I work from home most days in an apartment in San Francisco's Richmond area. When the morning mist burns out, I wear a hoodie and go for a walk. I head up the hill to the observation deck where I can explore the sky. It becomes a daily ritual, a way to measure my mood and remind me of the scale of my concerns. One recent day I walked to the perch and saw the plane heading west, leaving it with a silver thread. My flight tracking app revealed that this is the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner and will be traveling from Los Angeles to Tokyo. By the time we landed, we were reliant on the sky above San Francisco.
Some people enjoy watching the clouds, but I prefer countrails. The chalk lines left behind in the wake of high altitude aircraft have low temperature and vapor pressure. Aircraft engines cool in the air to expel hot, wet breathing out hot, wet breathing breath that condenses in the same way as how they produce condensed clouds by exhaling in cold climates. NASA lists short-lived cost rails that form right behind the plane as it flies and quickly dissipates. A permanent and unchallenging trail that maintains a narrow shape but can take a long time. And a permanent spread trail that allows you to fan out to cover a large area.
On sunny days, the resulting cost rails are sturdy, white, highlighting the watery blue of the sky. At sunset they are cast in dreamy golden shades. For me, their beauty comes in part from the inconsistency with the naturally occurring features of the sky. The mark itself is accidental and a quirk of atmospheric physics, but in other cases it can look like a character I follow in an impersonal sky. I recently took a photo of the path following a plane flying above the Stro Tower rising from the city centre. The aircraft was on altitude cruise, but the curvature of the Earth appeared to fly diagonally, and its nose was cast into the sun. The move looked cocky, touched by an aura of optimism.
It's strange to challenge, with both familiar and alien senses. If you can decode it, it's the cloud that appears to be conveying the message. At a residency I recently attended the Pacific Northwest, my fellow artists and I gathered outside the lodge before dinner and marveled at the white white band stretching all the way from one end of the sky to the other. . The trail was very bold and assertive against otherwise cloudless sky, so we felt dark and intrigued, and guessed which type of plane created it. I was standing there. The mystery of Costrail lends it with special powers, embracing us with its slaves, and uniting us in the early moments of our friendship.
Costrails should not be confused with Chemtrail's conspiracy theory, which assumes that exhaust from planes is tightened with additives used to control groups, but are evil in a more mediocre way. They are currently thought to contribute up to 35% of planetary warming caused by aviation, second only to carbon emissions. These artificial clouds cover large strips of the sky and can trap heat in the atmosphere, making permanent spreading contrails the most damaging. Recent research shows that pilots can change course slightly to slightly to change courses, as they are currently doing to avoid patches of air where turbulence is likely to occur. is suggested. Like aerosol cans and plastic foam packaging, there may be fewer relics of the environment-free past in a few years.
Is it wrong to find beauty in something that we know to be destructive? Certainly, being a Costray enthusiast is a bit perverse. For me, they remind me of a sublime feeling, a conflict with overwhelming and indescribable things. Traditionally, sublime refers to encounters with nature, such as standing on the lips of the Grand Canyon or witnessing the devastating forces of a tsunami. I had a similar feeling on the infamous “Orange Day” of 2020 when the skies above San Francisco and the majority of the west coast were dim and orange due to wildfire smoke. I walked through the eerie, transformed landscapes of my neighborhood and felt a negative adoration. At that moment I understood myself as a small percentage of vulnerable mammals compared to the planet's size and the climate crisis that threatened it.
Costray has the same effect on me. Sometimes when I see one, I fall into a sense of the ocean – as if the colony is a connection between me and everything else, with the rest of the universe You'll fall into it. Unfortunately, “all else” also includes the bulk waste we give to the planet. That's all to say: I'm not always in the mood to be fascinated by planting. On certain days, magic is revealed as a spell and harmful mess. I imagine shaking the sky like an ecchia sketch and removing the waste from the steam.
Regardless of my mood, I can thank countrail as a physical record of the existence of humanity on this planet. I'm thinking about this. I observe the intersecting of scars, permanent crushing, left by the plane that left a small slice of my sky. They are ghostly shaped, reminiscent of the plane that occupied this point recently, like the speed echo left when the cartoon characters pop out of the frame. I'm here, and after a while, I'm somewhere else, but my previous self is for better or worse.
