The View On Final Approach

When I used to live with my grandparents in a housing subdivision a mile east of LaSalle, Illinois, I sometimes noticed planes flying overhead, beginning their final descent to Chicago Midway International Airport, about seventy miles to the northeast. 

They flew low enough that, if the light was right, I could make out the markings on the side of the aircraft. I would stop and watch them for a moment, wondering where they had come from, who was on board, and where they were headed next.

 

At the time, I never imagined that one day I would be on one of those planes, looking down.

 

On June 7, 1989, after having spent a week with my mother in Irving, I was flying out of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, bound for Midway, where I would be taking a connecting flight to Los Angeles. The next day, I would be on another plane—this one headed across the Pacific to Japan. It felt like the beginning of something, though I didn’t yet know exactly what.

Somewhere along the way, I fell asleep.

 

When I woke, the aircraft had begun its final descent. There is a certain feeling to that moment—the subtle shift in the cabin, the change in the pitch of the engines, the sense that the world is slowly rising up to meet you again. The plane was already low—lower than I remembered those planes from the ground—and that’s when the details began to come into focus.

I turned and looked out the window on the left side of the aircraft, and below me I saw a winding river that looked strangely familiar.

 

And then I realized why.

 

It was the Illinois River.

 

We were flying over the Illinois Valley, that stretch of towns that line the river like a quiet thread through the land. 

I leaned closer to the window, suddenly wide awake. 

First, I saw Spring Valley, and then Peru, and then LaSalle. The plane was low enough that I could begin to pick out familiar landmarks—things I had not thought about in years, but somehow still recognized instantly.

 

There was LaSalle-Peru Township High School. The Kaskaskia Hotel. The LaSalle State Bank. I could see the silos of the Illinois Cement Company rising along the river, just as I remembered them. Then came the quarry, Route 6 crossing over Rt. 39.

 

And then, for just a moment, the plane passed directly over my grandparents’ house.

 

It couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. A blink, really. But in that brief stretch of air and memory, something shifted. 

Because how often does that happen? How often do you get to see your life like that—not in fragments, not in stories you tell yourself—but all at once, from above? 

A wide-angle view of where you came from, just as you are on your way to becoming someone else.

 

It was not like seeing your past in the rearview mirror. 

It was something else entirely. It was seeing your home, your roots—not as something left behind, but as something still there, still whole, still waiting in its quiet way.

 

And in that moment, I understood something I hadn’t before.

 

We spend so much of our lives thinking we are moving forward, leaving places behind, becoming someone new. But from up there, looking down, it didn’t feel like I had left anything at all. It felt like everything I had ever been was still there—intact, untouched by time.

 

And maybe that’s the truth of it.

 

Maybe the past doesn’t recede the way we think it does. Maybe it doesn’t fade into distance. 

 

Maybe it rises to meet us.

 

And maybe every journey we take—no matter how far—isn’t about escaping where we came from, but about finally seeing it clearly.