And yet though it's nominally a day, I have in fact switched hemispheres and seasons.Wasn't sure what I thought about being back in the US when the plane came into flat murky Los Angeles, but once I made my connection, oh boy! After a little cat nap I awoke with a start to find the Grand Canyon spread out below me. I've seen it before this way, and have lived in the Southwest too, my first love affair with land. But this time I saw it with new eyes. I saw how
young the land is, and what a difference rivers make, especially in soft sandstone landscape. (In Oz, there are few rivers, in part because there are few mountains to feed them; and few mountains because its continental plate hasn't buffeted by others. Its contours are the wear and tear of a land mass left to its own devices.)In fact, America pulled out the stops. After the Grand Canyon and its friends (including so many dust-colored buttes on the horizon
it seemed like a herd of bison) came some mountains with traces of snow, and then - I may have dozed off again in the interim - the land was a grid of white- rimmed squares of green in every direction: the country cousin of the grid in Manhattan. And like Manhattan's, the fact that each was precisely the same size as the others let you notice that each has its own character, its own patches of various greens, the occasional white farmstead, and 
(possibly visible only from the air) the contours of the land before settlement. Above them, and also stretching in all directions, an armada of cloud piled high. The view was vast, and I remembered a snatch of a song: for spacious skies. It took me a long time to remember that it was "America the beautiful," and even longer to remember how it begins. It was so spectacular and 
vast it seemed almost unfair. Australia, back in the distance, seemed a dried apricot by comparison.And then came the Great Lakes, with a great city on the shore (not quite visible in the photo, about a fourth of the way in from the left), and then late afternoon clouds like romantic American landscapes of the mid-19th century. Eventually we hit a dense blanket of cloud, tinged in orange and presided over by fantastically shaped piles of cloud in the distance.
When we dipped under it was suddenly night, water below - the Atlantic now - and just as I mentioned to the woman sitting next to me that on one charmed 4th of July evening I'd flown out of Newark for Europe and seen local fireworks displays blooming like flowers out the window below, it happened again! Thanks to friendly tailwinds we arrived early, just in time to see little bursts of firework all over below in what turned out to be a rain-wet New York. (This video hardly captures it, but might give you some vague idea: imagine little explosions off in the distance as far as eye can see!)It felt like completing a years-long trip around the world. Now to bed, since in Eastern Standard Time it's past midnight!
