Prayers from the Sea

This morning as I crept out into the break of daylight, the sun shone in through a low hole in the drizzly overcast to ignite a steep rainbow in the trees and elicit a blue glow from the rainy western sky. In my morning reading I’ve been incorporating parts of the Book of Common Prayer. I use a copy I found in the basement of a used bookstore in Cambridge, where old books can be bought relatively cheaply. This one is from 1795. I wanted one that was old, but a little beat up and cheap enough I wouldn’t worry about using it casually and often. Although the strange long S (ſ) still takes ſome getting uſed to, I like the older language. So often, “updates” do damage to original intent. And it’s leather, with marbleized end-pages. Yum!

After blending a perfect cup of Mexican hot chocolate to complement the weather outside, I came across the section entitled, “Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea.” Now just to be clear, most of my life I’ve had a personal distaste for pre-written prayers, and most other things high-church as well. They always seemed to me insincere, artificial, and pompous, if not downright mechanistic, as if we needed a specific prefab “prayer to be used during one’s engine breaking down in a rural setting.” However, if one recognizes liturgical prayers merely for what they are—a well-intentioned devotional aid for true and sincere personal prayer, then they can be quite intriguing and inspiring.

In any case, I found myself taken back to the late 1700s on a large ship, with chilling salty spray and creaking, soggy wood, thousands of miles from home. A storm’s terrible wrath was mounting quickly, and a group of men huddled around someone with a small leather book who read in haste:

“Most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the Sea, and who stillest the rage thereof; We thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help; Save, Lord, or else we perish. We confess, when we have been safe, and seen all things quiet about us, we have forgot thee our God, and refused to harken to the still voice of thy word, and to obey thy commandments: But now we see how terrible thou art in all thy works of wonder; the great God to be feared above all: And therefore we adore thy divine Majesty, acknowledging thy power, and imploring thy goodness. Help, Lord and save us, for thy mercies sake in Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.”

Sitting warm and dry with only a drizzle outside did not dull the point of the passage, that we silly humans tend to suddenly cry out to God when things get really bad, and the rest of the time, we wrestle to truly comprehend his power. I’m not talking about power to punish or scare people back into submission, like an angry, insecure god. No, most of the time, most of our lives, we have things so comfortable and safe and convenient that we grapple with all sorts of other weird questions and beliefs. It’s a rare privilege when we get to experience something that shakes us to the core, and suddenly snaps life back into perspective.

I experienced this kind of thing one summer night on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. A lightning storm blew in over the small peninsula where I lived. Reddish-purple flashes began to light up the sky all around, and thunder boomed and shook windows. I went outside to see the flashes and feel the wind. The fury grew and grew into a lightning storm like I had never experienced in my life. I lay down in the grass looking up at the sky to see as much of it at one time as I could see. The light was light a strobe—constant and overwhelming, and the thunder nearly shook the ground on which I lay. It was so big, so incomprehensibly vast and powerful compared to the scale of my own body. It was terrifying, but just terrifying enough to remind me what greatness lies beyond my own ego and tenuous life. It felt like a gift, because in that moment I could finally understand with perfect clarity all those stories I struggled to understand about people falling facedown before the presence of God as if they were dead. The feeling, the reaction, made perfect sense to me in that moment. It had nothing to do with anger. A little human has to seem angry to seem powerful. This was just sheer power, unassuming power. Even beauty, scaled to the proper magnitude, can put us back in our place and shift the reference point from which we view the world and ourselves.

In The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis imagines this kind of an encounter with beauty and the effect it would have on the common man, like Frank the Cabby:

‘Hush!’ said the Cabby. They all listened.

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it…

‘Gawd!’ said the Cabby. ‘Ain’t it lovely?’

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.

‘Glory be!’ said the Cabby. ‘I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.’

I still struggle every day to find and remember those reference points of power and beauty. Fleeting experiences in my life have given me glimpses of where they lie, almost unimaginably far off in the distance, but the mere fact and assurance that they exist never ceases to comfort me. It relieves me of the burden of wrestling with my own fickle perspective that changes day to day like the weather.

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

After days of being grounded, I finally got back out on the runway, wound up the engine, and felt the ground fall from beneath me. The thought of a new family member waiting to meet me in San Diego made the next two days of flying more like a race than an exploration, though there was plenty more awaiting my discovery in the hundreds of miles that lay ahead.

Skirting the western edge of Denver's formidable class bravo airspace, I caught a beautiful glimpse of the rocks of the Garden of the Gods projecting out of the greenery like a giant stone wave. 

