Eyes Open Descending Into Haiti

Your first impression as the island of Haiti comes into view below the airliner, is ‘brown and dry.’ A few minutes later the 757 does a wide arc over Port au Prince harbor, and you descend in approach to the Port au Prince airport. You begin to see tents and squatter camps everywhere, thousands of them, far from Port au Prince. People have traveled over the broken landscape for miles to find someplace to squat, someplace to live. There are splashes of blue and tan and purple -- tarps dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see.
The plane descended over miles of destruction. I said “Holy shit” under my breath as I looked out the window.

The news can’t prepare you for the scale. I think the human mind has trouble getting around something like this. There was an older meaning of the word ‘sublime’: something so big you can’t encompass it in your mind, like, say, gazing out over the Grand Canyon. You see it. You can try to describe it. But it’s impossible to fully grasp the extent and scale. That’s how I felt flying in to Port au Prince. You have to see it to believe it, and even then you don’t believe it.