When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
July 1995
I am nervous, afraid. Sometimes I wonder if I have lost my mind. I have lost everything else that ever mattered to me, but somehow I don’t think that I have parted with my sanity. At least not yet. Parting with that is, however, always an option. One which some would suggest I am exercising now.
I run through my checklist. Clothes for three months, a newly purchased and hurriedly programmed notebook computer, books to read, and my airplane. Whiskey Oscar. I am taking leave of my life and perhaps my senses. I am taking my glider cross country to fly, to travel and to see what I may see.
Leaving behind a perfectly good job, a nice house, a settled life. I guess I appear to be a bit erratic. But au contraire, what you are witnessing is actually a brave act of sanity in an insane world. I am leaving behind all the social mores that bind me; the senseless power struggles of the work-a-day world and the cruelty and betrayal that passed for my marriage. Poof! All Gone. It is all behind me, like clutter in a closet, and I am closing the door.
As I close the door to my house, I am ready to leave. But I am not. I fear going, I fear staying. The fear of the known, of the endless dull litany of a life not mine is greater than fear of the unknown, and that differential as much as anything seals my fate. I will go.
My stomach announces its misgivings. Am I making a reasonable decision? Have I lost my mind? The line between sanity and insanity, between acceptable an unacceptable, no longer exists and I no longer know.
My mind has been in a state of disarray since the night my husband informed me he was in love with his nurse. I have been unable to make sense of things. Of the many years we spent building a life together. Of all the little moments, of the difficulties, of the insanity of it all. Nothing has quite fit or flowed since that evening and now I realize that I cannot live the rest of my life this way. But I have no where to go, no one to go to. I need to find a place for me, a place that is mine, without the memories of my past staring at me daily.
But where to?
I haven’t a clue. All I know is that when the going get tough, the tough go traveling and that is exactly what I intend to do. Three months on the road and in the air, to see what I may see. I put the key in the ignition and a song comes over the radio:
“We gotta get out of this place If it’s the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Girl, there’s a better life for me and you…”
When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
1960
I am flying, soaring down the stairs, over the railing, through the dining room of my parents’ house and into the kitchen. I swoop up and down, just under the ceiling. The air forms a cushion beneath me, and arms stretch out to catch the air, I will myself this way and that. It is exquisite, delightful freedom, soaring through the house like this.
I fly back upstairs to my bedroom. Then I awake. But I knew that I could fly. It was more than a child’s dream and it has stayed with me all these years.
1997
Nearly four decades later, I feel the push of air beneath my body and I soar in it, climbing thousands of feet to the base of the cloud. It is wonderfully cool at this altitude. And it is silent.
I stop below cloud base and look up at the building mass above me. Soft tendrils hang, swirling in the sway of the air. Ten thousand feet below, I see the warm, rich browns of the desert, the curve of the mountains agains the blue of Tahoe. I check the flow of my oxygen and I push out, down the mountain’s spine, over the desert in my motorless plane.
***
Is there more to our dreams than we think?
Should our dreams perhaps be or guides, rather than the societal “must do’s” that we all know too well?
Khevin Barnes recently wrote this for our sister site, www.AntiCancerClub.com. It seems that I am not alone in recognizing the power of childhood dreams…
When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
Mid-life impulses are triggered by a variety of emotions. Sometimes it is the boredom of a fifteen year routine. The unfair imposition of limitations, of age. Sometimes it is regret over paths not taken. For me, it was betrayal.
To understand some of the decisions I made, you have to know that I love to travel. It is the sense of adventure that appeals to me: the idea that you don’t know what will happen, but whatever happens you will cope, one way or another. It’s as if you are suspended in time, in this cocoon of uncertainty and possibility, which is quite removed from the routine of day to day life. Of course it’s all in your head. Those possibilities always exist. It’s just unto you to see them, and for me, travel helps with that perspective.
I suppose I come by this wanderlust naturally. My father sold specialty oil products, often spending part of the year overseas. Business trips spilled over into multi-month traveling safaris, and I saw the world with a child’s eyes. It was a world of adventure and discovery, a world made up of the magic of change and chance.
Against this childhood, it seems natural that when my adult world started to crumble some decades later, I took to the road. Because when the going gets tough, I go traveling. And in a roundabout way, that is how I stumbled into the most incredible adventure of all: soaring.
