Ray was the last “Eye-In-The-Sky” Traffic Reporter. Traffic cameras and the internet had put him and his kind out of work at last.

The hours flying over the city, reporting the morning and evening rush hour snarls gave Ray purpose in his life. He had been a pilot all of his adult life. When he was flying above the city, he was part of the clouds, part of the sky.

His Cessna 172 was getting old. Ray was getting old too. He knew his hours as a traffic reporter were up. But the hard part was that no one really knew how he suffered. He spent his hours and days helping people get where they needed to go. Now these people no longer needed him. There was no other career that interested Ray. If there were, he would have jumped on it like anyone else.

He inspected the plane every time he flew, lovingly caressing the prop, gently running his fingers over the struts, flaps & hinges. He stroked the engine cowling. He checked the navigation lights. He knew his checklist backward and forward, up and down. Ray loved his job and his airplane.

On foggy or stormy days when he was not allowed to fly, Ray had to drive a van around town—thereby adding his part to the congestion. Ray hated driving around town in the radio station van and he didn’t mind telling his listeners that he hated it.

Ray was on his last traffic report and then his contract was up. He knew that as he took off from the little airfield east of town. He flew his plane north and south, east and west calling in his traffic reports for the highways and arterials just as he always did.

The predicted thunderhead was forming in the east, rising almost 5 miles above the lake. When the afternoon commute was over, Ray flew to the east toward the thunderhead.

The kids at the state fair below him watched as the little plane flew into the cloud mountain. To them it looked like a giant eye in the sky blinked as the tail of the plane disappeared into the fast-rising white cloud.