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Imagine a City

A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World

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This love letter to the cities of the world—from the airline pilot–author of Skyfaring—is "a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energized, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives" (Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel).

In his small New England hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spent his childhood dreaming of elsewhere— of the distant, real cities he found on the illuminated globe in his bedroom, and of one perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These cities were the sources of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination. Streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in the places where Mark hoped he could someday be anyone—perhaps even himself. 

Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in dozens of the storied cities he imagined as a child. He experiences these destinations during brief stays that he repeats month after month and year after year, giving him an unconventional and uniquely vivid perspective on the places that form our urban world. 

In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and to love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never quite left. As he explores emblematic facets of each city’s identity— the road signs of Los Angeles, the old gates of Jeddah, the snowy streets of Sapporo—he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home. 
Pittsfield

Autumn 1987

I’m thirteen. It’s after school. I’m in my room, at my desk. I look out the window over the driveway and toward the garage. It’s late autumn and it’s almost dark out. There’s frost in the corners of the window and snow is falling.

I look across the room, at the light-up globe on my dresser. I go to it, flip the switch on its cord, and watch as the darkened sphere turns blue in the failing light and starts to shine as if it were in space.

I return to my desk. I sit down, pick up my pencil with my left hand, and rest its tip on the sheet of graph paper. I love airplanes and cities and so, not for the first time, I’ve drawn a simple map of the world. I’ll draw a line that begins in one city and ends in another. But which city to start from?

I set down the pencil and look around my room again: at my model airplanes perched on my dresser, on my desk, and next to my old Snoopy on my bookcase. There’s a green-and-white Lockheed TriStar and a mostly white McDonnell Douglas DC-9. On the plane I assembled most recently, a gray DC-10, I notice that the decals aren’t attached very well. Maybe, I think, I could have done a better job, but these decals are a pain. You have to soak them in a bowl of water until they loosen from their backing, then align them on the aircraft’s fuselage or tail without tearing them, even as they’re drying out and curling up. Sometimes I ask myself if I really like assembling model airplanes; maybe I only like having the airplanes afterward.

The flagship of these models is a Boeing 747 in the blue-and-white colors of Pan Am. On a December night two decades or so from now, an hour before I pilot an actual 747 for the first time, from London to Hong Kong, I’ll walk around the plane to conduct the preflight inspection and when I look up at its sail-like, six-story tail fin I’ll recall this model, and this window by my desk, and the view it offers from a house that by then will be the home of someone else.

I look back down at the page. Now, where . . . ?

I could start from Cape Town. A cape with a town on it. From this far—from Pittsfield, the small, upland Massachusetts city where I was born—Cape Town is only that, a name.

Or I could begin in an Indian city. New Delhi—the capital, I’m reminded by the star that marks its location on the globe that’s shining on my dresser.

Or Rio de Janeiro, whose name comes from a bay that an explorer mistook for a river on the first day of a now-long-gone new year. I pause to consider if that can be right. Is that how Dad explained the city’s name to me after I told him how much I liked it? Dad lived in Brazil for years before he moved to New England. He’ll be home from work soon. I’ll wait until I see the red brake lights of his gray Chevy station wagon as he drives carefully through the snow that will muffle the car’s noise on the driveway below my window, and then I’ll go downstairs and ask him to tell me again about the City of the River of January.

I could start in Rio. It wouldn’t be the first time. But the best thing about today is the snow. So the air route I draw this afternoon should depart from a cold place. Boston or New York, perhaps.

Boston, our nearest big city and the state capital, is where my parents met. It’s around two and a half hours east of Pittsfield. I visit Boston once or twice a year, on day trips with school or my family—to the science museum, the aquarium, or my favorite skyscraper (which is blue, as is nearly everything I like best). From its observation deck you can look east toward Boston’s airport and listen to a radio tuned to the voices of the pilots flying to and from it.

Boston, then. I’ll start in Boston.

Today’s destination, meanwhile, is not a real city; rather, it’s the city I’ve liked to imagine since I was maybe seven years old. Its location changes occasionally, as does its name. But no matter where I draw it or what I call it, it’s the same city to me.

My city is where I travel to when I’m sad or worried, or when I don’t wish to think about what I don’t like about myself, such as the fact that I’m unable to pronounce the letter r, and therefore many words, including my own name. It’s also where I go when I want to escape my dawning awareness that I’m gay. A few months ago, for example, the youth group my brother and I attend, the one that gathers on the second floor of a church here in Pittsfield, held a session about “human development.” We were invited to write on cards any questions we didn’t want to ask out loud. One of the leaders collected the cards and a few minutes later read my question to the group: Is there a way to not be gay? He paused, and finally answered: I don’t know of a way. Instead, he said, it’s something people come to accept about themselves. And when I realized that he was looking at me, and how much I feared what he might say next, I turned my eyes away from his, and toward the lights of my imaginary city.

