Flying across the country at night is a relatively rare experience for me. I think I did it once before that I can remember, about thirteen years ago when I flew to Florida with my late grandfather. That time, as the plane came close to San Jose Airport, I looked out the window of the plane down onto the city of San Jose and remarked that it looked like some sort of phosphorescent, cancerous ameoba.

I was not very poetic when I was 19.

Our flight last night took my boss and I from Boston to Denver, and from Denver to Sacramento. For the first half hour or so from Denver, my boss and I had a good conversation, about the vision for our company, about my own concerns regarding the development of my own career, about his wife and my fiance, about life in general. The he moved across the aisle to an empty row so that he could stretch out and sleep. I leaned my seat back and looked out the window, trying to sleep (after having slept only about two hours in the previous fifty or so) but I found myself staring at the lights of the cities below.

The stretch from Carson City, Nevada, to Sacramento, California, is a pretty empty one, sparsely inhabited, with no major cities or towns. The flight took us over Lake Tahoe, and there were plenty of lights there, but, for the most part, it was empty. With no lights and with no moon out, the land beneath the plane was black; it was like flying through emptiness.

But then, a few lights. I have no idea whether it was a city I was looking at or a trailer park or an air force base or something else entirely, but there were lights. Not the huge grouping of yellow lights that marks a large city or even a small town, but a field of widely distanced mostly white lights that actually twinkled. I could see no pattern to them, and no distinguishing geological features near them; no mountains, trees, bodies of water, or anything. For a crazy moment, I thought that the plane had somehow flipped over and that we were flying upside-down and that I was now looking at the stars in the sky. Then I realized that gravity was still working normally and that there were no cries of panic from the other passengers or the crew; I deduced that we were indeed still properly aligned in the air and that I was seeing these lights on the ground. I have no idea what I was looking down on but these lights were exactly like looking at the sky on a clear night.

Nine hours later, I’m on the plane again, this time headed back up to Portland from Sacramento. While I was sitting in the airport waiting for the cattle call to Southwest Airlines to begin, I came up with a million reasons for not flying out: I’d forgotten to change the litter boxes, I should have made the bed before leaving, I left my Palm Pilot at home. But I have a lot of work to do in Portland this week and several meetings to attend, so I can’t really avoid this. Besides, I’ve planned to have dinner tomorrow night with Jennifer’s father, and the chance to spend some time with my future father-in-law, whose company I really enjoy, will make it worth it.

The view from outside the airplane window this morning is certainly different than last night. Most of California and Oregon is cloud-covered. No matter how weary I am of this weekly commute up to Oregon (thankfully I only have two weeks left), I will never get tired of seeing the sunlight play across the tops of the clouds. It’s a beautiful sight, like the starfield we flew over last night. I can stare down on them, on the bright whiteness and occasional blues or browns or greens of the mountains beneath the clouds, and feel the stress of the past week and the apprehension of the stress of the next two weeks starting to fall away — down, down into the stars.