shadow is a piece of darkness moving at the speed of light. Our shadow is the shape of the light we intercept, our darkprint. It's evidence that we're really here; ghosts don't have them. It can be gone faster than the hole we make in water when we dive.

Weightless and silent, a shadow is powerful. A hawk's shadow will spook a yard full of hens. His own shadow will play with a child all day, never missing the child's quick feet with its own. We never outgrow our shadow, never need a new one.

You can often see your shadow from an airplane, and you can do some interesting things with it. The easiest way to show someone the difference between airspeed and groundspeed is to show him your shadow as you fly. An airplane's shadow is an exact record of its speed and a precise trace of its path over the ground. Try to "fly" your shadow along a road, for instance. The wind makes it tricky. Or try to make it hold still. In a slow enough airplane flying into a fast enough wind, you can actually stop your shadow on a spot. I've done it in a glider.

Student pilots make three solo cross-country flights. The last must be a triangle more than 300 miles long. I made mine in mid-Winter, Lancaster, Texas, to Abilene to Stephenville and home. On the Abilene to Stephenville leg, late in the afternoon, I saw my shadow about 2,500 feet down and a quarter mile to the left. I watched it ghost along the course line.

It was a wonderfully complex shadow, made partly of light. The Cessna 152's cabin has a lot of glass, even a back window, unusual in airplanes, and our shadow had an indistinct but unmistakable dot of light in its center. I watched it for a while, wondering if someone on the ground could tell what it was. Not likely, I decided; it would flick over them at 92 knots, or about 106 miles an hour. Then, busy little student, I got involved in navigating and forgot about it. I have remembered it several times since, though: how it bounced like a buggy over prairie and farm, a dark little buckboard, freighted with light.

© Paul J. Sampson