Cows graze in a fenced pasture. Cotton-y smoke rises from industrial facilities. Tiny golfers with tiny golf carts negotiate the greens and sand traps. Monopoly-sized houses and hotels are arranged around streets with tiny plastic cars and trucks. Roads and rivers go around molded trees on a carpet of green construction paper. It’s all carefully glued together, with care taken not to show the empty shoebox underneath.

And above it all hums a Robinson R22 helicopter, looking down on the diorama that is, in fact, Suffolk from the sky.

What appears to be the work of a talented grade-schooler fulfilling an assignment becomes more recognizably Suffolk the lower Steve Decker hovers his aircraft. Suddenly, the eye in the sky can see the cows are moving, not molded. The smoke is rising, not pasted in place. The golfers are putting, not put there.

The sights are familiar to Steve Decker, who in 1969 was drafted into the military away from his job as an auto mechanic. He spent 23 years in the service, flying just about every type of rotor-wing aircraft the military owned — Chinooks, Apaches, Black Hawks — before he retired in 1993.

“When I got out of the military, I didn’t ever want to see a helicopter again,” he says as he sits inside the terminal at Suffolk Executive Airport, where his business, Decker Aviation, is based.

So he did some decidedly un-aviation-related things for a while. He substitute-taught in local school divisions. He even got certified in cosmetology, because his wife at the time owned a nail salon.

But there was a feeling he just couldn’t shake that called him back to the sky. It was the thrill of rising smoothly into the air with the blades spinning above him. The diorama below him when he gets high enough. The freedom to be able to land pretty much wherever he wants or needs to — he only needs 10 feet around the blades.

“It’s like riding a motorcycle,” he said, adding he still works on ground-level vehicles in his spare time. “It’s just very relaxing for me.”

Decker has parlayed his relaxation time into a business, incorporating just about every imaginable application of a helicopter. With his two Robinson choppers — a two-seater and a four-seater — he does aerial surveys for the Navy, gives aerial tours of Hampton Roads, does aerial photography, takes law enforcement up for aerial searches. He’s also the pilot for WAVY’s Chopper 10 and does all the maintenance on that copter, too.

His aerial tours — at $550 an hour for up to three people — take adventurous types on a virtual circle of Hampton Roads, from the Suffolk airport to the oceanfront to Fort Monroe and back to Suffolk, along with everything in between.

But there’s just no comparison between the ground-level view and the view from above.

“There’s really no description for it,” Decker said.