As the plane drooped swift tward the land beneath the clouds, the blue was swallowed up with whites and bitter greys, empty and full greys in shades. I was reminded of the flakiest of biscuits, layerd and pitted, and as the clouds reamed along vertical streaks and plains above and below the field of view from my regular window, I wondered that I could be moving in a giant one, even now. A giant biscuit grands.
But as it plane rose, hours earlier, quick to the canopy about Tampa that concieled the bright blue and it's briliant roving star, the plane jostled, but bickered little as the clouds closed in.
A column of mist rolled from the engine along the curve of the wing, wining off and then on, hollow like a tube but only was it water moving faster than it would and breaking all to bits in a spinning misty row along the metal. It dropped off the back edge there, where sheaves and leaves of shining steel had unfurled downward tward the ground and pulled the air this way and that to have the plane set sail, up and with the wind.
the same sheaved sheathes would once deploy when dropping down mere feet from the ground, and flail up as the engines pound the air reverse to keep the plane aground, and in a powerful moment, a time of strength and wheel friction and momentum, the wing panels fly up and expose the tender inner parts of hoses and cervos and motors and wire kept covered during all the other LESS violent parts of the parade. But all that has two and a half hours to wait, for now the potent clouds enwrap us all, giving way here to white wide caverns, and filling back up to dim the view.
But they all had a certain erand or other, the copious low cumulus, and our climbing brought us soon out into the sun. The farther we climbed, looking down at the tops of the cloudy day, the less like clouds they all became.
At first I had the thought, "So this is the top of an overcast day!" Then they all became trees. At once they were a flat forested plane seen from a tall fire tower or a bald mountain ridgeline, a summer of white leaves and boughs, and still higher we climbed. Then it was a field of snow or the whitest sand but merely at my feet, the imperfections of a windswept field, rocks or trunks or earth or shells sticking up and though the thin places instead of merely cloud shadows.
And then I saw the drop off, the place, either at the head or tail of the wather front, where the dim ground and trees and water looked back at me. The Atlantic shoreline blank and grey from this height, but ending hard at the dark dim trees, sometimes the faint white of sand peaked around to see us passing by.
And I, as of yet, still havent seen any state lines. Oh, the puzzlement.
