Got my wings clipped
I'm surrounded
All this pavement
Guess I'll circle while I'm waiting for my fuse to dry...
Someday I'll fly, someday I'll soar...
~ J. Mayer
Back in the States, when I had just moved from Ohio to Missouri, some friends of mine suggested that I read an author by the name of Richard Bach. You might remember Bach from the book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," but I was recommended Bach's "The Bridge Across Forever." By association, I came across "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" at a bookstore in Manistee, Michigan on a vacation with my parents just a few months later. I read "Illusions" in a day and reread it every year until 2004, when I came to California and the book went into storage in Missouri. In the book Bach plays on his nomadic experience as a biplane barnstormer to describe a fictional account of meeting another barnstormer named Don in the "hills of Northeast Indiana" who wants to join Bach for a time on his travels. Bach is uncomfortable with Don; Don performs little miracles like stopping a plane without enough runway distance, "lifting" the bugs off of the cloth body and visors in the cockpits so that the creatures can live again, and performing routine maintenance without ever greasing the engine. Bach knows at some point this kind of behavior will produce a mob of followers (this was before Facebook and other social media, so think "followers" in a Biblical context), but Don insists that the powers he possesses can be attained by anyone. I'll let you discover the ending, if you want it.
The book opens with an account of what kind of parable Don might tell if he were to relate a modern-day "Sermon on the Mount," and the story goes something like this: there was once a creature that lived along the bottom of a fast-moving river. The creatures could breathe underwater, but they struggled on the river-bottom all the same, getting beat by the current against the rocks. One day one of them posed the question: "What would happen if we just let go of the river-bottom?"
"Are you crazy?" asked another. "You'll be smashed upon the rocks and die!"
The first creature wanted to take the chance anyway, and he released himself into the current. At first he was dashed upon the rocks, and then he began to drift away from the rocks and rose up in the river, floating with the current, seeing amazing things, like other rivers...lakes...oceans. The rocks occasionally bruised him when he came to new terrain, and yet, he knew they wouldn't end the adventure. They were a part of the freedom for him.
I was thinking about that passage the other day when I caught AMC's airing of the 1997 movie "Contact." In one scene Jodie Foster's character is questioning the building of a restrictive chair in the spacecraft, a chair that is not mentioned in the schematics that the "aliens" have transmitted to Earth. Later, secured in the chair, she suffers all kinds of jarring and turbulence; it takes watching a piece of jewelry that she was wearing float in front of her to trust her instincts and leave the "safety" of the chair. As she floats quietly in the cabin, the chair breaks away from the spacecraft and slams into the top of the cabin, where a moment more of thinking safely might have broken something on Foster.
Like, say, a hand or arm.
*****
Around the time I got the Bach recommendation I was friends with the first of two pilots in my life. He was a student at the College of the Ozarks, studying airplane mechanics and working part-time at the same luggage store that I worked for in Branson, Missouri. Occasionally, if the conditions were right, he would take me flying. As I remember it the planes were mostly Cessnas; I trusted him enough not to get airsick. Most of my motion sickness is psychological, so the trust part was crucial.
I don't remember if we ever flew completely without instrumentation--I remember taking sunset pictures and I remember a floating trick where he placed a hat on the dashboard (is it called a dashboard in a Cessna?) and then dropped the nose of the plane so that the hat "floated." Lucky hat, I thought, laughing out loud, every time the pilot did that. Lucky hat, to be set free from the rocky river bottom.
*****
"What do you need, Pete?"
"Glider practice."
~ "Always," 1989
Visibility. Wikipedia calls it the most important aspect of flight. Most of the time, flying, you're high enough to have visual perspective--if there's no cloud cover you can gauge the geography. If there's cloud cover you can very often get above them and gauge the horizon and distance.
Over the weekend I read a fantastic short story by Colum McCann about early transcontinental flight pioneers. McCann is well-versed in historical fiction; his novel "Let the Great World Spin" intricately covered the Twin Towers from their early days to their last ones, and he leaves no detail unturned with the story "TransAtlantic." (You can look it up online for the April 16th issue, but if you aren't a subscriber you might do well to sit down with a copy at the library.) In the story two friends fly from America to Ireland overnight in a modified Vickers Vimy. At one point three failures occur: the weather forecast (it was supposed to be clear), the exhaust manifold (a failure that creates a loud, steady white noise that threatens to put the aviators to sleep), and the electrical system (killing the heat and the instrument panel). The pilot hesitates to drop below the clouds or try to climb above them; in the cloud cover, with no instruments, there is literally no way to determine which way is up.
With no perspective, would it be best to give up? Should our heroes let go of the safety and just let the plane fall? Or should they trust the thin air in front of them, and hope that somewhere, somehow, a horizon will emerge? Let go, or go on?
Perhaps letting go is a form of going on.
*****
I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
I'm just out to find
The better part of me...
~ "Superman" Five For Fighting
I have no instruments for conventional flying. I possess no pilot's license, for VFR, IMC, or otherwise. I have been a passenger only all of my life, trusting the pilot.
Conversely, I have never spent significant amounts of time on an actual river-bottom, or in a spacecraft bound for a replication of Pensacola. I do not possess those instruments, either. I'll have to take the current for granted, or the dreams of Carl Sagan.
Still, I possess certain instruments that allow me to fly. My little boat of thoughts floats in the vast ocean, my little glider of dreams graces the skies with instruments of vast and billowing communication. I find possibility in job boards, publishers' Twitter accounts, and ties with friends following my plume. I skim over nothing. I have picked up every detail on my dashboard--dials and gauges called Monster, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, email--for a year now.
Four months ago, all of the instruments worked. My little glider may have been grounded, but I could still gain access to to the skies.
And then I moved to another land. One after another, the instruments either failed forever or were disabled. I had to grab the stick, stare at the cloud cover, and either let go or go on. I picked up a pen, some paper--these are my throttle, steering. I let go of the instruments that wouldn't work (strange freedom!), like rocks on the river-bottom, and held on to my little vessel with just a pen and paper. I wrote my way out of the paper bag. Back to square one...and sooner or later I spotted Ireland. I landed without hitch. Bless the person who repaired my little vessel, Lord, and here's the ground, and there's the plane, ready for me.
I'm on my way up again.
And the arms of the ocean are carrying me,
And all this devotion was rushing out of me...
Never let me go never let me go...
~ Florence + The Machine
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