When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
Pennsylvania to Indiana, 1995
Signs for a rest stop appear along the road and I pull off. Between the BMW and the thirty foot trailer shaped like an inverted speedboat, I am rather conspicuous.
My old BMW 535 towing Whiskey Oscar, secure in her trailer
I walk around the trailer to be sure everything is in good order, as I top the car off with gas. We take up an entire island, the car, Whiskey Oscar and I, but fortunately the station is not busy. A woman, a bit older than me, smiles and asks me what’s in the trailer.
“I am taking my glider cross country,” I reply as if it were self evident. And sensing a camaraderie in this stranger, I add, testing the impact of my evolving tale:
“I was married to a surgeon who ran off with his nurse who was pregnant with the child of another physician on staff. So I started flying airplanes without engines.”
I am psychotic. Why did I say that?
The woman paused, her mouth slightly opened. I have to stop doing this, I thought. Someone is going to shoot me or something. But to my delight and surprise, the woman starts to laugh! She howls with laughter. Tiny tears, tears of life, run out of the sides of her eyes. She takes her hand and wipes away the moisture.
“I was married too,” she tells me, sobbing with laughter. It is no longer clear just what she is laughing at. Me, my story, her marriage, mine. It does not matter. We have connected on some fundamental level. We share the laughter and the tears of two women who have traveled similar emotional territory, in different places on different days. But the stories are so familiar. The feelings are the same.
“There is life afterwards and isn’t it great!” she sobs through her laughter. She smiles lost in her own tales. She wishes me well and fortified by the encounter I continue on my way.
The rolling green hills continue forever. Pennsylvania fades into Indiana, and Indiana into Illinois, the state of trains and no hotel rooms. I have been driving since early this morning, with thirty feet of trailer sashaying behind me along the road, thirty feet which holds my precious Whiskey Oscar, and I am tired. But summer travelers have apparently booked every hotel room for miles. I go from one to another, only to be turned away. It is night and finally with the help of a kind desk clerk who gets on the phone to an out of the way University Club with rooms to let, I find a place to stay. It is 10pm my first day on the road to Oshkosh and I am just outside of Chicago.
When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
“Make no mistake; your greatest teacher will not be what you expect. Your mentor will embody love, light grace, and compassion. However, your greatest teacher comes imbued with rage, darkness, fear, and judgment.” -Joseph Campbell
Summer 1995
I have this incredibly complicated relationship with my sailplane. It is made up of impatience, anger, love, fear, possession, burden, repulsion and attraction all at once. We are one, yet we are separate. Our lives are inextricably linked, here on the road, and in the sky. Through her I move in a circle of people who share my passions. Through her I am restricted in my time and attention to other matters. She is an inanimate object, but she breathes my desires. She depends upon me for her life, just as I depend upon her for mine.
Learning to fly is infatuating. How unearthly to think that you can soar in the air, like a child in a dream. How incredible to possess a plane that makes it all possible. Tales of Icarus come to mind, and I take heed, because what goes up does indeed come down.
There are times when it requires studious effort to keep my feet firmly planted. I am a pilot, I can fly. I am a pilot, I cannot fly.
I can keep the glider up all day. No matter what I do, I fall out of the sky.
Ups and downs. Lift and sink. Ego and insecurity. It takes a certain detachment to see the greater picture, to have a sense of time and continuity and progress.
For the moment what I see is my progress at this point in time, and I am flying. I am moving forward into unknown air. I do not know what what I will find. Weather briefings provide an overview but they cannot predict my flight. I have to hope that my preparations to date will be enough to keep us both safe. For Whiskey Oscar and I are one in the air.
And one on the ground. Separate but together. On the ground she is a burden. Stuffed into a long and ungainly trailer she has no purpose in this form. She provides me the company and rationale for my trip, but she is a responsibility of sometimes staggering proportions.
Love, hate, push, pull. Come close, go away. I love my sailplane. I love to fly.
Life wish, death wish.
For a time I wasn’t sure. I looked over that precipice and Death stared back at me. Here I am. Right here. I am fear. Come and get me. This way. Forget about flying, you are too afraid. No one cares. Let it go, let it go. Let your fear come in.
No.
My flying is a life wish. It pulls me forward into new air, into new realms, pushing me, challenging me, making me work for all I am worth. And then it rewards me with the accomplishment of new skill. I work hard, sometimes not understanding just where I am going, but eventually I will learn what I need to know. Eventually I will understand this task I fly, this route I have taken.
Love, fear, possession, burden.
I possess this exquisite plane. I know every inch of her fuselage, every curve in her wing. I know every chip in her gelcoat and how it was caused. I know from washing her down every day after flying, just where the mud tends to cluster, just where the bugs tend to splatter on her leading edge. I know how the bolt in her elevator drops and settles. I know just how the fittings feel when they are properly secured. I know how she flies.
Burden.
I worry about every noise and groan. Each chip needs repair. Insurance is due in June and payable in one large sum. I worry about her trailer, her canopy. Dust which can grind down the plexiglass and leave a scar. Wax which protects her body from the wear and tear of UV light. Tires which need attention. Brakes which need adjustment. Monthly payments the size of a small mortgage.
