Tag: flying

Categories
Aviation Memories

Overhead the Farm

This week is the annual EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This brings back memories of a good time we shared over 35 years ago.

Our Piper Cherokee could hold enough fuel to fly well past what our bladders would tolerate, but we didn’t fly that way. We planned every stop — fuel first, restrooms too — and let the country reveal itself in the increments a small plane gives you: Rock Springs WY for the first night, Alliance NE next for gas and bathroom, Yankton SD to make a phone call, and then, finally, circling over a farm outside Alcester, South Dakota, that I hadn’t seen from the air before.

It was 1989. I was forty-two. My Dad was sixty-eight, sitting in the right seat of my 1974 Piper Pathfinder, painted red, white, and blue — an honest airplane that never asked for much and never gave us trouble. We were headed to Oshkosh, to the fly-in, the way pilots go to Mecca — except this time the pilgrimage ran straight through his childhood.

His people were Norwegian. His grandfather had crossed an ocean and then a good part of a continent to end up farming eastern South Dakota, and the family had stayed put the way families did then, generation folding into generation until my grandfather had more children than the land could easily absorb. Some of them farmed anyway. My father did not. He went into printing — Linotype machines, hot lead, the smell of a shop instead of the smell of a barn. But I remember the soil anyway. I’d visited that farm as a boy of ten or so, and what stayed with me wasn’t a story anyone told but a set of smells: hay and diesel and animal warmth inside the barn, the particular rattle of a tractor under me, dust rising gold in a shaft of light through a barn door left open. Did I want to help milk the cows?

We landed at Yankton for fuel and my father called his sister. I don’t remember what either of them said — it was a short call, the kind you make when you’re about to do something better shown than explained. Something like: we’ll be overhead in twenty minutes. Go outside. Look up.

And then we were. Alcester from a thousand feet is not much — a scatter of buildings, a windbreak of trees, fields squared off in the pattern only farmland makes — but down there was a farmhouse, and out in the yard were two people who’d stopped whatever they were doing to come out and watch the sky. We circled twice. My father waved — big, unmistakable — from a thousand feet up at his sister and her husband in the yard below. They waved back, two small shapes going back and forth, back and forth. Then we leveled the wings and kept going east, toward Wisconsin, and neither of us said much of anything, because there wasn’t really anything to say. It was just good.

Oshkosh itself is its own kind of pilgrimage, and if you’ve never been, the thing that’s hard to explain is not the airplanes — though there are more in one place than you will ever otherwise see — it’s the people.

And the crowd starts in the skies as you line up for the Fisk arrival into Oshkosh. The air traffic controllers are out in a field somewhere below and they’re talking continuously. “The red white and blue Cherokee rock your wings! Land on the yellow dot midfield…” Before you know it you’re turning off into the grass and being waved to your parking spot next to so many other airplanes.

Most pilots who fly in tent-camp right under their own wings, sleeping on the grass next to the machine that brought them. Dad and I opted for relative luxury: a dorm room at a local university, actual beds, actual plumbing. I don’t remember the room. Or how we got back and forth to the airport.

What I do remember is the grounds. Tens of thousands of people for a solid week, and no litter. None. If you saw a gum wrapper, you picked it up, the way you’d pick up a dropped tool in someone else’s shop. The shared bathrooms stayed clean not because anyone was assigned to clean them, but because everyone behaved as if they were company in someone else’s house.

It sounds like a small thing to remember thirty-some years later. It isn’t. I’ve described it as renewing my faith in humanity. Each afternoon we gathered along the flight line for the daily air show which was usually punctuated by the contrast between an old biplane and the sound of the latest American fighter aircraft. Amazing sights.

I had been once before, driven in with pilots who’d rented an RV, and learned mostly that I didn’t want to do that again — too many people, too close together, none of the ease of arriving on your own wings. That trip didn’t have the thing this one had. I couldn’t have told you what the thing was, exactly, except that being there with my Dad restored some baseline faith in how people can behave toward each other when they all care about the same unlikely thing.

The flight home took us back through Spearfish, where another of our relatives put us up for the night, and then on to Logan, Utah, for fuel and that bio break.

