Contrail Daydreams
By Gordon Baxter
January 1997
 I was coming home, it was about sunset, VFR, there was a prevailing southerly and a medium-high cloud layer blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. I was in the day’s-end traffic flow, looking up at the sky. I’m always looking up at the sky, to see what’s going on up there. I saw two clear distinct jet contrails, one just above the cloud tops, headed eat, the other much higher and westbound. I guess that’s ordinary among the metropolitan East Coast, but not an ordinary sight down here.
Where the westbound tall boy was going I have no idea, he was too high to be approaching HOU but it’s a well-traveled trail. The lower jet was climbing out from Houston to New Orleans, would be my guess. Lay your plotter between these two metropolitan airports and you just about have the route of the Sunset Limited only much quicker. When it was railroading, the Southern Pacific called itself the Route Of The Sunset Limited. High-wheeled express steam locomotives, headed from Texas to California, moaning and wailing their song in the night. When I was a little boy I wanted to be a brave engineer, my head out the window, watching those drivers roll.
Then the first barnstormers came down here in their Wacos and Curtiss Robins. We didn’t have an airport, but this was all flat land. The main crop was rice and the main industry was oil. Oil used to come from Pennsylvania until the Spindletop gusher blew in at the turn of the century and both Texaco and Gulf built their refineries here. With Texas oil came Port Arthur and Beaumont, the cities I grew up in. But they shipped most of the oil by tanker. Trans Texas Airlines’ first DC-3s didn’t offer us a connection to the outside world until nearly 50 years later. And I shipped out in the engine room of tankers, wiper and oiler, but I was always looking up into the sky. When a barnstormer landed, my bike was the first one there, and I’d be saying, “I’ll stay with your plane tonight and guard it from the cows for the first ride in the morning.” (That’s the one where they buzzed the town as advertising.) I was always looking up at the skies; still do, and marvel at how much things have changed in these last 50 years. I can think of nothing to compare with the arrival of aviation out here in the country.
I imagined that the eastbound jet was hauling passengers. I watched his contrails, straight and true, the broken cloud cover blowing in from the Gulf below him creating the illusion that the clouds were stationary and he was crabbing.
At times like these I transpose myself from driving home in my pickup to sitting on the flight deck with him. That’s what I always wanted to do. but the gate is neither low nor easy, and I have many excuses for why I was never an airline pilot. Lack of self-discipline would do for simple coverage. In later years I got my commercial and IFR tickets, but by then I was too old and had made a wrong set of standards for myself. Why fly an airplane if you can’t see out the window? There are many of us who just fly for the fun of it, but airline pilots are cut from an entirely different piece of cloth. That captain up there laying down those contrails like a piece of machine drawing in the sky is relaxed at the wheel. He and the rest of his crew are breathing gently to a beat and rhythm that is the end product of a lifetime of self-discipline. They are relaxed and content only with a constantly demanding degree of perfection.
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