I also like to go to my imaginary city at more ordinary times: when I’m doing things I don’t enjoy, such as washing dishes or raking leaves; when, in school, I get bored or lose track of what the teacher is saying; or when it’s late and the house is quiet and dark but I can’t sleep and so I look out my bedroom window and I see how blue the night is and that it has started to snow, and when I lie back down and close my eyes I see the same snow falling past the towers of my city.

Now the lights from Dad’s car appear on the drive and shake over the garage doors as I pick up the pencil again. I make two small circles on the map and write a name by each. I draw the line that curves between them and then I go downstairs.

Abu Dhabi

A young woman finishes an uneven rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and hands back the mic.

A few minutes later, Jane, a late-middle-aged woman with shoulder-length curly brown hair, picks it up. I’m terrible at karaoke but an enthusiastic supporter, and as she reaches the stage I applaud and try to shout the loudest.

Jane is one of the cabin crew from my flight from London today. She worked in the forward cabin, the one nearest to the flight deck. She came up for a chat with me and the captain on her break between the two passenger meal services, when we were crossing the Black Sea coast of Turkey and the sun was setting. Later, she came back to the cockpit with two cups of strong tea as the hazy green lights of Baghdad filled the long side window that ran past my right shoulder, and she returned again as we sailed down the Gulf’s skies and crossed near one glowing city after another, and over the petroleum complexes that themselves resemble whole cities. Then, in the terminal in Abu Dhabi, after touchdown, Jane and I spoke once more, about the views we’d each had of this desert metropolis, which sprawled on the coast like the Milky Way on a beach holiday, as we made a slow circuit above and landed, having reversed direction, facing back toward London.

Nothing we talked about, though, has prepared me for what happens when she starts to sing. Jane’s voice is so rich it seems to change the air in the room. Entire tables of friends or colleagues fall silent as they turn and see that she has not only the voice, but also all the right moves: she twists the cable that isn’t trailing from the cordless mic; one moment she makes eye contact with a member of the audience, and the next she looks up into a smoky light as if her muse is beckoning from within its beam.

She starts a second song, John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and I take out my phone to make a video to send home to my husband. Then I watch and listen as she finishes and the crowd erupts. Jane hands the mic to the next person and returns to a festive welcome and expressions of disbelief and vicarious pride from our table. When she was young, she explains with a smile, she worked as a showgirl in Las Vegas. Then she came home to England to raise a family. Several decades later, she decided to see the rest of the world.

Before too long we all return to our hotel. My room is on a high floor, maybe the twenty-fifth. It’s late now, but I’m on London time and I know it won’t be easy for me to sleep yet. I walk to the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows and slide open the successive waves of curtains that I’d struggled to figure out how to close earlier. I turn down some of the lights, to dim the images of the bed and mini-fridge that repeat over the nightscape beyond the glass.

As I look out through the reflections that remain, I try to retrace the decisions and circumstances that led to my first visit to Abu Dhabi, many years ago. My parents divorced when I was sixteen; Dad remarried a few years later. After high school, I left Pittsfield for college in a town only an hour or so away, over the hills to the east. Later, I moved to England for graduate school. Two years after that I was due to go to Kenya as part of my graduate studies, and I returned to Pittsfield to visit Mom beforehand (while I’d been in England, Dad and my stepmother had sold the old house in Pittsfield and moved south, to Raleigh, North Carolina). At the end of my visit, Mom took me to the bus station and waved me off, smiling—in order not to appear sad, it seems now—as the bus rolled away along the first yards of my first trip to Africa. Late the next night I landed in Abu Dhabi, on a layover en route to Nairobi.

I’d never been to the Middle East before, let alone to Arabia, and, though my stay here in Abu Dhabi would be measured only in hours, I’d looked forward to it with the enthusiasm of someone who had spent most of their life dreaming about airplanes and journeys to cities as distant from home as this one. I remember a yellow rain of lights as I pressed my face to the jet’s window on the final approach; gusts of a new kind of heat on the airbridge; tiles on a curved ceiling, in a shade of blue that was close to perfection; and the wonder, to me, of Arabic script on the advertisements along the walkways. Nothing else.

I left the graduate program that had taken me to Kenya once I was certain that I wanted to become an airline pilot. I moved to Boston for the first time, to work at a management consulting company in order to save money for my flight training. Three years later I moved to Kidlington, near Oxford, England, to start my pilot course, after which I moved to a shared house near Heathrow to start my flying career. In those early years I flew a narrow-body Airbus jet on short-haul routes to cities all across Europe. Eventually I retrained on the Boeing 747, the iconic airliner I’d dreamed of flying since I was a little kid. In my eleven years on the 747 fleet, I traveled to many of the world’s largest cities, but never to Abu Dhabi.

