.’
In the clip, the Airbus glides so smoothy into the forest, it upends our expectation of disaster. Crashes are supposed to be jarring, sudden—brace yourself for impact. In The Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes that the death of her husband, in mid-sentence, over a glass of scotch, reminds her of the framing of accounts of 9/11:
“It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”
I think we habitually conflate “ordinary” with “exempt,” as emergency will be announced by that damned Carmina Burana movie trailer chorus or the nerved-up string section in the Bourne movies. In that sense, there is no “ordinary.” I think that may be what we turn away from. This fascinated Auden:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Brueghel flips the convention of his time. Instead of catastrophe—the crucifixion, the slaughter of the innocents—taking center stage, with a dog pooing or children skating in the corner, he puts the catastrophe off to the side. Dum de dum. Nothing to see here.
Watching disasters—videos of crashes, photos of wrecks, “the humanity, oh the humanity”—we feel it’s proper to look away. Looking at Brueghel’s ploughman, who does just that, we’re horrified. Look! How can you do anything but look?
"We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways."
In 1999, the German photographer Olaf Otto Becker took a picture of a glacier in Iceland for his first book, Under the Nordic Light. When he returned to photograph the same glacier three years later, it was gone.
Becker’s photographs from [his latest] expeditions appear in his latest book, Above Zero, and are now on view in exhibitions in New York City and Copenhagen.
As Eve Bowen notes, Becker’s midnight sun photographs of Greenland’s west coast (left column, above) have the sublimity of 19th century landscape paintings. In his dizzying new photos from the top of the Greenland ice sheet, there’s no frame of reference for scale or distance; no trees, no vehicles, only sky, water, and ice, melting.
At the Amador Gallery in New York through January 9.
An albatross chick on Midway Atoll, raised on plastic that its parents mistook for food from the polluted Pacific Ocean, September 2009; photographs by Chris Jordan
