I'm in an industrial zone. It's a ravaged, Rust Belt sort of place, the kind that saw its better days when car headlights rode outside the fenders and men wore pork pie hats. The streets are wide and littered. Alongside the road I'm on is an elevated railway, though for some reason I want to think of it as a straight line rollercoaster. A line of men and women is gathered alongside me, waiting to mount rickety, corroded steps to a platform along the railway. They're all pilots and astronauts, each wearing a uniform from somewhere in their career. I see WWII Army Air Corps pilots, WASPS, Vietnam guys, Apollo astronauts, Gulf War vets. It's like a history of American air power on the foot.
Above us in the sky floats a line of B-25 Mitchell bombers. They are moving far too slowly for airspeed, as if they were hung from blimps. Some are complete, some are damaged, some are so skeletal as to be nearly wireframes of themselves. As they drift past the platform, the generations of pilots step aboard them. They are flying to wherever it is that aircraft go after they die, sort of like that scene in Porco Rosso.
I weep for them.