Not long ago I retrained again, to fly the 787, and it was in the cockpit of one of these newer and smaller jets that I finally returned to this city. Now I’ve flown here several times as a pilot, on trips that typically include around twenty-four hours off “down-route,” that is, on the ground but away from home. That’s time enough to sleep, to study the latest updates to our manuals, to file my scheduling requests for the following month ( Johannesburg? Chennai? Another Abu Dhabi?), to exercise while I listen to music or catch up on a podcast, or to wander out to see something of the city, in the company of my colleagues or on my own.

From the tower of our hotel I look down to the nearby streets. Many Gulf cities have long histories as small coastal settlements. As major metropolises, though, all of them are new.

Close by is a broad avenue lined with shops and framed by rows of apartment and office buildings, perhaps twenty stories high. The avenue is lit to a snowy brilliance even at this hour, while the road that runs parallel to it is herringboned by side streets dense with what look like large single-family homes, an incongruously cozy sight from my high and anonymous room. Farther away is a cluster of skyscrapers, many of which are capped with beacons. Between these red-lit points, my eyes follow the zigzag line that is like a signature of the city’s creators.

I yawn and ponder if it might soon be time for bed. Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to be sleepy: the roads below are still busy, a common sight in Gulf cities, where summer nights are so much more pleasant than summer days, while during Ramadan public life may seem to begin only after sunset. I watch the skyscrapers and construction cranes twinkle as if in an effort to communicate, and I think of David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes, maybe the first novel I read that presented gay characters. The friend who gave the book to me when I was perhaps eighteen had said little to me about it. I thought it would be about the birds, and perhaps Japan, where I knew they were revered enough to be painted on the tails of planes; rather, the book’s title follows from the story of a small child who saw a construction crane from his window, and came to treat its sounds and movements as a language.
One of AIR MAIL’s 10 Best Books of the Year

“Part memoir, part travelogue, part history, Imagine a City is all entrancing. . . . Vanhoenacker's generous view is a reminder of just how extraordinary the whole mess of air travel still really is.” —Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air,” NPR

"There’ve been plenty of books about cabin attendants’ adventures as part of a globe-trotting sorority bringing the mile-high club down to earth; Imagine a City is a much more intimate and thoughtful work from a man who, seeing ‘the small metal plate on which an arrow indicates qibla, the direction of Mecca’ in [a] hotel room in Abu Dhabi, uses it ‘to estimate the initial direction of the great circle route’ that will take him and his big bird back to London as the light comes up again. . . . What makes this captain of the heavens so appealing is a kind of all-American innocence that helps him savor ‘the palmistry of lit streets’ in Salt Lake City, seen from 38,000 feet above, as eagerly as he devours the poets of Delhi when touching down for 48 hours. Linking the places he flies between through snow, or gates, or the color blue, Vanhoenacker . . . seems to have a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities.” —Pico Iyer, Air Mail

“Mark Vanhoenacker is a beautiful lyrical writer who uses his experience as a pilot to bring us constantly in touch with the transcendent and the other worldly. Imagine a City is a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energised, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives.” —Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel

“An inviting new volume that gives new meaning to the notion of the view from 42,000 feet. . . . Who knew that in command of one of humankind’s most remarkable modes of transport was a historian of humankind’s ancient history? . . . At the keyboard, Vanhoenacker has danced, and on his pages there is tumbling mirth indeed. . . . Along the way—in mid-flight, you might say—Vanhoenacker offers a lyrical look at what life is like behind those bolted cabin doors.” —David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe
 
“A love song to cities the world over. . . . Visits to the great cities, especially in the company of one who loves them as Mr. Vanhoenacker does, can have a way of inspiring us and urging us to follow him and go there too. The author sees these places in their entirety—from great heights and from close by—as he strolls down their streets taking in their views, sounds and smells. He writes as someone who, from a very early age—looking at a metal globe—wanted to explore the world, to get to know it all, to touch it, so to speak, everywhere. I share that urge. Many of us still do. And for those of us who do, Imagine a City will hold us in a warm, welcome embrace.” —Shlomo Angel, The Wall Street Journal

“If you’re not tussling for legroom and overhead bin space, it’s easier to remember that flying is a spectacular way to see our planet. Belgian American pilot Mark Vanhoenacker blends privileged cockpit views with travelogue and memoir in his new book, which reads as a love letter to the cities he’s returned to again and again. . . . As in a previous book, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, Vanhoenacker captivates when describing the silent beauty of a world glimpsed from above.” —The Washington Post

