Seeing Los Angeles from the air for the first time chips something off your soul. Below me is an endless sprawl of a city with no boundaries, swathed in its own filthy brown smog. It is a long way from my Banks Peninsula home and it is a view of the world to come that makes me uncomfortable in my comfortable airline seat.
It has been a long, dreary flight from the island of Rarotonga to Los Angeles. Even by today’s standards of modern air travel, the Pacific is a big ocean to cross. All night, I watched the sleeping forms of my fellow passengers lit occasionally by the flash of