The Sangre de Cristo mountain range cut through my course from Meadow Lake to Monte Vista like a 14,000' wall in the sky. I squeaked around its point at 12,500', about as high as I could push the little Mite at that density altitude. Nudging the stick back to climb did nothing but slow me down. 

Across the valley on the other side, I could see huge, dark thunderstorms brewing to the south near the New Mexico border, combing the desert with sheets of rain. Standing in gusty wind on Monte Vista's desolate runway staring up at them put a sick and lonely feeling in my stomach. I'd hate to be weathered out again with nobody around. Thankfully they stayed off my course, and I was able to shoot straight for Animas airport near Durango, where I would spend the night. 

I happened upon another Mite in Durango, Gregg Delvin's N100JM, built in 1953--one year younger than my N4071. It had a wooden prop and a cheery checkered tail. It would have been nice to leave the two Mites together in the hangar for a few hours and let them talk. Heaven knows what stories they'd have to tell. 

Some friends of mine showed me around Durango. Had my dad not discovered Quincy in N4152 decades earlier, I very well might have grown up in Durango. And the two Mites would certainly have been friends. 

I was dropped off back at the airport at about 7:30 PM and wandered around for a while musing at an evening rainbow, then the sunset, then hundreds of rabbits skipping through the brush. 

I went to sleep on top of a big flatbed truck trailer watching a distant lightning show. The lightning soon turned to rain, and I scrambled down underneath the trailer. The wind still blew the rain in on me, so I wrapped up as well as I could in an old military poncho and covered the rest of me with my jacket. They were pretty wet and muddy in the morning, but at least I was dry. I hung them up on the Mite's prop to dry out while I stole through the darkness into the FBO to make some oatmeal.

It was my marathon day. I ate and watched the sunrise, then hopped in the cockpit and took off. There was not a cloud in the sky, at daybreak and the air was smooth as glass. It's fun to watch your gauges in smooth air and really dial in your climb rate, cruise speed, fuel mixture--even in a plane as crude as a Mite.

There was no more highway beneath me as I flew. The white desert stretched out silent and vast for hundreds of miles. Sandy river beds snaked through its rolling contours, and I flew low and marveled at the solitude.

The morning was still young when my wheels squeaked on the pavement in Gallup, New Mexico 200 miles to the southwest. In the FBO I found a large plate of doughnuts, two hot pots of coffee, and three or four old-timers telling flying stories. Boy, did that coffee hit the spot. And the apple fritter too.

That scene, to me, was the quintessence of small-town airports. The guys told me stories, and we talked planes. I loved that I could just breeze in there, enjoy a few moments with them like they were old friends, and then walk out and disappear to another part of the country, most likely never to see them again in my life. There is a kind of grace in serendipity. It doesn't merely create adventure; it makes moments completely unique and irreplicable.

Past Gallup, the desert turned from white to wild pinks and reds. That was Navajo country, but it looked like the surface of Mars. Then it climbed higher and higher into pine trees, and suddenly dropped off from 7,500 feet down to Payson in the valley floor. 

The day was heating up quickly, especially the farther south I flew. The airports were getting lower too. By the time I reached Wickenburg, AZ it felt like walking around in an oven. A tiny shack with two palm trees stood on the field like an oasis. Inside was an ice cream bin, and inside that was a mint chocolate chip fudge brownie sandwich with my name on it. Never had ice cream tasted so good. 

The nice lady who ran the place had a Great Dane named Paycheck who looked like she was much older than most Great Danes get to live. 

Blythe airport was blisteringly hot, and I had trouble starting the Mite, which usually fires right up on the first pull of the prop. My hand was sore after yanking it again and again, even gloved with the old glove my dad always kept in the pouch behind the seat for that purpose. Mites don't have starters, so you stand in front of the starboard wing, yank on the prop with your right hand, hold the airplane from taxiing away with your left thigh. Then you quickly jump up into the tiny cockpit and stomp on the brakes.

Finally, after nearly eight hours of flying time, I bounced down onto the runway at Gillespie airport near my brother JK's house in La Mesa. He came and picked me up, then the two of us went to San Diego to get my mom and sister who had flown down commercially from northern California. I was proud to have beaten them there. Seeing a baby car seat in the car made my heart leap with excitement. 

I showered before meeting the baby, and wanted to shave too, but didn't have a razor. He was so tiny, and his features so refined--almost un-babylike. I held him for a long time. Twenty-five years earlier my parents had brought my older brother back to that very room. Finally there was new life in our family. Dad never got to meet little Kennon, but he'd heard the news before he died, and he and my mom cried tears of joy in his hospital room. I was Kennon's only uncle. Dreams of adventures together soared in my mind, and I stroked his cheek, too soft to even feel with bare finger.