"Combines the god’s eye view of them with street-by-street detail. The book will enchant and even move anyone who feared in recent years for the future of both travel and urbanism." —Financial Times, "Best summer books of 2022"

“Even if you're not yet ready to brave crowded airports and long lines at TSA, you can still visit some of the world's great cities from the comfort of your armchair, with Mark Vanhoenacker as your tour guide. . . . Vanhoenacker is a sure-handed navigator, filling in . . . gaps with history, poetry, and lots of local color.” —NPR

"Vanhoenacker is exceptionally well travelled, and an exceptionally curious and widely read observer. . . . He doesn’t waste an hour, and with every return his engagement with each city deepens." —The Times Literary Supplement

“[A] beguiling tour of cities both real and imagined. . . . Vanhoenacker is a collector of sumptuous details. . . . Philosophically rich without being ponderous, belonging on the same shelf as books by Saint-Exupéry, Markham, and Langewiesche, Vanhoenacker’s book is unfailingly interesting, full of empathetic details on faraway places and lives. It’s an absolute pleasure for any world citizen and a trove for any traveler. A sparkling addition to the literature of flight.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book. . . . Dreamy and erudite. . . . A most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view.” —The Times (UK)

“A century ago, at the dawn of flight, people imagined that writers would want to become pilots, and vice versa, because of the revelations that come with seeing the Earth from above. Mark Vanhoenacker's elegant, engrossing book shows the power of these twinned perspectives, from the skies and up close at ground level. Readers who have not yet traveled with him at the controls of a 787 will be grateful to accompany him on the journeys in these pages.” —James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns
 
“Mark Vanhoenacker is a long-haul commercial pilot, and his 787 Dreamliner—a very apt name—takes him to all the cities he dreamed of as a boy in smalltown America (and many more). His perspective--from the cockpit, on the ground, and through the lens of retrospection—defies easy comparison: Imagine a coming-of-age memoir and shrewdly picaresque travelogue told by Jules Verne, E,B. White, and Jan Morris rolled into one. There is a moment we all know, head angled against an airplane window at night, when you can see both yourself and what's below. Imagine a City lays claim to that moment. Vanhoenacker's curiosity about the planet and his honesty about himself will leave a permanent mark.” —Cullen Murphy, editor at large of The Atlantic

“An utterly remarkable and original travel book. Like Jan Morris and Pico Iyer, Vanhoenacker weaves memoir and travelogue, using his unusual perch as a pilot to take us on an incredible journey to dozens of cities around the world. Like Italo Calvino, he somehow weaves it all into one, a painfully beautiful cubist city of memory and dreams that rises out of his warm and lyrical prose.” —Andrew Blum, author of Tubes and The Weather Machine

“If the child is the father of the man, then ‘the hometown is like a mother tongue.’ Mark Vanhoenacker takes us on a journey to major metropolises all over the earth on a quest to find the hidden personal geographies revealed in faraway and unfamiliar parks, cathedrals, marketplaces or seashores. We all carry an invisible city around with us wherever we go, a town of the psyche we’re always trying to re-enter or flee. Vanhoenacker regards the lights from 40,000 feet up, and then lands the plane to meet the denizens of his own interior city eye-to-eye. A tour de force of descriptive power and honesty; I can think of no other book like this one.” —Tom Zoellner, winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction 
 
“Most of us look at cities from the ground up. But, Mark Vanhoenacker, a pilot, looks at them from above. And his journeys enable him to drop in and visit and revisit cities across the world. His book, Imagine a City provides a unique and much-needed perspective of the cities and the urban world we live in.” —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
 
"An enriching memoir of how a sensitive boy’s yearning for escape and acceptance found its fulfilment in the life of an airline pilot . . . A touching survey of human dreams and endeavours and a hymn to the quiet pleasures of returning, in the flesh or in memory, to the intimate geography of one’s hometown." —Patrick Gale, author of Mother’s Boy

"Refreshingly personal and moving . . . This absorbing modern twist on the age-old story of flying the nest, yet yearning for home, will transport you around the globe and back again without leaving your seat." —Mark Ovenden, author of Metro Maps of the World
© Mark Jones
MARK VANHOENACKER is a commercial airline pilot and the author of the international best seller Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot and How to Land a Plane. A regular contributor to The New York Times and the Financial Times, he has also written for Wired, the Times (London), and the Los Angeles Times. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked as a management consultant before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. He now flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London to cities around the world. View titles by Mark Vanhoenacker

About

This love letter to the cities of the world—from the airline pilot–author of Skyfaring—is "a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energized, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives" (Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel).

In his small New England hometown, Mark Vanhoenacker spent his childhood dreaming of elsewhere— of the distant, real cities he found on the illuminated globe in his bedroom, and of one perfect metropolis that existed only in his imagination. These cities were the sources of endless comfort and escape, and of a lasting fascination. Streets unspooled, towers shone, and anonymous crowds bustled in the places where Mark hoped he could someday be anyone—perhaps even himself. 

Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades crossing the skies of our planet and touching down in dozens of the storied cities he imagined as a child. He experiences these destinations during brief stays that he repeats month after month and year after year, giving him an unconventional and uniquely vivid perspective on the places that form our urban world. 

In this intimate yet expansive work that weaves travelogue with memoir, Mark celebrates the cities he has come to know and to love, through the lens of the hometown his heart has never quite left. As he explores emblematic facets of each city’s identity— the road signs of Los Angeles, the old gates of Jeddah, the snowy streets of Sapporo—he shows us with warmth and fresh eyes the extraordinary places that billions of us call home. 

Excerpt

Pittsfield

Autumn 1987

I’m thirteen. It’s after school. I’m in my room, at my desk. I look out the window over the driveway and toward the garage. It’s late autumn and it’s almost dark out. There’s frost in the corners of the window and snow is falling.

I look across the room, at the light-up globe on my dresser. I go to it, flip the switch on its cord, and watch as the darkened sphere turns blue in the failing light and starts to shine as if it were in space.

I return to my desk. I sit down, pick up my pencil with my left hand, and rest its tip on the sheet of graph paper. I love airplanes and cities and so, not for the first time, I’ve drawn a simple map of the world. I’ll draw a line that begins in one city and ends in another. But which city to start from?

I set down the pencil and look around my room again: at my model airplanes perched on my dresser, on my desk, and next to my old Snoopy on my bookcase. There’s a green-and-white Lockheed TriStar and a mostly white McDonnell Douglas DC-9. On the plane I assembled most recently, a gray DC-10, I notice that the decals aren’t attached very well. Maybe, I think, I could have done a better job, but these decals are a pain. You have to soak them in a bowl of water until they loosen from their backing, then align them on the aircraft’s fuselage or tail without tearing them, even as they’re drying out and curling up. Sometimes I ask myself if I really like assembling model airplanes; maybe I only like having the airplanes afterward.

The flagship of these models is a Boeing 747 in the blue-and-white colors of Pan Am. On a December night two decades or so from now, an hour before I pilot an actual 747 for the first time, from London to Hong Kong, I’ll walk around the plane to conduct the preflight inspection and when I look up at its sail-like, six-story tail fin I’ll recall this model, and this window by my desk, and the view it offers from a house that by then will be the home of someone else.

I look back down at the page. Now, where . . . ?

I could start from Cape Town. A cape with a town on it. From this far—from Pittsfield, the small, upland Massachusetts city where I was born—Cape Town is only that, a name.

Or I could begin in an Indian city. New Delhi—the capital, I’m reminded by the star that marks its location on the globe that’s shining on my dresser.

Or Rio de Janeiro, whose name comes from a bay that an explorer mistook for a river on the first day of a now-long-gone new year. I pause to consider if that can be right. Is that how Dad explained the city’s name to me after I told him how much I liked it? Dad lived in Brazil for years before he moved to New England. He’ll be home from work soon. I’ll wait until I see the red brake lights of his gray Chevy station wagon as he drives carefully through the snow that will muffle the car’s noise on the driveway below my window, and then I’ll go downstairs and ask him to tell me again about the City of the River of January.

I could start in Rio. It wouldn’t be the first time. But the best thing about today is the snow. So the air route I draw this afternoon should depart from a cold place. Boston or New York, perhaps.

Boston, our nearest big city and the state capital, is where my parents met. It’s around two and a half hours east of Pittsfield. I visit Boston once or twice a year, on day trips with school or my family—to the science museum, the aquarium, or my favorite skyscraper (which is blue, as is nearly everything I like best). From its observation deck you can look east toward Boston’s airport and listen to a radio tuned to the voices of the pilots flying to and from it.

Boston, then. I’ll start in Boston.

Today’s destination, meanwhile, is not a real city; rather, it’s the city I’ve liked to imagine since I was maybe seven years old. Its location changes occasionally, as does its name. But no matter where I draw it or what I call it, it’s the same city to me.

My city is where I travel to when I’m sad or worried, or when I don’t wish to think about what I don’t like about myself, such as the fact that I’m unable to pronounce the letter r, and therefore many words, including my own name. It’s also where I go when I want to escape my dawning awareness that I’m gay. A few months ago, for example, the youth group my brother and I attend, the one that gathers on the second floor of a church here in Pittsfield, held a session about “human development.” We were invited to write on cards any questions we didn’t want to ask out loud. One of the leaders collected the cards and a few minutes later read my question to the group: Is there a way to not be gay? He paused, and finally answered: I don’t know of a way. Instead, he said, it’s something people come to accept about themselves. And when I realized that he was looking at me, and how much I feared what he might say next, I turned my eyes away from his, and toward the lights of my imaginary city.

