Most of the Earth is water. And most of that water is in the Pacific Ocean, by far the world’s largest. Only the Pacific truly deserves the description of “vast,” where land is not even an exception worth mentioning. It’s a bucket of deep blue with specks of dirt in it.
Crossing such an enormous expanse, from corner to corner, is a strange experience. Most likely, we live in at the end of an era, one that only began only a few hundred years ago. To us, crossing the Pacific is possible, whether by ship or plane, but both methods seem very long, relatively speaking, for that method of transport. It just seems to go on and on, and the comforts afforded to the (economy) traveler don’t seem like enough, even though today’s crossing is even more than yesterday’s science fiction. The looming era of ramjet engines and suborbital travel promise to shorten the trip time to where a nap may not even be possible and time zones zip by like invisible mile markers.
So, while not really comfortable at 37,340 feet and moving at 578 miles per hour, crammed into a seat sized for someone to sit upright for a two-hour trip, right now, I’m just glad not to be bobbing up and down in the waves, at the mercy of the wind, straining my eyes at the horizon, searching for a speck of brown among the blue.
