Panhandle piloting: 3,000 miles in a Mooney Mite (Part 1)

July heat baked the tarmac, which responded with rippling mirages. In the hangar, I dug into the small space behind the seat of the Mooney Mite to swap out a battery I figured wouldn’t hold a charge anymore. That was exactly how I felt—drained of emotional energy and unable to pull any back into myself. Less than six months earlier I had watched my dad’s coffin go down slowly into the ground. The following afternoon my grandmother, his mom, died of a heart attack. In less than a month, and just as unexpectedly, I would lose my other grandmother too. The attention had been hard. I was grieving, but no longer in the way that anyone could understand. I probably looked normal, perhaps even happy at times. Every condolence came with the expectation I would show some appropriate emotion, a sign of comfort, appreciation, or some indicator of “how I was doing." It was well-intended, but exhausting.

Silence was what I needed. Space.The desert. That was where we used to go in the summers, Dad and I. When I was little I used to lie in the shade under his glider wing and smell the sagebrush. I was free to just be. The only sound was the wind, or the occasional radio check on the ramp. I’d sit in the cockpit of his glider while he rolled it out to the runway lineup for the day’s race. By the time I was 16 I knew the sky over Quincy like my own driveway, and the Mite and I had become good friends. Girls fall in love with a pony, guys get a crush on a car. I had a little plane of my very own to explore the thousands of small airports all over the west. Dad called it a motorcycle of the sky. A Mite only has one seat. It would go a hundred miles, on three gallons of gas, in one hour. With full tanks, I could fly longer than I could sit in its hard seat. I remember Dad and I flying wing-to-wing, chatting over the radio about thermals to catch or coyotes to chase.

That evening we went up to the lake to watch the Fourth of July fireworks like we did every year. It didn’t feel the same. The next morning I stuffed my backpack with a sleeping bag, camp stove, and a few books. I also grabbed my backpacker mandolin, which would just barely fit behind the seat with the backpack. There were a few other things I had to do, not knowing when I’d be back, so it was mid afternoon by the time I made it back out to the airport. I ran my hand over the nimble wings and tail, giving it a good preflight. Maybe I would go to Denver. I’d heard good things about Colorado. The prop sputtered into a windy hum with an easy flick of my hand on its metal edge, then I climbed in. My flight briefer said there were thunderstorms past Fallon, so I figured I’d put down there for the night and get an early start the next morning. The plane floated off the runway like a boat lifted by the tide. There were plenty of strong thermals in the hot afternoon, so I let them carry us up to 9,500’ and watched Quincy disappear below.

Fallon’s unicom was silent, and the airport seemed empty as I eased the throttle back and let the Mite sink down over top. A line of big thunderclouds stretched from north to south beyond the airport, and underneath them a curtain of gray rain veiled the hills on the horizon, decorating them with a hazy desert rainbow. The FBO walls and ceiling were covered with shirt tails, cut off of new pilots and marked with the date of the their first solo flight. Dad had mine framed, and I hung it in my room.

The man who ran the place filled up my tank and then drove me into town so I could get some soup and oatmeal for the trip. Back at the airport I found a nice spot in the sagebrush by the runway to lie back and enjoy the last of the evening light. The gentlest breeze breathed warmly through the brush. I pulled out the mandolin and played something absent-mindedly, my bare feet on the sand. As the sky turned pink, occasional jackrabbits loped through the pastel browns and greens around me. I was glad not to have any particular plans. It wasn’t the kind of adventure you could plan, I thought to myself. It was the kind you just had to discover.