It was the leg after that — the crossing of the state of Nevada — that I still think about on rough days. The sky was clear. Not a cloud anywhere. And the air was some of the worst turbulence I’ve flown through, before or since. I tried up high, I tried down low, but there was no altitude in that whole stretch of sky that gave us any peace. No smooth air anywhere. Just wind. Dad didn’t get sick. Neither did I. We just held on and let the airplane buck and waited it out, the way you do.

After a time then we crossed low over the Sierras, and somewhere on the descent into the central valley of California the air went calm again, smooth as the farm pond back in Alcester must have been that morning, and the trip was, in every way that mattered, already over.

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
Books Living Short Stories

Memories: The Chrysanthemums

Sometime this summer I was eyeing one of Stanford’s Continuing Education courses titled Short Story Masterpieces to be taught by Michael Krasny. For the course, Krasny was going to be using The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction edited by Ann Charters.

While I knew I couldn’t devote the time required to actually enroll in the course, I hadn’t heard of the book before – so I thought I might enjoy just getting a copy. As it turns out, the book is priced like a textbook – but I still decided to get it. For the last couple of months it’s just sat on a bookshelf in my home office – until today.

This afternoon – looking for a pre-holiday relief from work work – I picked up the book and found a cozy place away from the office to begin exploring. I read the book’s Introduction and its explanation of the book’s structure (Stories, Commentaries on specific stories, Casebooks on specific authors, and an appendix with Charters’ discussions about short stories, the genre, etc.)

One of my favorite writers – ever – is John Steinbeck. There’s one story by Steinbeck in Charters’ book – “The Chrysanthemums“. The story, like much of Steinbeck’s work, is based in California’s Monterey County – and, specifically, in Salinas.

Steinbeck begins the story:

The high grey flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot.

Many years ago I owned a small airplane and, from time to time, I would need to fly in actual instrument conditions to maintain my proficiency for instrument flight. I have vivid memories of one morning taking off and flying purposely to Salinas – which was fogged in at the time and, as a result, would provide me the opportunity to shoot an instrument approach into Salinas Airport in actual instrument conditions. Steinbeck’s story – and his opening sentences – brought those memories flooding back.

That morning was just as Steinbeck described – the fog was a lid on the valley. It was a closed pot. Approaching Salinas, I was in clear blue sky above but I needed to penetrate that fog to get below it and land at Salinas. As I was communicating with the approach controller, he cleared me for an instrument approach and I began descending into the fog – transitioning from clear blue sky to only flying from the instruments in the cockpit of my airplane.

My approach began normally – me feeling good about getting into actual IMC. But then something happened – the directional gyro suddenly began spinning. This was not supposed to happen!

The directional gyro provides the pilot with information on the heading the aircraft is pointed. It’s one of several important instruments which pilots need to continuously scan when they’re flying in the clouds. One of the risks pilots face when flying in instrument conditions is a failure of one of these critical instruments. So – here I was – in the fog, descending into Salinas, but with a spinning directional gyro.

Pilots are taught that maintaining the scan of all of the critical instruments is vital while flying on instruments. If one of the critical instruments fails, a pilot can become fixated on the failed instrument, stop scanning the others, and lose situational awareness. When I was flying, there were circular plastic covers with suction devices on the back that you could use to quickly slap over a malfunctioning instrument to prevent it from becoming your sole focus. I had a couple of those – but when the moment strikes they’re not handy – being tucked away in a flight bag in the back seat!

So I forced myself to just ignore the damn spinning directional gyro – and figure a way out.

The fog layer was perhaps 1,500 feet thick – maybe even less. I knew I had blue sky above me. If I could break off the approach, applying power and keeping the wings level, I could get back up to that clear blue sky air. And that’s what I did. I radioed Salinas Tower that I was breaking off the approach. He responded with “State your intentions” – and I cancelled my instrument approach as I climbed above the fog and headed back home. I never did land at Salinas that morning. I also never trusted that directional gyro again – and had it replaced.

As I read the opening sentences of Steinbeck’s story, the memories of my foggy morning encounter with Salinas came flooding back. In Steinbeck’s story, Elisa has her own challenges with the Salinas fog as a metaphor for her life. She lived there. For me it was just a close encounter. I made it back.

Looking at Krasny’s course syllabus, I think I’ll begin exploring the other writers he’s featured in Charters’ book – as I move beyond this initial Steinbeck story. The book is such a treasure trove of stories – I know I need – and want – to dive deeper. I’m sure more memories await!