This past Monday, the plane I flew home on took a route that mostly paralleled the California coast, following its broad contours from about twenty miles inshore. Being a smaller jet, we cruised at 27,000 feet, a little lower than most jets. The air was clear and the view superb.

It was a fine thing indeed to watch the coast tick by, looking for landmarks, recognizing specific bends in Hwy 1, coming out of Carmel, spotting that weird dam on the connector from the 101 to Gilroy, being able to tell which town below Salinas was Gonzalez and which one King City, being able to make true sense of the 101 north of San Luis Obispo--both in terms of elevation and route and in relation to the chain of hills that divides it from the valley further inland--finding Hearst Castle, being able to recognize a business route off the 101 in a small town whose name I forget but which contains a fine Mexican restaurant I've eaten in twice, seeing the alluvial plane south of Santa Maria and matching that last stretch of flat, straight highway before it does a right turn and rises into SLO, and seeing--clearly for the first time--that Morro Rock really is in fact the last bead of a necklace of ancient volcanic plugs, just as Uncle Nelson had always said it was.

Driving out to Morro Bay on our annual trip, we'd pass the other, duller peaks off to our left. Nelson told us about them and that they and the rock were all part of the same chain, and that they formed a straight line, and it's only the erosion and placement on what is now shore that makes the rock so much more dramatic than the other plugs. Still, driving by them on that interminable drag from SLO to Morro Bay--time decelerating in our exuberant haste to traverse that last stretch and get to that great rock as quickly as possible--they were far enough apart and indistinct enough that I could not intuit that they were part of the same chain. I couldn't see the chain, I couldn't see the straight line--that pattern--but from Monday's plane I could. For the first time. Nearly twenty of them, in a straight line, fairly evenly spaced, tapering off towards the water, and then the crown jewel: the rock.

And then I chuckled because I could also see the three stacks of the power plant, the plant that Nelson always railed against, the plant which although indeed something of a blight on the surroundings of the rock, was also always weirdly fascinating to me as a kid, as much because the stacks were seemingly as tall as the rock itself as because there was an odd symmetry to the two entities, one synthetic, one organic, both wildly disproportionate to the surrounding area.

Other patterns emerged later on as well, one of them linked to another memory: the annual drive to Ojai to cut down a Christmas tree. From the window of a car, the beginnings and ends of citrus groves were indistinct, the divisions between pine groves and fields equally obscure; the distance from the county highway to the foothills at the base of the snow capped low mountains completely unguessable. From the plane all divisions and barriers and distances were remarkably clear; streams, irrigation ditches, roads, columns and rows of crops, the impasto, black-green globules of orange trees arrayed in dense graphs...suddenly, all those perennial curiosities of childhood were answerable.

The final landmark only goes back a decade or so. Over two years, I spent many evenings on the Encino Velodrome, training and racing. I'd never seen it from a plane before. In the final minute of our approach, I could see the start/finish line. It was a beautiful kind of strange, looking at the oval and trying to imagine myself down there doing laps. I stared hard, the distance great, the hard mid-day sun blowing out the light concrete of the track into a blinding white, trying to envision tiny little riders on tiny bicycles careening around the track, myself at once there, now, and there in memory, and there, now, in that plane, memory and the present commingled and refracted through the lens of an otherwise impossible perspective: three thousand feet up in the air.