I also like to go to my imaginary city at more ordinary times: when I’m doing things I don’t enjoy, such as washing dishes or raking leaves; when, in school, I get bored or lose track of what the teacher is saying; or when it’s late and the house is quiet and dark but I can’t sleep and so I look out my bedroom window and I see how blue the night is and that it has started to snow, and when I lie back down and close my eyes I see the same snow falling past the towers of my city.

Now the lights from Dad’s car appear on the drive and shake over the garage doors as I pick up the pencil again. I make two small circles on the map and write a name by each. I draw the line that curves between them and then I go downstairs.

Abu Dhabi

A young woman finishes an uneven rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and hands back the mic.

A few minutes later, Jane, a late-middle-aged woman with shoulder-length curly brown hair, picks it up. I’m terrible at karaoke but an enthusiastic supporter, and as she reaches the stage I applaud and try to shout the loudest.

Jane is one of the cabin crew from my flight from London today. She worked in the forward cabin, the one nearest to the flight deck. She came up for a chat with me and the captain on her break between the two passenger meal services, when we were crossing the Black Sea coast of Turkey and the sun was setting. Later, she came back to the cockpit with two cups of strong tea as the hazy green lights of Baghdad filled the long side window that ran past my right shoulder, and she returned again as we sailed down the Gulf’s skies and crossed near one glowing city after another, and over the petroleum complexes that themselves resemble whole cities. Then, in the terminal in Abu Dhabi, after touchdown, Jane and I spoke once more, about the views we’d each had of this desert metropolis, which sprawled on the coast like the Milky Way on a beach holiday, as we made a slow circuit above and landed, having reversed direction, facing back toward London.

Nothing we talked about, though, has prepared me for what happens when she starts to sing. Jane’s voice is so rich it seems to change the air in the room. Entire tables of friends or colleagues fall silent as they turn and see that she has not only the voice, but also all the right moves: she twists the cable that isn’t trailing from the cordless mic; one moment she makes eye contact with a member of the audience, and the next she looks up into a smoky light as if her muse is beckoning from within its beam.

She starts a second song, John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and I take out my phone to make a video to send home to my husband. Then I watch and listen as she finishes and the crowd erupts. Jane hands the mic to the next person and returns to a festive welcome and expressions of disbelief and vicarious pride from our table. When she was young, she explains with a smile, she worked as a showgirl in Las Vegas. Then she came home to England to raise a family. Several decades later, she decided to see the rest of the world.

Before too long we all return to our hotel. My room is on a high floor, maybe the twenty-fifth. It’s late now, but I’m on London time and I know it won’t be easy for me to sleep yet. I walk to the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows and slide open the successive waves of curtains that I’d struggled to figure out how to close earlier. I turn down some of the lights, to dim the images of the bed and mini-fridge that repeat over the nightscape beyond the glass.

As I look out through the reflections that remain, I try to retrace the decisions and circumstances that led to my first visit to Abu Dhabi, many years ago. My parents divorced when I was sixteen; Dad remarried a few years later. After high school, I left Pittsfield for college in a town only an hour or so away, over the hills to the east. Later, I moved to England for graduate school. Two years after that I was due to go to Kenya as part of my graduate studies, and I returned to Pittsfield to visit Mom beforehand (while I’d been in England, Dad and my stepmother had sold the old house in Pittsfield and moved south, to Raleigh, North Carolina). At the end of my visit, Mom took me to the bus station and waved me off, smiling—in order not to appear sad, it seems now—as the bus rolled away along the first yards of my first trip to Africa. Late the next night I landed in Abu Dhabi, on a layover en route to Nairobi.

I’d never been to the Middle East before, let alone to Arabia, and, though my stay here in Abu Dhabi would be measured only in hours, I’d looked forward to it with the enthusiasm of someone who had spent most of their life dreaming about airplanes and journeys to cities as distant from home as this one. I remember a yellow rain of lights as I pressed my face to the jet’s window on the final approach; gusts of a new kind of heat on the airbridge; tiles on a curved ceiling, in a shade of blue that was close to perfection; and the wonder, to me, of Arabic script on the advertisements along the walkways. Nothing else.

I left the graduate program that had taken me to Kenya once I was certain that I wanted to become an airline pilot. I moved to Boston for the first time, to work at a management consulting company in order to save money for my flight training. Three years later I moved to Kidlington, near Oxford, England, to start my pilot course, after which I moved to a shared house near Heathrow to start my flying career. In those early years I flew a narrow-body Airbus jet on short-haul routes to cities all across Europe. Eventually I retrained on the Boeing 747, the iconic airliner I’d dreamed of flying since I was a little kid. In my eleven years on the 747 fleet, I traveled to many of the world’s largest cities, but never to Abu Dhabi.

