Beginning Our Descent, Three tales of the Bakken - By John Rember

1.
A month ago I was in North Dakota or Montana. I can’t be more specific than that. It was almost night, and I was five miles in the air. The only bright lights down there were the burning flares of oil wells. The flames looked like stars in deep space. For a hallucinatory moment, I thought the Boeing 737 I had boarded in Chicago had delivered me to a point light-years from Earth. I would arrive in Boise with a lifetime supply of frequent flyer miles.

Sagebrush deserts became drifting clouds of dark matter. Mountains became shadowy nebulae. Small towns became dim and distant galaxies, their streetlights red-shifted to near invisibility.

None of my fellow passengers seemed to notice. Most of them were sleeping, but here and there a reading light flashed on, a newspaper rustled or someone stood in the aisle, stretching. Flight attendants eased by, collecting trash and adjusting blankets. I fell asleep inside the cocooning, comforting hum of the jets, and woke only when the pilot announced we were beginning our descent.

The slap of the 737’s tires against the tarmac put an end to interstellar travel for the night. A short time later I was at the carousel, waiting for my bag, thinking that humans have a genetic compulsion to obliterate time and space. I had begun the day on the other side of a continent that people used to take months and even years to cross.

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