Soaring is pure sport aviation. It’s about taking to the skies in a glider, a sailplane, and flying, soaring like a bird, on the breath of the earth, at the whim of the sky. You can climb tens of thousands of feet, and fly for hundred of miles. All without an engine, all in the silence of motor-less flight. It is an adventure that humbles, amazes, astounds and intrigues. It is an adventure that forces you to look both within and without for answers to your flight.
I never planned to fly; it just happened. Perhaps it was a childhood dream; perhaps it was just the adventure of it all. All I know is that when I stumbled into this incredible world of motor-less flight, something deep inside of me clicked, and my future was forever changed.
How does an otherwise sane, intelligent, nearly forty year old woman find herself willingly aloft in an airplane without an engine? Chance and fate, and no doubt destiny, the seeds of which were sown some time ago, for it took several years for all the pieces of this tale to unfold.
Perhaps the best place to begin is in New Orleans.
When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
New Orleans 1988
New Orleans presents its beautifully sculpted face and history to the public, but for me, I always felt an undercurrent of dark malaise that I could never quit put my finger on. Part of that dark undercurrent was undoubtedly a reflection of the rot taking hold in my personal life, another year looking for the future, in lieu of living in the present. Tomorrow it will be better. The call schedule will improve. This endless, powerless position of residency which thwarts life will be behind us. The illusions of medicine are many, and they start early.
That year in New Orleans, New England seemed impossibly far away. I watched the weather map each morning on the TV news, and yearned for the site of the Long Island Sound and the smells and sounds of the Connecticut shoreline. I missed the breeze that brought the cooling scent of the sea, and the evening air that warranted a comforter mid-summer.
In New England, history has a certainty, a clear cut rational that directs the story. This happened then. He stood for that. Positions were clear. It is an intellectual progression of time.
Not so here.
Here you feel the emotion of human history, the fragility of life along the mighty Mississippi. And the web of past emotions seems to linger, in the heat, in the architecture, and in the people. In New Orleans, time meanders as if caught in the backwaters of the river itself.
The town is in may ways a monument of historic excesses. Of great successes and beautiful houses. Of economic hardship and poverty. Cycles of boom and bust created enduring pockets of wealth and poverty, sided by side, in geography and in time.
Ultimately it was greed and visions of world domination which settled New Orleans. If we were honest, it was visions of greed and domination that lured us there as well.
Michael was a bright and ambitious man. He actually score a perfect 1600 on his SAT’s. Magna cum laude at Harvard. Then to medical school (Penn) and Yale for his residency.
At Yale, he took a year in the lab, doing research on poor unsuspecting rabbits. The rabbits would scream and fidget whenever a white coated figure entered their room. I was recruited to play anesthesiologist for a rabbit one Saturday and it was a profoundly disturbing experience. The rabbit is captured, crying, terrified, then anesthetized. The fur is shaved and the flesh prepped for slicing. My job was to maintain a lack consciousness and to spare the rabbit the pain being inflicted upon it.
From that point on, I vowed to stay away from hospitals. I found medicine to be intellectually interesting, but the practical aspects of it all were quite appalling. Flesh and hair and blood. Pain and drugs. I could not live in that theatre. I preferred the tools of money and markets, strategy and decision, to scalpels and drugs.
***
New Orleans is segregated in ways that I, as a Yankee visitor, do not fully comprehend. It is a town separated by neighborhood, genealogy, race, money and personal inclinations. It is a big small town where everyone knows the house you grew up in, versus where you live now. That so and so’s grandfathers’ mistress fathered your best friend’s husband. And that your brother in law has kept a succession of male lovers in the building he owns in the quarter.
And overlaying all the human commotion is a sense of celebration. Indeed the year we were in town, the symphony went bankrupt, as people continued to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the celebrations that define the city.
Michael spent his days with Monsieur le Docteur Henri, a renowned spine specialist. The unspoken laws of medical hierarchy were universal, and they applied here in New Orleans as they did elsewhere. Until your training was done, you were at the mercy of your superiors. As an intern, as a resident, as a thirty five year old fellow, you were essentially the property of your master. It was a feudal system of apprenticeship and abuse, perpetuated for the benefit of the powers that be.
Henri, rest his soul, remains larger than life even in death. The eighties were the days before medical cost containment and Henry would run three or four operating rooms at once, staffed by fellows (earning $30,000/ year) . Each surgery would yield in the range of $15,000 and he would oversee two to three rounds, two or three days each week. Needless to say, Henry lived comfortably if not happily.
