I'm on a helicopter ride, with my dad, for his birthday. We start somewhere like southeast Portland, and buzz around a huge tree old tree, hundreds of feet tall, in the middle of the city. This tree has a trail that goes all the way to the top, and I'd been meaning to hike up it one day, but I thought it was very difficult. From the air, I can see that hike is actually pretty easy; the parking lot is pretty close to the top, and the trail, a boardwalk suspended in the branches, just winds around once. It looks really neat.

We keep flying, right down into the streets. It seems like we are dangerously low, and the pilot is really being a daredevil. He pilots us right through a door and down a hallway, and then reaches a dead end and has to fly backward, retracing our path down the hall, which seems even more dangerous.