She is so beautiful. She is freedom, she is accomplishment, she is art in motion. She is fast and swift, so sleek in the air. She speeds instantly, she spins abruptly and dangerously. There is an edge in her flight, an edge you do not pass over. Past those limits she is not my friend. She becomes a wild creature that frightens me.
How do I sort out the contradictory feelings toward a piece of machinery? But she is not. She has soul as surely as she flies. She is my mirror, my reflection , my aspirations. She holds my fears, my love, my life in her tiny cockpit nestled between endless expanses of wing. She is my flight, my will, my destiny.
And where do we fly from here? What do I want? Where do I want to go? Talk to me Whiskey Oscar. Talk to me.
Long arms of white sit in their cradles in the trailer. Her fuselage lies motionless. Silence is her only reply.
Soaring is a metaphor for my life’s journey. May you see my journey and yours in my ramblings.
My friend and former Whiskey Oscar owner Heinz Wiesenmüller actually did the flying for this sequence.
***
Sam (my original World War II aviator/instructor) told me years ago that flying was better than sex. At the time I noted his advancing age and filed the information accordingly. But with experience comes wisdom and three years later the following entry appeared in my journal:
How can I begin to describe the joy, the fascination, the occasional terror, and the wonder of motor-less flight? Moving through the air is a complex set of manoeveurs to understand under any circumstances. To adjust to the conditions of the day, to impose your will of destination and to make them all come together is–well–mind boggling!
Flying, soaring, provides a wonderful mirror, an alternate universe of daily trial and tribulations, hopes, aspirations and unavoidable events that characterize life. Perhaps because all this occurs in a defined space in time, the intensity is increased.
To go cross country, you need to let go of all that is familiar. There is no other way, no shortcut or compromise. Yet to let go requires extreme courage and faith. Courage and faith in the elements, in your plan, and most of all, in yourself.
The experiences are so immediate, so real. Every ounce of your being is focused on the task at hand. Take landing. At MASA Sunday the air was brutal. Those that launched early hit wave* and were gone. The latter half of the grid, including Happy Hooker and myself, fell out. I released at 3,000 feet over the mountains and found, much to my dismay, turbulent air. Given the tow, I expected some bumpiness, and the intense and abrupt sink countered by rare bursts of lift was hard flying.
I lost altitude and headed for the ski hill to contour fly the terrain with the hope of picking up some lift. And lift there was! My wings pulled and flexed with the force of the air as it slammed into the belly of my plane. I felt the strain of the straps on my shoulders and the twin tubes of steel which anchor the wing spars moved and grunted. I had been warned that the degree of flex in my wings could be troubling to behold. It is! I watch the wings wrap towards each other, over my head. Will they hold?
***
Landing in such stuff is nerve wracking.
I start my pattern high and with a tail wind, fast (the MASA runways sloped uphill; we nearly always ran the pattern up the hill, regardless of wind, which made for some very interesting landings). How much wind will I encounter, how much drift as I turn base and final? Shear over the trees? How violent? How much airspeed do I need to safely manage my passage back to earth? How much space will I need to dissipate its energy.
I concentrate on the task at hand.
Gear down. Flaps in thermal setting for the moment. Speed, trim, altitude and relative position to the field. I crab in, losing altitude, careful to turn final high above the trees. One wing in that turbulent air could be more than enough to stall the wing. There are no survivors in low altitude spins in a 20.
Landing. Everything at once moves too fast to comprehend, all in the slow motion reserved for dreams. The trees thrash at high speed, yet I see every leaf slowly turn its bottom for my review as I pass overhead. I descend, a close eye on my airspeed. In exactly this place, I have watched as my airspeed indicator dropped to zero as I encountered shear along the tree line. This would be a bad day for that to happen again. The air is very rough and uncertain.
I clear the trees and the ground approaches. Blades of grass wave as I pass by. I can almost feel each individual blade gently tickle the belly of the plane as we pass overhead in ground effect, waiting to settle and land.
As the plane lands, a whole new set of parameters apply. This lovely bird is not suited to the ground. Roll, roll, wings level although the air at the end of the ailerons ceases to cooperate. Stick back, negative flaps full forward. There. I can hold the wings now. Eyes far out, feet working the rudders and some sixth sense provides the feel for the positioning of it all.
Then I stop.
Except for the radio–and maybe an audiovario–it is silent in the cockpit. The yaw string hangs limp to the side. I breath. This is a moment of pause and transition. I flick open the canopy release and let the air flow into the cockpit. Straps unbuckled. Shute released. I touch the ground.
The plane sits, perhaps the wings stirring slightly in the wind as if seeking to fly again, eager to return to the sky. She exudes motion even in stillness, speed at stop. She is an extraordinary ride.
I regard my journal entry. I relive the moment, fully cognizant of the difficulties and danger of flying. But it is so exquisite. Exhilarating. Fantastic.
Sam was right. Flying is better than sex.
*This link is from Minden, NV which has some of the best soaring in the world. And where, just incidentally, I’ve lived for some time now!
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Inspiration, joy & discovery through travel. Oh, did I mention with supposedly incurable cancer?
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