Not long ago I retrained again, to fly the 787, and it was in the cockpit of one of these newer and smaller jets that I finally returned to this city. Now I’ve flown here several times as a pilot, on trips that typically include around twenty-four hours off “down-route,” that is, on the ground but away from home. That’s time enough to sleep, to study the latest updates to our manuals, to file my scheduling requests for the following month ( Johannesburg? Chennai? Another Abu Dhabi?), to exercise while I listen to music or catch up on a podcast, or to wander out to see something of the city, in the company of my colleagues or on my own.

From the tower of our hotel I look down to the nearby streets. Many Gulf cities have long histories as small coastal settlements. As major metropolises, though, all of them are new.

Close by is a broad avenue lined with shops and framed by rows of apartment and office buildings, perhaps twenty stories high. The avenue is lit to a snowy brilliance even at this hour, while the road that runs parallel to it is herringboned by side streets dense with what look like large single-family homes, an incongruously cozy sight from my high and anonymous room. Farther away is a cluster of skyscrapers, many of which are capped with beacons. Between these red-lit points, my eyes follow the zigzag line that is like a signature of the city’s creators.

I yawn and ponder if it might soon be time for bed. Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to be sleepy: the roads below are still busy, a common sight in Gulf cities, where summer nights are so much more pleasant than summer days, while during Ramadan public life may seem to begin only after sunset. I watch the skyscrapers and construction cranes twinkle as if in an effort to communicate, and I think of David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes, maybe the first novel I read that presented gay characters. The friend who gave the book to me when I was perhaps eighteen had said little to me about it. I thought it would be about the birds, and perhaps Japan, where I knew they were revered enough to be painted on the tails of planes; rather, the book’s title follows from the story of a small child who saw a construction crane from his window, and came to treat its sounds and movements as a language.

Reviews

One of AIR MAIL’s 10 Best Books of the Year

“Part memoir, part travelogue, part history, Imagine a City is all entrancing. . . . Vanhoenacker's generous view is a reminder of just how extraordinary the whole mess of air travel still really is.” —Maureen Corrigan, “Fresh Air,” NPR

"There’ve been plenty of books about cabin attendants’ adventures as part of a globe-trotting sorority bringing the mile-high club down to earth; Imagine a City is a much more intimate and thoughtful work from a man who, seeing ‘the small metal plate on which an arrow indicates qibla, the direction of Mecca’ in [a] hotel room in Abu Dhabi, uses it ‘to estimate the initial direction of the great circle route’ that will take him and his big bird back to London as the light comes up again. . . . What makes this captain of the heavens so appealing is a kind of all-American innocence that helps him savor ‘the palmistry of lit streets’ in Salt Lake City, seen from 38,000 feet above, as eagerly as he devours the poets of Delhi when touching down for 48 hours. Linking the places he flies between through snow, or gates, or the color blue, Vanhoenacker . . . seems to have a near-bottomless appetite for fresh sights and guidebook curiosities.” —Pico Iyer, Air Mail

“Mark Vanhoenacker is a beautiful lyrical writer who uses his experience as a pilot to bring us constantly in touch with the transcendent and the other worldly. Imagine a City is a journey around both the author's mind and the planet's great cities that leaves us energised, open to new experiences and ready to return more hopefully to our lives.” —Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel

“An inviting new volume that gives new meaning to the notion of the view from 42,000 feet. . . . Who knew that in command of one of humankind’s most remarkable modes of transport was a historian of humankind’s ancient history? . . . At the keyboard, Vanhoenacker has danced, and on his pages there is tumbling mirth indeed. . . . Along the way—in mid-flight, you might say—Vanhoenacker offers a lyrical look at what life is like behind those bolted cabin doors.” —David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe
 
“A love song to cities the world over. . . . Visits to the great cities, especially in the company of one who loves them as Mr. Vanhoenacker does, can have a way of inspiring us and urging us to follow him and go there too. The author sees these places in their entirety—from great heights and from close by—as he strolls down their streets taking in their views, sounds and smells. He writes as someone who, from a very early age—looking at a metal globe—wanted to explore the world, to get to know it all, to touch it, so to speak, everywhere. I share that urge. Many of us still do. And for those of us who do, Imagine a City will hold us in a warm, welcome embrace.” —Shlomo Angel, The Wall Street Journal

“If you’re not tussling for legroom and overhead bin space, it’s easier to remember that flying is a spectacular way to see our planet. Belgian American pilot Mark Vanhoenacker blends privileged cockpit views with travelogue and memoir in his new book, which reads as a love letter to the cities he’s returned to again and again. . . . As in a previous book, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, Vanhoenacker captivates when describing the silent beauty of a world glimpsed from above.” —The Washington Post