After several days together, it was time for me to make my way back up north to Quincy. My goal the first day was just to make it to Santa Monica. I'd been in touch with an old flame from college who lived in Malibu at the time, and I was hoping we'd get a chance to talk about the past, which had never quite made sense to me. 

The stress started when I took out the flight charts. I looked at the airspace between San Diego and LA, and my heart sank about as low as my jaw dropped. My normal sectionals weren't even detailed enough to see all the complicated clutter I was going to have to fight my way through. I had to buy a couple higher-resolution terminal charts just to do my flight planning. But I knew the experience would be good for me, a mountain pilot raised in class G.

My previous experiences that trip had taught me enough to talk to some local pilots familiar with the route. I found a banner flier in a nearby hangar who familiarized me with the VFR corridor right through the middle LAX class B. Even after I knew what I had to do, I had to sit for a long time running through it in my head again and again until I could recall it easily under pressure. Things go by so fast when you can't just pull over and look at a map, and lots of unanticipated things can go wrong, as I would soon find out.

I was taxiing before finally realizing there were no fuel pumps on the field, only trucks, so I had to shut the plane down and call for fuel service. After that I listened to ATIS and told ground service I was ready to go. They said my radio was bleeding over into all the other frequencies. That would be a major problem flying through LA, so I shut down the plane a second time and had a radio mechanic try to take a look at it. He couldn't help, but I remembered I had a spare handheld just in case of such a problem. 

It was afternoon by the time I got rolling the third time. I got a radio check, and after hanging the handheld up on the side of the cockpit behind my right shoulder I was able to transmit well enough to tell myself I could make it through LA--and sort of believe it. Because I was using a handheld with it's own power, I forgot to turn on my master electrical switch at first, so I thought I was having transponder issues too when flight following couldn't get a signal.

I sat in the run-up position with a sick feeling in my stomach, knowing that once I said "N4071 ready for takeoff" and rolled out into position there was no going back or changing my mind. It was Santa Monica through the dragon's throat or bust.

I wanted to do it, knew I should do it, and someone was waiting for me again on the other side. What wrenching feelings fighter pilots must go through sitting on the runway with their engines whining.

"Ready for takeoff."

A Southwest airliner blasted underneath me as I cruised past John Wayne. The flight controller kept telling me to get a visual on him, but he was right under my starboard wing until he was practically right underneath me. It felt like I could almost see the pilot and copilot's faces gazing up at me from their purple and red locomotive in the sky. A Cessna Citation rocketed by, and numerous other small planes buzzed around me.

Once I started to near LAX, I spotted someone headed straight at me from 12:00 at the same altitude. I banked to miss him, realizing as I did that "he" was actually a green balloon who would probably answer to the merciless FAA if he didn't end up plastered on the front of a purple and red locomotive first. Unlike the balloon, a Goodyear blimp kept to lower, safer air down below me. 

Several real airplanes did come speeding my way, especially as I got close to the class B. Flight following told me "frequency change approved" and said to squawk 1201 on the transponder for the special VFR corridor over LAX. Never having done it before, I asked if it was possible to get flight following through the corridor. "Negative," he said. "You've got to do it on your own, and you can contact So-Cal Approach when you come out the other side."

Something felt extremely unnerving about flying through the very heart of some of the world's busiest airspace on my own navigation. It felt like flying through the eye of a hurricane. An eerie calm settled, and time seemed to pass in slow motion as I communicated with other pilots suspended in the nucleus of madness. Huge airliners dove down and roared out LAX directly beneath me. I flew at 4,500 feet, and southbound traffic passed in the opposite direction a thousand feet below, like bugs amidst a swirling mass of tumbling houses and farm animals.

I contacted Approach as soon as I popped out the other side, but they just said to contact Santa Monica tower. Woe was me, because that tower controller seemed to be having the worst day of his life that day. He was telling planes to fly up to Pacific Pallisades and not come back for at least two minutes. "Cessna 1359B, you're number seven for landing!" he'd bark angrily, "I've got a ton of jets coming in here!"

I took my time dropping down to pattern altitude and timidly called my position at right downwind like he'd told me to. He said he wasn't getting a transponder signal from me, but I'd just been using it with flight following and knew for a fact that it was working. I re-cycled it anyway, but he just kept telling me to do it over and over, and then literally yelled at me over the radio. Pilots, especially young pilots, have to develop thick skin pretty quickly, but it sure would have been nice if my equipment would work like it was supposed to. As if traffic and airspace weren't enough to worry about.

