New York City to Norfolk, Virginia, June 1, 2015

★ A light drizzle was blowing, but the raincoat stayed off in the residual sweltering from getting the suitcase packed and out the door of the stifling apartment. After delays in the dark of Penn Station, the train emerged into blue mid-morning twilight in New Jersey. Male blackbirds perched on the reeds, darker little dashes on the gloomy background. The phone rang with a robot calling to announce that the plane would leaving 50 minutes late. Egrets stood almost up to their white bellies in the water. There was water on empty lots, creeping into a turn lane, ponding along the rail beds. Down below the AirTrain, the lower branches of trees were submerged. The first glimpse of gray dull-shining tarmac looked like an estuary. Flash-flood warning tones blared from one phone after another in the men’s room. Rain streaked the glass of the restaurant as two women hailed a third to join them for late-morning mimosas. An old bald man in a gray suit, wearing a Princeton necktie and carrying a straw hat with a Princeton hatband, asked to have a cold bottle of beer. The rain hit the windows harder. The extra 50 minutes passed, and another 25 or 30 minutes. The plane finally appeared; one load of passengers was exchanged for another. The rain stopped. The plane sat. There would be a 15-minute wait. An hour and a half into the 15 minutes — as the phone’s browser announced that the connecting flight from Philadelphia was already wheels-up and gone — the plane finally got cleared into its ration of sky, hitting the clouds almost immediately. It climbed to the top of the lowest layer of clouds, but only barely. In almost no time it came back down through them, disclosing a graveyard and then rowhouses through bright mist. A pleasant breeze rode up the jetway as the gatechecked luggage slowly arrived. There was another plane, already at its gate; only its crew, gone wayward in the rain-tattered system, could not be accounted for. The sky darkened. At last they were found, the plane sent out. Not far from the runway, the pilot got on the speaker with a regretful announcement about thunderstorms along the way and a wait for “route approval” and the fact that he was killing the engines for a while. Then he turned them back on, and the plane went up for a quick glimpse of a smoldering refinery before hitting the clouds again, clouds upon clouds, on up through to a view of tumbled mountains and pillars of them, ivory and gray against blue, with ever more spaces between them. The land appeared in patches and then expanses. One flat gray cloud, moving alone, trailed a curtain of rain from its leading edge. Then there were no clouds but a few high ones, and haze over fields all the way to the barrier islands and the ocean. Whitecaps appeared and dissolved in the dark green water. The concrete of the runway twinkled in the sun. A pine thrust up against clear blue sky. The day here had by all accounts been a hot one, but it was cooling off. The sneakers were swapped out for dress shoes in the parking lot, the sport coat shrugged into. In the cold of the funeral parlor there was no weather at all.