I have heard it said that there are no atheists in foxholes; I think the same could be said for the experience of flying over an Alaskan mountain range on a clear spring day, albeit for a very different reason. As I look out the airplane window, I succumb to the ever-present temptation to take pictures. My cell phone, bless its heart, poor myopic little toad, cannot even pretend to catch hold of what I see. And naturally, my real camera is packed away in one of my suitcases, jammed into the tail of the plane and collectively weighing about as much as a small neutron star.

Maybe I should just look.

I wonder, do I look enough? From the old days I have shelves, drawers, and even a few albums of old pictures, when everybody was young, and I am glad to have them. More recently, the pictures I collect live in the digital multiverse, and I like to look back at those too. But I wonder, did I miss anything while I was scrambling to take all these pictures? The mountains and streams that I am looking at on my cell phone screen seem mildly disappointing.

Here are some things that don’t translate well into a photograph: dormant volcanoes, the Kuskokwim River, fogbows (also called white rainbows; you really should just look at those if you get the chance), Lake Iliamna with its myriad of tiny weather systems gliding around, the wing of an airplane, and the St. Elias mountains. So, why the mad snapping? Maybe I panic. I can see forever, almost, and everything that forever holds is moving away from me at something approaching terminal velocity. It could be that I’m just trying to slow it down.