He let me land, but only with a stiff reprimand to get my transponder looked at. To add insult to injury, my cell phone died after I landed, so I called my friend in Malibu from a land line. It turned out her phone had died too, but she eventually got the message.

We grabbed a bite to eat and then sat on a wall above the beach and watched the dark breakers. She asked me how I was doing regarding Dad's death, but I found myself unable to pull any words together that would make any sense. Losing a father isn't like losing a lover. Your world doesn't blaze with pain. It just changes, forever. It's an empty seat, old shirts in a closet, planes with dust on them. That silence and emptiness cools life down from the energy of youth. With no eyes of wisdom watching over your shoulder and cheering you on, every decision feels bigger, harder, less certain.

Life is full of mysteries. Nothing really happened during that visit with my friend, or afterward. We stayed friends, for which I'm thankful. But as I climbed out of Santa Monica, a poignant loneliness struck me. When was in college, dad used to plan the timing of business trips so we could fly home together to Quincy just for the weekend, especially when I was homesick. We always flew out of Santa Monica. He'd let me climb into the left seat and take the yoke, and we'd get up to cruise and listen to AM radio stations, or just talk about life and marvel at the stars above and lights below. I knew that route up California so well. This was the first time we could no longer do it together. I was by myself. 

It was a Saturday when I got back home. Three thousand miles had offered me desert sunrises, sublime thunderstorms, new friends, even a new family member. And I was a far better pilot than when I'd set out. If anything, the flying had made me miss Dad more, but that was a good thing, a healthy kind of appreciation and longing. A new generation had begun in our family, and little Kennon would know all the joys in the sky his namesake had given us. That empty place in my life would not go away, but I had been given the gift of appreciation, not taking anything for granted, and I suppose the trip taught me just how far that could take me.

WestJet viral "Miracle" video

First, I should say I'm a big fan of outside-the-box thinking and ideas that shake up people's expectations. Once in a while we all need something to renew our sense of wonder, or even just make us think.

This WestJet video has made me think quite a bit. It has exploded all over social media and news outlets, with headlines like "Must-Cry Video? Watch WestJet Airline's 'Christmas Miracle'" and "What WestJet airlines did for its passengers this Xmas - I teared up." 

Because of my journalism background, I've been gritting my teeth at the recent tsunami of teaser headlines that use curiosity to entice clicks. I'm even more miffed that it works. All that to say, I usually skip over the wishy-washy teasers, but given the sustained ubiquity of this particular post, I eventually thought I should take a look.

Initially, I was pleasantly intrigued by WestJet's imagination and resourcefulness. For a moment I suspected this was something they'd done to bless passengers who'd had to travel on a Christmas-day flight, but it was a 2013 pre-Christmas event. 

A boy gets an Android tablet, a family gets a 50" flat screen, and a woman cries over a digital camera she wanted. An adaptation of "The Night Before Christmas" poem closes with the lines, "A WestJetter would say, it was more than mere fun. Miracles do happen when we all work as one. ... Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good flight."

On NPR's blog Mark Memmot wrote, "Some Scrooges will say, 'Bah humbug, it's just a public relations stunt.'" but contended that "experts tell Global News that WestJet isn't likely to get a big boost in business from any good will it generates" since people tend to choose travel based on price, not brand.

Although I have my doubts it had nothing to do with raising publicity for the airline (WestJet said it would donate free flights to one family if their YouTube video got more than 200,000 views; it's now at 19 million), I'll give WestJet the benefit of that doubt and assume this wasn't a marketing stunt. Whether they make a return on their miracle is not my beef.

What concerns me is the growing presence of marketing in our lives. I don't mean merely our exposure to advertisements, although that's certainly at an all-time high. Through YouTube, Facebook, and other social media, we are being recruited as advertisers. Clicks and views are worth money, so if you're getting clicks and not cashing in on them, you're missing out, or so the reasoning goes. Conversely, if you're not getting clicks and you want to, there are thousands of ways you can sell yourself--your blog, your pictures, your "likes" on Facebook, and of course your YouTube views. Who dosn't want to make money from home without much effort? I've been told you can even purchase followers on Twitter.

Marketing has always been marketing. I'm not saying this is anything new. But I believe there's a line that's starting to blur--the line between marketing and our own personal lives and relationships. Do you feel the compulsive urge to share things online as soon as they occur? Do you get a little shot of dopamine when you check your status and see a lot more "likes" than you expected? Do you fantasize about coming up with a great idea for a video and watching it go viral? Maybe even landing a talk-show interview as a result? 

