Arcadia Café, Athens, Greece, 2017.10.20
Home. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA, 2017.10.21.
iPhone 7, all auto.

My flight home on February 6, 1980 was epic in ways I could not have expected. We flew over the pole, where the dazzling white ice from horizon to blue horizon was jaw-dropping, truly astonishing. Life-changing, even, because it left me with a concrete-yet-visceral sense of the interconnectedness of the Earth's biosystems, and their fragility. I was alone without companions; I was exhausted and stretched out across three empty seats; but my vivid memory is of the beauty of the ice below.

This time it was an ordinary 777 next to a very rude Austrian woman who hacked up a lung for thirteen hours without covering her mouth. Two days later I had laryngitis.