Texas Skies

When I was a kid, I used to study maps so closely that some of my friends called me Mr. Map. I was so skilled at map reading that my dad allowed me to navigate on our summer car trips to Colorado and Arizona. It is a skill that has served me well as a professional pilot; I am often so familiar with the terrain I am flying over by merely looking out the window. A curve of a river or a stretch of highway approaching a town is sometimes all I need to ascertain my aircraft's position. If I ever have to divert for an in-flight emergency, I would instinctively know many of the nearby airports suitable for landing.

This is especially true when flying over Texas, my home state. Each time, I am able to pick out towns and cities I have visited over the years. As we headed southeast from New Mexico to South America, I scanned the Texas landscape unfolding beneath us: the flat expanse of plains around Midland and Odessa, the hill country towns of Fredericksburg and Kerrville, the Central Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio, the curve of the Brazos River just west of Hempstead, Bryan-College Station just to the north and my beloved Aggieland, and the piney woods stretching north of Houston into East Texas. I could even see the upper stretches of Lake Livingston near Trinity where my parents now live.

As I approached Houston, I looked for the familiar neighborhoods where my friends from high school now live: Barker Cypress, Willowbrook, Bear Creek, Spring, and the Oak Forest neighborhood where we all grew up, tucked up against the Northwest Freeway and the Loop. The multiple skylines of the city rose in glassy splendor: downtown, uptown, the Medical Center, Greenway Plaza, and other skyrises seemingly popping up everywhere like mushrooms after a rainstorm. The freeway network laid out with intricate precision, carrying commuters to the once rural outlying counties, now virtual cities unto themselves. The Juicebox, Toyota Center, Reliant, and the Dome - places I have rooted for Houston's teams, if only in spirit. The east side refineries, the economic engine of the region, stretched along the ship channel toward the San Jacinto Monument, marking the place where Texas was won on the battlefield.

Beyond the Johnson Space Center lay Galveston Bay and its smaller cousin, Clear Lake. The bayside communities, so terribly devastated by Ike, appeared unblemished; even Galveston looked undamaged, but its scars could not be seen from my elevated perch. However, the Bolivar Peninsula's damage was clearly evident; even from 30,000 feet, the land where beachfront homes and towns once stood appeared to have been scoured away by the sea. A line of ships waited for their channel passage at the bay's mouth, anchored amid chocolate colored water on either side of the clear channel leading to the gulf.

And then Texas was behind us as we headed out over the gulf towards South America.

Yet hours later, after a second round of stops in Peru and Ecuador, we returned under clear midnight skies. First, lights flickered below us from the gulf; hundreds of off-shore platforms stretched as far as the eye could see. A meteor raced across the sky, leaving a momentary trail of smoke as it sped towards Mexico. A dim glow on the horizon soon morphed into Galveston and Houston, beckoning us towards land. Looking right to left, I could see the lights of every city along the entire Texas coastline, from Beaumont to Brownsville. It was an amazing sight.

We coasted in from the gulf just south of Victoria and started our descent into San Antonio, our destination for the night. The city was sleeping as we were vectored for the ILS approach into Kelly Field on the city's south side. I clicked off the auto-pilot and auto-throttles as the glide slope came down and manually flew to a landing on runway 15.

It wasn't the Texas overnight I was hoping for; it was well after 1 am and there would be no margaritas on the Riverwalk that night. The Texas skies I'd flown through would have to sustain me until December, when I'll return with my family to celebrate another Texas Christmas.