I'm not as down on new technology as many are. Each era of history produces unique cultural artifacts and situations that may even be romanticized in years to come. It would be a shame to throw them out and miss out on what people in future generations will one day wish they could have experienced. The dawn of the Internet! Week-by-week discovery of the infinite possibilities as processing power skyrockets. 

The thing is that cultural artifacts have their victims as well as their heroes. Sometimes they're even one and the same. I believe a big danger lies in quantifying the value of experiences, information, etc. based on their online notoriety, for one because competition of goods drives their price down, which makes the "sellers" more desperate and competitive. And then we end up with a kind of inflation of information--increasingly sensationalistic news that's got to be shorter, with more hooks, more EYE CATCHING! We need bold, italics, all caps, and lots of teasers. 

If you've read this far, you're one of perhaps 5% who clicked on this blog. 

As I logged in this morning to finish the post, I was ironically greeted by the following message:

The latest from Blogger Buzz
Earn money from your blog this holiday season
2 days ago by A Googler

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Happy holidays!

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro, Marketing Manager

Three nights ago I dreamed I was in some rural community, but in the future. There was a big, dilapidated barn people were living in, and they were very poor and hungry. They weren't growing vegetables or tending livestock. They were brainstorming how to orchestrate something to film that would make enough money to get them by for another month or so. Perhaps someone would die in the film, perhaps there would be a terrible crash or explosion. They didn't have CG.

Forgive the sensationalism of that last paragraph. I wouldn't share it as an apocalyptic doom-and-gloom condemnation of technology. I only share it because it was a real, honest-to-goodness dream that shocked me. I don't think that's where we're headed. But I do think we should watch that blurry line between our lives and our ads.

That WestJet wanted to publicize their "miracle" is, perhaps, neither here nor there. Many millions of people enjoyed--and were deeply touched by--what they did. I found the closing words about "working as one" rather arbitrary and disjunctive, a generic placeholder for what I was expecting to be a very meaningful message. It may not have been marketing, but I'm not sure what it was actually  intended to be. I'm encouraged that for every "miracle" that goes viral there are many secret ones. Sometimes that it is secret is the best part. It feels great to inspire others, but for me it usually feels even better when I've got a special secret, whether that be a scheme to bless someone or a gorgeous sunset through the snowy trees.

