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95 Thin Places and Thick Time A Duet for Two Worlds “Ready to go flying?” I ask. “Absolutely.” “Think I know how to do this?” Roy Hammerling, a religion professor at the college, sits in the right seat as the Skyhawk enters the runway. “I’m counting on it,” he says. The throttle goes forward, and the airplane begins to run down the centerline . It’s a beautiful day for flying. Clear sky and bright sun. A gentle breeze from the north. Huge distances between the very small clouds. The type of day where chasing an idea with an airplane seems perfectly logical and sane. At 60 knots I ease back on the yoke, the nose lifts, and then the rest of the airplane follows. We begin a gentle climbing turn to the west. “I love that initial feeling,” Roy says. “It’s like you’re tethered to the ground, and then all of a sudden you break free.” Roy and I are on an expedition this morning, a mission, a voyage of discovery . We are looking for the place where everything changes, the place where the very behavior of the physical earth changes direction. There are signs on the ground that point to the spot, but when you are standing there, the shift is too subtle to see. We are looking for a line reaching back to Pleistocene catastrophe and forward into ecology and myth. We are looking for the Laurentian Divide. And we are looking for something else as well. Below us the land is green where crops have sprouted, brown where the plants are still emerging. We’ve had three days of hard rain, and overland 96 Prairie Sky water moves toward the Maple and Sheyenne and Red Rivers, streams today in depressions you can measure but never see. “I am always amazed by the takeoff,” he says. “When I was a little kid, I used to imagine it was like there were ropes around the airplane, and you had to break away. And there is this sense of—I don’t know—elation when you break free.” There is such a thing as accidental genius, I think. Hunting for geology, the normal thing would be to invite a geologist. But the Laurentian Divide in North Dakota is nothing like the Great Divide running the length of the Rocky Mountains. There is no leap and swooning of summit and valley here. Subtle at best, invisible at worst, the Laurentian Divide is more idea than rock, but the evidence of its presence is overwhelming. I mentioned this in a hallway once, and Roy got interested. If you are looking for the invisible, I think, invite a theologian. I level the wings just fifteen hundred feet over the ground. Traffic on the interstate is light. An egret flies southbound below us. “I always felt there was a bit of a metaphor for spiritual life in that,” Roy continues. “In the sense that what people always want is a sense of joy or happiness . But there’s always these things tethering you down to the ground. You can’t get away from it. I have a friend who’s a pilot, and I’ve gone up with him a few times. I always have this sense of freedom in flying.” We’ve begun this conversation a thousand times. In my office, in his office, in hallways and lunch lines, we get to talking about flying and about the small insistent sense that something else is happening beyond the shape of air moving over wings. But then we’ve always paused. “In the airplane,” I’ve said. “I want to hear what you think while we’re actually flying.” When I told him I was going to try to find the divide, something huge and historic and mostly invisible unless you’re looking for it, and even then damn near impossible to fix precisely, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We’ve delayed this conversation so long, it nearly erupts. “Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?” “Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax—the physics and the math work pretty well.” “Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears; they build up regulations and walls and...

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