I was flying recently from Manchester, New Hampshire to Pittsburgh, and our flight path took us directly over my home town. The afternoon was calm and bright, and though we flew at 37,000 feet, it wasn't hard to spot the familiar landmarks of Brattleboro, Vermont, spread out like a dinner picnic: the two bridges spanning the Connecticut River north and south of my small town, with its four main streets and five spires, and the surrounding development blossoming out. Even the Catholic church two blocks from my apartment was obvious.

Our course took us due west, and I soon saw the road I take to work each day: Route 9 wending its way west up the foothills of the Green Mountains, past Marlboro College and onwards towards the New York border. When the plane passed Bennington, a town I vaguely know, I was able to pick out the white obelisk of the Bennington Battle Monument, but soon we were headed west of my regional know-how, towards Albany and beyond the confines of my corner of the world.

Take a good look down. You can see the land bathed in a rose-gold wash around 7:30 on a summer eve. You see the origins of towns. You see the lids and bald spots of our made world and the patches of nature caught in between. On a clear day with few clouds, you can watch each pattern of creation, each tidy parcel and house color-coded and blocked like a faded board game running beneath you, away from the belly of the plane.

Somewhere over western Pennsylvania I saw a square-block village center, mostly houses and a compact Main Street, a perfect grid, as if laid out from an engineer's specifications, pre-assembled, and dumped down at once. This was surrounded by more chaotic commercial and residential development, ringed further by helter-skelter industrial parks and strips. The original main road, now probably called "Old Route Something," still threaded the needle of downtown, but its glory had been usurped by the by-pass, which faked right then left then right again around the town like a running back.

The writing was on the wall, or rather, the blackboard below. I saw the fields and subdivisions, the dead mountains and dammed up rivers, the swaths of fresh asphalt and abandoned airfields. From the air, everything's bare. I wondered about the fate of that town's Main Street, how well it was faring in the wake of 24 hour mini-marts and discount outlets sprouting on the by-pass, and how or if the citizens were rallying.

Air travel is the story of America speeded up and dramatized, like a two-hour movie absorbed in an afternoon, not a thousand page novel read over a week-long mini-van or rail trip.

Outside of Chicago, socio-economics stratified like the kinds of clouds we passed through. Some well-to-do suburbs enjoyed in-ground pools, shaped exotically into kidneys and ovals; other subdivisions sported utilitarian, above-ground circles. Other suburbs had no pools. One stately subdivision abutted a Rorschach golf course, while just a few hundred yards away, middle and working class row houses sat right behind shopping malls. Developers tried to hide their handiwork by sticking a fine line of trees between the respectable homes and a noxious-looking chemical plant.

If this approach was halfway passable on the ground, from the air it was a failure. You could see right through it.

Ethan Gilsdorf lives in Paris with his wife Isabel, and is a frequent and favorite contributor to Get Lost Magazine.