To NPR's credit, in November I heard one of their commentators remarking on the "Brown Thursday" phenomenon this year, in which retailers are trying to pre-empt the mainstream Black Friday sales to get a jump on the rampant consuming. "Sorry," the commentator said, "Thursday's already got a name, and it's called 'Thanksgiving.'"

~~~

Lately I've begun to enjoy the habit of leaving my smartphone at home in the evenings and instead donning an old pocketwatch I found at a Mexican flea market for a few pesos. It was broken, and it was quite a few years before I found a watchmaker capable and willing to make it work. Someone I respect once told me that we ought to intentionally cultivate a habit of fixing things that could just as easily be discarded, because it helps us remember that we're like that; we all need some fixing, and there is always hope. 

I'm not trading my smartphone for a pocketwatch. Every generation has its reactionaries as well as its "actionaries." They key is balance, and knowing our own limits and weaknesses. Every time I compulsively reach into my pocket to take a picture or check my email, and find only the smooth contours of my pocket watch, I feel an almost involuntary victory over my weaknesses and insecurities.

Someday I'll bet people will carry around vintage iPhones and dress "turn of the century" (again). And rightly they should. But hopefully they'll be winning the battles of their own day, and their own technology.

Panhandle piloting: 3,000 miles in a Mooney Mite (Part 2)

As the sunset bled down into the western horizon, the sand grew cool underneath my back. The stars overhead seemed to drift across the sky like satellites, though it was the thin veil of cloud underneath them that created the illusion of motion.

I set my alarm for 5:00 but woke up on my own at 4:45. The air was barely cool, almost that same perfect temperature that lulled me to sleep. I slipped out of my sleeping bag and stole barefoot across the sand further into the open to where I could watch the distant clouds begin to glow with the first full day of my journey.

The Mite sat with full tanks ready to go astride the runway. After washing up at the FBO (fixed base operator) and making myself some oatmeal with a portable water heater, I spread my maps out on the wing and tried to figure out how I was going to get to Eureka. Miles and miles of restricted airspace encircle Fallon from the north, south, and east like a giant crescent. I was able to get a hold of someone on the phone who said they didn’t really activate those restricted areas until 8:00, so I was lucky I still had time to get through.

The sun just began to beam brightly when I took off, and all of Nevada sprawled out beneath me. That flight reminded me how wonderfully vast our country is. It seems so small now that we can hop on an airliner and end up on the other side in just a few hours. Miles below, there is so much we miss. But I saw everything, even wild herds of horses grazing in meadows surrounded by forest on top of mountains thousands and thousands of feet high. I was cruising at 9,500 feet, and they were not far below me. There is still all the adventure and discovery and wonder a soul can hope to find.

At Eureka an older man topped off my tanks. He said he remembered seeing my Mite a very long time ago in Reno. That’s how it is when you own a Mite. They have their own social lives, and they make friends even when you’re not around. I asked him for some advice on getting to Denver. I was 22, and though I’d grown up flying in the Sierra Nevadas, crossing the Rockies was a whole different ballgame. He recommended going up north through Salt Lake, so took his advice.

After climbing out of Eureka into a smooth, quiet sky I plugged my headset into my MP3 player and started listening to an audio book I’d brought called At the Back of the North Wind. In the book, the north wind comes and whispers through a crack to a boy who sleeps in the hay loft of his family’s stable. He opens the window, and night after night she takes him on her back to fly over the cities and oceans of the world. The author paints the sights and sensations in vivid detail. The book was written by George MacDonald in 1871, 25 years before the Wright brothers even began dabbling with unmanned gliders. I found myself choked up as the narrator described uncannily exactly what I was feeling and thinking as I myself rode the wind over mountains and valleys and little towns. Someone knew just what it would be like before anyone had ever seen an airplane fly.

Wendover made for a nice stop half way. Having never been there before, the WWII museum offered a fascinating couple hours’ break from the flying, and quite a contrast from where my mind had been during the previous flight. The Wendover Air Force base was where the B-29 unit trained that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another hour and I was in Ogden, where I had a late lunch at the airport café. Avgas there in 2006 was $3.90 a gallon, which meant I was paying a few dollars an hour of flying, or about a dollar every 25 miles to see the country from an open cockpit with the wind in my hair (not including the price of oatmeal). I called 1-800-WXBRIEF1-800-WXBRIEF to check the weather again and see how much farther I could go before the afternoon thunderstorms took their turn to rule the sky. It looked like I could squeeze in one more flight if it was short.

East of Ogden, a wall of mountains shot up to over 9,500 feet, so I had to meander up to the nearest pass and goad the Mite up and up to a safe altitude over the rugged mountain forest. The wide, low desert of Nevada and Utah were behind me. The rest of the journey to Denver would be high, rugged, and completely new to me.

I settled down for the evening at the small airport in Evanston, WY at 7,138’, about the altitude of the highest mountains around my hometown of Quincy. A muscular phalanx of thunderstorms shut off the way to the east. The guys at the FBO were really friendly and didn’t mind me camping out there for the night.

Almost every small airport has an old dog with a name like “Radar” who hangs out on a large, battered couch. Evanston had two dogs, who both became very jealous of my attention when I arrived and began to rough each other up to see who could win the right. But the couch belonged to the biggest cat I’d ever seen, who solicited a good pat and then fell asleep with his enormous head on my lap.