I mention the latter, because Henry lived a double life. A male lover at the hospital, a gastroenterologist if I recall correctly, and a wife and children at home. Henry’s wife was a hardened but attractive red haired woman, a nurse, who was rumored to have pursued and married Henry for his money. She had no illusions about the human condition based on her own experiences. She grew up poor and her father lived in jail for the murder of another man.
It all seems an uncomfortable alliance at best, once whose secrets were best not revealed. So they were hidden beneath a veil of southern hospitality, New Orleans style. Whatever their shortcomings, Henri et famille were true New Orleanians.
When I think back to New Orleans, I always come back to one evening that set the tone of decadent absurdity for the entire year.
Henry, like any affluent New Orleanian, owned his own policemen. John guarded his office from theft by the enterprising locals interested in narcotics and ventured forth into the seedier part of town to pick up the the most succulent, decadent, marvelous fried oyster po’ boys for lunch on Fridays. John I believe also worked for the New Orleans Police Department, but I could be mistaken. Such details were never discussed. Nevertheless, it was from John that I learned certain key facts about the Big Easy.
When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
New Orleans 1988
The Zoo To Do is a huge party to raise money for the Audubon Zoo. Local restaurants and entertainers are staged throughout the zoo grounds, and you eat, drink and dance yourself silly ’til dawn. With the exception of the alligator pits ( for obvious reasons) much of the grounds are open and young docents wander the crowds introducing a range of docile creatures to potential donors. It’s a great evening for everyone.
Not to be eclipsed by the celebrations of a mere institution, Monsieur le Doctor offered pre-party nuptials and hired private transportation for the evening. In this manner we would not have to deal with the indignities of public parking, nor would the ladies needlessly expend their energy hobbling on fashionable high heeled shoes from some remote parking locale.
So in our finery, we were delivered to the ZooToDo and we played in the steamy evening air. We ate bananas foster, jambalaya and trout meneure under the stars. We danced, we drank and we had a wonderful time. And at the end of the evening, we were driven back to Henry’s house on the park for the obligatory nightcap.
In the wee hours of the morning, filled with food, drink and exhausted by dance, we piled out of the house, profusely thanking our host for a memorable evening. Henry climbed drunkenly onto his front stoop singing the French anthem, the Marseilles. It was time to call it a night.
We started to search for the car. Where had we left it? Would it still be there?
Just as this quandary permeated our sluggish brains, John appeared from the shadows.
“May I help you find your car sir?” he asked in his unmistakable New Orleanian drawl. And he escorted us to our vehicle and made sure we got headed off in the right direction. The rest was up to us.
There is a lesson in this story of NOLA fun and excess circa 1988 or so: Apparently in New Orleans, if you can find your car, you are not considered too drunk to drive.
When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
I think some of my most joyous days flying were early on, when everything was fresh and new and full of potential It was all such incredible endless fun. First to fly, then to solo, then to fly new airplanes. I felt invincible as I moved from one task to another.
Same for flying cross country, to a destination away from my home field. I took off, sure that I would go wherever it was I intended. I had no doubt that I would find the lift I needed or that I would return to my home field at the end of the day. I soared the air, oblivious to any consequences. Consequences were not yet a part of my vocabulary.
Of course my wanderlust was tempered with some awareness. A strong headwind would absolutely prevent the small sailplane I flew from making any headway and I factored that into my consideration. A day of bad weather dictated the soaring possibilities. A big deck of clouds meant no lift and there was no arguing with that. But all in all, if there was even a bit of lift, I was game to go fly.
As long as I remained oblivious to reality, the reality of the weather, the risks, my own skill level, I moved forward. I knew no fear. I had no experience. I knew no bounds.
Inspiration, joy & discovery through travel. Oh, did I mention with supposedly incurable cancer?
What's on your bucket list?
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CancerRoadTrip is about making lemonade out of lemons.
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That year in New Orleans, New England seemed impossibly far away. I watched the weather map each morning on the TV news, and yearned for the site of the Long Island Sound and the smells and sounds of the Connecticut shoreline. I missed the breeze that brought the cooling scent of the sea, and the evening air that warranted a comforter mid-summer.
neighborhood, genealogy, race, money and personal inclinations. It is a big small town where everyone knows the house you grew up in, versus where you live now. That so and so’s grandfathers’ mistress fathered your best friend’s husband. And that your brother in law has kept a succession of male lovers in the building he owns in the quarter.