"Combines the god’s eye view of them with street-by-street detail. The book will enchant and even move anyone who feared in recent years for the future of both travel and urbanism." —Financial Times, "Best summer books of 2022"

“Even if you're not yet ready to brave crowded airports and long lines at TSA, you can still visit some of the world's great cities from the comfort of your armchair, with Mark Vanhoenacker as your tour guide. . . . Vanhoenacker is a sure-handed navigator, filling in . . . gaps with history, poetry, and lots of local color.” —NPR

"Vanhoenacker is exceptionally well travelled, and an exceptionally curious and widely read observer. . . . He doesn’t waste an hour, and with every return his engagement with each city deepens." —The Times Literary Supplement

“[A] beguiling tour of cities both real and imagined. . . . Vanhoenacker is a collector of sumptuous details. . . . Philosophically rich without being ponderous, belonging on the same shelf as books by Saint-Exupéry, Markham, and Langewiesche, Vanhoenacker’s book is unfailingly interesting, full of empathetic details on faraway places and lives. It’s an absolute pleasure for any world citizen and a trove for any traveler. A sparkling addition to the literature of flight.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A memoir wrapped within a scholarly travel book. . . . Dreamy and erudite. . . . A most likeable, warm-hearted narrator with an original world view.” —The Times (UK)

“A century ago, at the dawn of flight, people imagined that writers would want to become pilots, and vice versa, because of the revelations that come with seeing the Earth from above. Mark Vanhoenacker's elegant, engrossing book shows the power of these twinned perspectives, from the skies and up close at ground level. Readers who have not yet traveled with him at the controls of a 787 will be grateful to accompany him on the journeys in these pages.” —James Fallows, coauthor of Our Towns
 
“Mark Vanhoenacker is a long-haul commercial pilot, and his 787 Dreamliner—a very apt name—takes him to all the cities he dreamed of as a boy in smalltown America (and many more). His perspective--from the cockpit, on the ground, and through the lens of retrospection—defies easy comparison: Imagine a coming-of-age memoir and shrewdly picaresque travelogue told by Jules Verne, E,B. White, and Jan Morris rolled into one. There is a moment we all know, head angled against an airplane window at night, when you can see both yourself and what's below. Imagine a City lays claim to that moment. Vanhoenacker's curiosity about the planet and his honesty about himself will leave a permanent mark.” —Cullen Murphy, editor at large of The Atlantic

“An utterly remarkable and original travel book. Like Jan Morris and Pico Iyer, Vanhoenacker weaves memoir and travelogue, using his unusual perch as a pilot to take us on an incredible journey to dozens of cities around the world. Like Italo Calvino, he somehow weaves it all into one, a painfully beautiful cubist city of memory and dreams that rises out of his warm and lyrical prose.” —Andrew Blum, author of Tubes and The Weather Machine

“If the child is the father of the man, then ‘the hometown is like a mother tongue.’ Mark Vanhoenacker takes us on a journey to major metropolises all over the earth on a quest to find the hidden personal geographies revealed in faraway and unfamiliar parks, cathedrals, marketplaces or seashores. We all carry an invisible city around with us wherever we go, a town of the psyche we’re always trying to re-enter or flee. Vanhoenacker regards the lights from 40,000 feet up, and then lands the plane to meet the denizens of his own interior city eye-to-eye. A tour de force of descriptive power and honesty; I can think of no other book like this one.” —Tom Zoellner, winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction 
 
“Most of us look at cities from the ground up. But, Mark Vanhoenacker, a pilot, looks at them from above. And his journeys enable him to drop in and visit and revisit cities across the world. His book, Imagine a City provides a unique and much-needed perspective of the cities and the urban world we live in.” —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
 
"An enriching memoir of how a sensitive boy’s yearning for escape and acceptance found its fulfilment in the life of an airline pilot . . . A touching survey of human dreams and endeavours and a hymn to the quiet pleasures of returning, in the flesh or in memory, to the intimate geography of one’s hometown." —Patrick Gale, author of Mother’s Boy

"Refreshingly personal and moving . . . This absorbing modern twist on the age-old story of flying the nest, yet yearning for home, will transport you around the globe and back again without leaving your seat." —Mark Ovenden, author of Metro Maps of the World

Author

© Mark Jones
MARK VANHOENACKER is a commercial airline pilot and the author of the international best seller Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot and How to Land a Plane. A regular contributor to The New York Times and the Financial Times, he has also written for Wired, the Times (London), and the Los Angeles Times. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked as a management consultant before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. He now flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London to cities around the world. View titles by Mark Vanhoenacker