I had to make a quick trip to the frozen north that Rhode Island had become. I call it annual one: see doctor, dentist, dermatologist, tax preparer — those elements that require residency that is not the vagabond life.

I flew out of Houston. The plane lifted off, circled about the city then picked a heading east along the coast. It was a sparkling clear morning and the coast line that I had examined so closely on maps (I still like the perspective a map gives rather than the microscope or binoculars backwards view that a navigation app shows). From the air we were tracing my exact route; I thought of my former mother-in-law who had scoffed at taking a private plane flight with a friend who was a pilot because he just “followed the road” from the air.

We passed over Port Arthur and its weirdly shaped Lake Sabine with its unnaturally straight banks and the industrial sprawl with waiting tankers at the Sabine Pass LNG station. Then along the Louisiana coast above the Pickled Pelican RV Resort where Wilson had gamboled on the beach among the 4 x 4 tire tracks and I had chatted with a van-lifer from Wyoming who spent Christmas selling Christmas trees in New York City. The plane turned northeast at about Morgan City, LA and crossed the Mississippi just north of Donaldsonville, close by Houma House where I had stayed two nights on my trip from the Keys to Houston. With he clear coastline and counting the bends in the Mississippi River make it easy to find where you might have been from the air. I wondered, how the explorers who mapped this area with surprising accuracy might have felt if they could have looked down upon the land. While sailing transatlantic in the late seventies, by using Sailing Directions, Bowditch and other books on board, we made serviceable navigation charts for arriving in Terciera, Azores carefully tracing a compass direction and distance and inserting notable landmarks like church spires, lighthouses, and castle towers. These manual arts have disappeared in the digital age.

The strip of land we flew over is sparsely populated. It is mostly wildlife refuge, the Sabine National Refuge, the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, the Atchafalaya Delta Wildlife Mangement Area and Game Preserve. On the ground it is swampy while from air it looks like land but confusing as the water in the barrier ponds is often green while the earth is dun colored. Sometimes they switch colors so looking down is always a field and ground problem. Despite the lack of population, it is still industrialized. Great gas pipes snake across the landscape with an occasional terminus, like the Cheniere LNG plant. Barge traffic clearly wanders the Mississippi off-loading or passing the chemical plants on the banks.

The homebound, back to Wilson, tracked my Rhode Island departure. From the air, I saw the towers of Boston disappear and the ribbon of the Mass Pike clear against the landscape. Again, a field and ground issue but this time because the gray concrete highway and the scatter of snow made differentiation a challenge. Again we tacked towards another great American river, this time the Hudson and below the plane lay West Point. The Plain, the Apron and the zig-zag of buildings backing the level area stand out so much more clearly from the rising hills than when on foot in the space.

Soon we crossed Pennsylvania and rather than right below, but a little off to starboard, lay the intersections of the Chambersburg and Baltimore Pikes, the York, Hanover and Emmitsburg Roads. They all came together at Gettysburg. Our flight took us across the Alleghenies and down its western flank. It would have been too much for the commercial flight to track my path along the spine of the Shenandoah then the Blue Ridge with a turn to those new western states formed after the colonies that I had recently discovered and explored.