From the flight deck of this Tokyo-bound British Airways Boeing 787 I look down to the river-cleaved lightscape of Seoul, then up to the ribbon of still tentatively lightening blue along the horizon’s eastern rim.
Soon, as the new day’s rays first strike the cockpit, I will place my fork and knife back onto the breakfast tray on my lap, don my sunglasses, look across the Sea of Japan’s dazzling blue and recall some of the other cities I and my colleagues have passed since lift-off yesterday from Heathrow’s southern runway: daylit Brussels and Frankfurt; a brief parallel of the Danube’s course through Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest; how dusk fell, near clear-skied Baku. During the night so abbreviated by our eastbound speed we crossed beneath the stars north of Ashgabat, Dushanbe and Tashkent, and then, not long before dawn, we gazed down upon Beijing, whose pattern of concentric ring roads glowed like a heating element on the floor of the night.
I became a pilot because I love to fly. And that love has always been deepened by my fascination with the cities that airplanes connect.
Whenever, as a child, I flew as a passenger, I would pore over the route maps in the back of the airline magazines. I was captivated by the lines that spread out from each great metropolis. To me they suggested a planet-sized flowering or root-taking, and echoed the sea routes drawn in dashed arcs across the blue portions of the illuminated globe I was given on the day I turned seven. In school, if I was bored, I would sometimes make my own map, dot it with cities, and draw the air routes that curved between them.
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My friends occasionally remind me that my earliest dreams have come true. I became a long-haul pilot. I’m spending my working life navigating the invisible lines between two metropolises, while the patterns of condensed lights that form other settlements scroll past the cockpit’s aquarium-thick windows and the callsigns of air traffic centres—'Samarkand Radio,’ ‘the New York Center,’ ‘Tokyo Control’—sound in many accents in my headphones. Then, after I land, I have an opportunity to explore some of the world’s largest and most beloved cities, again and again and again.
My passion for flying and cities, however, emerged not only from my dreams but from my earliest challenges and fears, as well. I grew up in Pittsfield, a small city in western Massachusetts, where for much of my childhood I was troubled by more than one speech impediment, as well as by the dawning realisation that I’m gay.
When it came to my speech, I had trouble pronouncing the hard American ‘r’, which meant that people often could not understand certain words when I said them - including, in a cruel twist, my own first name. I developed the habit (it’s common, I later learned) of preparing my words in advance, to use as few ‘r’s as possible. From my Belgian father - in Pittsfield, only two hours from Boston, my family was unusual in having neither Irish nor Italian roots - I learned that the ‘r’s of other countries were often pronounced entirely differently, so I took comfort in studying foreign languages, and I promised myself that when I became an adult I would move to a place where one of them was spoken. I hoped it would feel easier to come out there, too - in a city so far from Pittsfield that no one there would know me, and so vast that everyone who arrived could find both themselves and something of a new home.
When I was 14, thanks to a speech therapist, my speech difficulties finally improved, and then, when I was 18, I realised I didn’t need to leave to travel to an anonymous city on the far side of the world to come out. I told my parents and friends that I’m gay, and all were loving and supportive. After university I started a PhD in history in England, but soon left when I realized that each trans-Atlantic journey - home to Pittsfield for Christmas, for example - only intensified my desire to become a pilot.
In 2001 I started a British Airways cadet pilot course in Oxford, and my first passenger flight took place in 2003, a few months before I met my now husband. Although my parents died a few years later, I’m glad they lived long enough to meet him, and to see me become a pilot. My father even came along on one of my flights, from Heathrow to Budapest.
While I believed that those early challenges had long ago receded, in recent years I’ve come to understand that they haven’t quite disappeared. Since I was young I’ve always enjoyed writing - diary entries, letters to far-off pen pals, occasional essays and stories - but it was only when I started to write articles and books for publication that I found myself stepping around certain words as carefully as I once had as a child with a speech impediment.
I didn’t mention my partner or even being gay at all in my first book, Skyfaring, for example, though I shared stories of other family members. And when, later, I met one of its reviewers at a party and introduced him to my partner, he strongly expressed his regret that I hadn’t been more open about myself. At the time I didn’t take kindly to his words - I suppose because I regretted it, too - but they came to mind often as I worked on my latest book.
Imagine a City, my new book, is partly a travelogue, a journey to and through the cities that have come to mean the most to me, such as Delhi, Calgary, Los Angeles, and above all Tokyo, my favourite city and the destination of today’s flight. I wanted to describe not only the promises extended by these cities, which are as glorious as the view from above, but also some of my nearly countless days among their realities - which are, of course, far more complicated than I ever imagined as I turned my globe in childhood.
Imagine a City is also, however, about my hometown, Pittsfield, which I’ve increasingly come to understand is always with me - much like a first language, one that, aptly, I once struggled to speak. And within the book, too, is a considerably more personal story than I ever thought I’d be able to write or share: one in which love and friendship helped me to see my past more clearly, and allow even the longest journeys home. Mostly, I found the book liberating to write, but also, frankly, frightening. It reminded me that being open about myself is a lifelong challenge, rather than one I resolved long ago, once and for all.
Still, this book represents a big step on that journey. On its cover - I’ve brought a draft copy on this flight, to proofread in the café of my favourite Tokyo museum tomorrow - is the wing of an aircraft banking over a twilight cityscape. I don’t recognise the city, and my publishers, who chose the photo from an image bank, don’t either. Perhaps, I ponder in passing, an image of an unnamed city is auspicious, reminding each reader of a city they once dreamed about; although some readers, of course, will recognise it instantly - because it’s their birthplace, or because they came to it from far away and chose to make it their home.
As our 787 enters Japanese airspace we order the latest weather report from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport: 15 degrees under clear skies, with good visibility and a northerly wind. Not long afterwards we cross the coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island, and soon I’m looking southeast at Kyoto - at its cradle of temple-spangled hills and at the rectangular grounds, near the arrow-like junction of two rivers, that identify its Imperial Palace - as I recall a line from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: ‘Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.’
No city is perfect, of course. But today I cannot imagine a brighter morning, or a more fascinating world. I’ve recently resumed my study of the Japanese language - I have an app, as well as a very patient online tutor - and as I sip my coffee I reflect on Kyoto’s name, which means, simply, ‘capital city’, and on that of Tokyo which, only slightly less majestically, means ‘eastern capital’. And then - 13 hours after leaving London, and at least 40 years after I first saw Tokyo on the illuminated globe in my small bedroom in Pittsfield - it’s time: my colleagues and I idle the thrust on the engines under each shining wing and start our gentle descent.
Mark Vanhoenacker is a Boeing 787 pilot for British Airways and the author of ‘Skyfaring’ and ‘Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Love Letter to the World’s Greatest Cities’.