I felt a little tired myself after a good five hours of flying. At first I wondered what I could possibly do for the rest of the afternoon, but remembered right away that that was the whole reason I had left. I needed time and space that didn’t have to be filled, that could exist for their own sake and remind me that life, like the pages of the books in my backpack, has margins.

I lay out on the lawn for a few hours and read a book about the Arthurian knights who rode about the country sleeping in forests and glens looking for adventure and wrongs to put right. When the light faded, I wandered up to the top of the hill behind the airport. A deer startled and bounded out of the sagebrush, which was greener than Nevada’s. I heated up some clam chowder on my camp stove and drank in the view from my perch—nothing but freedom in all directions. The wide open space was full of birds singing. There’s a song Glen Phillips sings that says, “I’ve got a roof over my head, or sky if I choose.”

With the thunderstorms still rolling around, I zipped into my bivy sack and draped the poncho over my backpack rather than using it as a ground cloth. I woke up to rain falling and flashes of lightning. Suddenly being on top of the tallest hill around seemed like a dumb idea, but the storm wasn’t quite bad enough to make me willing to get all wet by moving somewhere else. The bivy sack covered my face with only mesh, so I had to roll onto my stomach for the rest of the night to keep dry. The flashes of lightning lit up the darkness of my little cocoon through the fabric, but the rain rolled off into the sand.

The sunrise heralded clearer skies. I made my oatmeal on the camp stove while my poncho dried out on the sagebrush. My sleeping bag was only wet from the condensation on the inside of the bivy, and that dried quickly too.

The density altitude at Rock Springs, my first stop, was 8,800 feet, but the Mite performed admirably climbing out. I could certainly feel the difference at higher airports, but I had yet to experience any real problems reaching a cruise altitude comfortably above the terrain.

I had several friends who lived in Denver, so I pushed quickly through Rawlins, Laramie, and Fort Collins Downtown (3V5) to Erie Municipal just north of the city. One friend turned out to be out of the country, and the other couldn’t get away from work. That’s the way it goes when you’re making it up as you go. It was too late to make it down to Durango where some other friends of mine lived, so I turned back north to Fort Collins, which turned out to be my favorite airport of the whole trip.

I don’t remember the Fort Collins airport dog’s name, but he was a brownish black mutt-looking dog. I’d been curious to check out the town, which was about a three-mile walk from the airport. A Dixieland band was just finishing a great music set at Avogadro’s Number, where I had dinner. Posters on the walls advertised shows by some of my favorite bluegrass bands. I was sorry to miss them. Not far away was the New Belgium Brewing Company, another tempting stop, but I just explored the town and wound up topping off the day with Dutch chocolate and Reese’s peanut butter cups from a local creamery.

My feet got pretty tired on the way back to the airport, so I caved in and took a cab the last couple miles. Chris, the cab driver, peppered me with questions when he found out I was flying and camping around the western states. He asked if I could sleep in my plane. I laughed and said there was no way to sleep in a Mooney Mite, though one certainly could in larger planes. That reminded me that I hadn’t figured out where I actually was going to sleep that night. Unlike all the previous airports, Fort Collins was in a suburban neighborhood, and the relatively well-lit ramp didn’t leave many places I could hide away without being visible and looking suspicious. The FBO was locked, otherwise I might have slept on the large battered couch.

After looking around for a while I still had no good ideas, but I pulled my pack out of the baggage space behind the folding seat to get out my sleeping bag and camp pad. “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself. What a breakthrough it would be to figure out a way to sleep in a Mite! I climbed in feet toward the tail. It was no good. My feet were too scrunched up against the aft bulkhead, and my head hit the stick. And yet there was so much more room down toward the rudder pedals if only I could remove the stick. But that was impossible.

I gave it a few minutes’ deep thought. This had to be done. To be able to sleep in a Mite would make it the ultimate travel craft. It’s a small enough airplane just to sit in. Some people are too big for even that. The luggage area, while relatively spacious, housed the battery, which protruded from the floor in a big metal box. Then inspiration struck. All I had to do was lay something down around the battery to make the floor level, and I could lie with my head back there and my feet down against one of the rudder pedals. That would let me utilize the full length of the available space.

I pulled some clothes and stuff out of my pack and made the luggage space as level as possible, then I laid my camp pad down on top of that and the seat, with my sleeping bag over the pad. The trick was getting in. I couldn’t scrunch up small enough in the cockpit to be able to get my head back into the luggage space. The only way to do it was to go head first. Not wanting to bump any of the instruments or knobs on the panel with my legs, I slithered slowly, inch by inch, twisting sideways as I went so as to end up on my back. My torso just barely fit into the space, but fit it did. Before climbing in I’d stashed my pack under the plane so it wouldn’t get wet if it rained, which looked very likely. Stretching out my feet, I smiled with satisfaction and happily ate my words that there is no way to sleep in a Mite.

Of course I had to get the canopy closed, and there was no way I could reach it with my hands, but it was easy enough to catch the rim of it with my toes and slide it shut. Fitting so snugly into the fuselage also blocked out the annoying airport lights. I had a perfect, cozy little space to sleep cleverly disguised as an airplane. Suddenly no airport, no matter how urban, was off limits for camping. I’d always have a place to stay. In the following years I made a regular habit of sleeping in the Mite. Once at an airport in Oregon I heard a couple guys wandering around the plane early in the morning marveling at its design. They must have stared right at my sleeping bag in the cockpit and never even suspected there was a person inside it.

