Both Sides Now

One of those loud pings rang through the cabin and I awoke. My first thought was: Why are we over the ocean?! A small green island with a lighthouse was just to the right of the plane, lapped by pale water in the early dawn.

But we should have been close to Charlotte, NC, and our flight path should never have gotten nearer the Atlantic than we were in Baltimore, where we started. So - What the---? Why the ocean?

And then I realized: not an island with water and a lighthouse, but a hilltop with fog and a microwave tower. The captain announced our approach, saying the weather in Charlotte was "overcast at 900 feet". We're either not nearly to Charlotte yet, I thought as I leaned to peer over the sleeping soldier in the window seat, or else we're flying very low indeed, because the view to the ground was obstructed only by the fog - and only at the very lowest points. It almost looked like snow, except backwards. It wasn't the peaks that were white with dark lower ground; the valleys were white, dark hills rising above the mist and fog that filled all the lowlands, lapping them like milk.

And then quite suddenly we were approaching a massive bank of clouds - under us, but solid, a wall reaching vertically as though the edge had been cut off and stretching horizontally as far as I could see - and then we were over it. Here was our "overcast at 900 feet" - massive white clouds piled up like, yes, for all the world like angel hair. Or cotton batting. From a distance, perhaps, clouds look like ice cream, but from close up, no. It's impossible to think of them as not having at least some substance when you're on top like that. Inside them, they're just fog - all grey and insubstantial - but from on above they look quite solid, though soft. Feathery and wispy, they filled the sky below us; above was pale grey turning blue, and orange and gold burned all along the left side of the sky where the sun was just coming up.

And then all was gray as we descended into the clouds, dropping down to Charlotte.