The Millennial Pedestrian

In E.L. Doctorow’s novel World’s Fair there is the most wonderful description of the German dirigible Hindenburg’s 1937 passage across the Bronx as she headed for her mooring in Lakehurst, NJ: "She sailed incredibly over the housetops, and kept coming right toward me, … and kept coming and kept coming and still no sight of the tail of her. She was tilted toward me as if she were an enormous animal leaping from the sky in monumental slow motion… The ribbed planes of her cylindrical balloon, thick in the middle, narrowed at each end, reflected the sunlight, flaring sunlight in striations, as if a deck of cards were being shuffled… The enormity of her was out of scale with everything, out of scale with the houses and the cars on the street and the people now shouting and pointing and looking up: she was like a scoop of sky come down to earth, or a floating building, or a populated cloud. I could see little people in the cabin, they were looking out the window and I waved at them."

 
Hindenburg

Incurious teals looked
At or through the windows
As we sailed among them.
We felt ourselves a fresh species
Able to immerse ourselves in sky
As no other humans could.
Our Diesels were so far away
They were inaudible,
And gusty winds did not disturb
The Zeppelin’s unruffled flight.
We were of the air, not in it
And we ate our breakfast muesli
With the zeal of eagles.

As we neared our journey’s end
We called it a migration, thought
Ourselves quite avian.
Our shadow fell serenely down on
Gardens, parks and highways,
City streets and country farms.
People ran outdoors just to point and wave.
We made them happy, made them
Call hellos to us, made them smile
To see the future so benignly
Soar above them, one with nature.

When we fell in flames we thought of Icarus;
It’s most surprising but
One definitely does have thoughts
As one falls burning
Through the air.
Rueful recognition in this case:
We surely overreached ourselves,
Our earthbound natures, projected
Far too much upon our long sleek bag of gas.
Next time, we thought, let’s not be so oblique.