Listening to the rain patter on the fuselage that night at Fort Collins as I lay snug and dry was one of the best feelings I experienced on the journey. Not a drop got inside, and I slept like a baby.

I was rained in the next day, and since there was nowhere I really had to be, I let myself sleep in. When I eventually did emerge from my cocoon, I wandered into the FBO to make some oatmeal and take a sink shower. I spent the morning reading, then was invited to join the guys for lunch for an awesome feast of burgers and sausage from the grill.

They were all nice guys, and knew I slept in the plane overnight. They told me the airport was being shut down soon, something to do with the city I guess. It’s a very common story for little airports, which usually predate the neighborhoods around them. People build their houses next to a runway and then complain about the noise. If there are enough of them complaining, it gets shut down. One of the guys named Steve had been flying there since the 1960s and got to be the first one to take off on the runway. Pat gave me a stack of postcards that showed an aerial view of the airport, with the mountains in the background. He said nobody would miss them. Knowing I was kind of stuck there till the weather improved, he also gave me the keys to the courtesy car to have overnight. He said he’d get in trouble if Sharon the boss found out, but that I could give them back discretely to Brian in the morning. Steve offered to let me stay at his place, but I was happy just hanging out, and the Mite really was surprisingly comfortable.

There was a gardener who came occasionally to mow the lawn and tidy things up, who just loved dogs. He talked a mile a minute about them. He had a dog that was 17 years old, and she had a brain tumor. She walked around awkwardly staring at the ground while he trimmed the hedges. She squatted to go to the bathroom but seemed to be having trouble, so he went over and held her by the sides so she could get the task done properly. “Well, that’s one part of her that still works,” he said.

When the guys had closed up the FBO and gone home, I took the courtesy car into town and journaled for a while at Starry Night Coffee. While I was in town, I ran into Chris the taxi driver. He had several people in the back but stopped to chat. “I see you’re still in town,” he shouted out his window, grinning ear-to-ear. I told him I was leaving in the morning, and he said to have a safe flight. It’s funny how quickly strangers can become friends. I find that to be particularly true when you’re doing something sort of interesting to people. They open up about their own lives and dreams. Inspiration is like warmth. It draws us together out of the cold to share whatever we have to share, and we leave filled up and recharged.

The rain beat heavily on the fuselage all that night, and was still going strong when I awoke in the morning. I was able to squeeze down into the cockpit without opening the canopy. The inside was a little fogged from my body heat, and droplets of water streamed down the outside. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and managed to pull my jacket on before clambering out into the rain.

It was a Sunday, and Brian was the only one manning the FBO. I thought about checking out a church in town, but decided to just hang out with Brian, who was all alone, save the dog, who belonged to him. Hardly anyone came in because the weather was so bad. He made us a pot of coffee, and we sat out under the eaves and mulled over life and the universe and God while he smoked a cigarette. He was from Texas originally, but had moved up to Fort Collins to get his a & p. The rain droned on and on. I tried to learn Bach’s Prelude to Suite Number 1 in G Major on my mandolin, with limited success. Brian and I talked periodically, but mostly just killed the time.

At 6:00, he was allowed close things up and go home. He told me he was going to leave a door unlocked, implying I could sleep on one of the couches if I wanted to. He said it might be cold that night, but that I shouldn’t get caught inside when people came to open up in the morning, or he would get fired. He would never normally do that for someone he’d just met, he said, but that I seemed like a cool guy. I really didn’t want or need to sleep inside, but I was touched by his trust in me, and I thanked him and said I would be sure not to let him get in trouble. Before he left, he came out to see my plane. The rain had let up, and I was sitting by the wing cooking some beans and rice for dinner on my camp stove. He really liked the Mite. He wasn’t a pilot yet, but really wanted to learn to fly. He shook my hand and said it was really nice meeting me.

Like Pat had done, Brian also left me the keys to the courtesy car, which I drove back to Starry Night and bought a half pound of coffee to thank the guys for letting me hang out. Steve had given me his card and said to call him any time, day or night, if I ever needed a place to stay or anything else.  I journaled over a cup of hot chocolate, and decided to head north to Driggs, ID the next day to visit my uncle and his family. That night in the Mite I discovered that the wooden rib that ran along the wall of the fuselage made a perfect little shelf on which to set my cell phone. The lateral brace above me was a perfect place to hang my headlamp to light up the whole compartment so I could read or do whatever required being able to see.

The weather was clear that night and the next morning, but the flight to Driggs was only about 350 nautical miles, so I didn’t need to hurry. I let myself sleep in till 8:00. When I wandered into the FBO again, Steve joked that he thought I was going to sleep forever. I was just on the line with the weather briefer when I saw that my brother was calling. He told me I was an uncle, which I couldn’t believe. It was ahead of schedule, but I couldn’t very well argue with him, since he knew much better whether I should be an uncle that week or the next. My nephew’s name was Kennon, the same name as my dad.

“Hey guys, I’m an uncle!” I shouted. They all congratulated me. I bought Phoenix and Los Angeles sectional charts and hastily planned out a route to San Diego, where Kennon was waiting to meet me.

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