Memory

With winter wind come the dusty white fragments,
Borne out of the vacuous alpine chill as falling stars--
Scepters, scintillating shafts and diamonds interlaced,
Entangling, entwined along the pinnacle crags.

I reach my hand slowly into the ethereal blanket
And pour out its weightless sand from an open palm.
Drifting flakes instantly flurry to fill the trough
And round the little mound with renewed softness.

The pines around the ridge grow gray with hoar,
Pointing into the wind with whispering fingers
Too quiet to reveal the secret they all descry
In the distance. Soon they are white, all white.

Through the receding clouds night calls up flightless
Feathers to stretch and catch the morning’s sun
And fling its sparks to set the ice aflame with
Light before they bow finally to its warmth.

Storm and clear, night and day this place receives
Afresh each fine dance of crystal wind upon it;
But here and there in secret places I can discover
The one laid upon the other in gentle anamnesis,

And even when crystal streams have sipped the last drops
From this peak to slake the waking summer swelter,
You and I will spread a blanket upon the ground, and
Lay upon it cheese, and music, and an enduring hour or two.

And beneath that hour I will still find the summers
Of sixth and seventh grade with their campfires and
Milky stars and chilling dips in the lake with the
Other boys whose company swirled around me with contentment.

And beneath those I still stand as a child next to my father,
Saluting for a photograph my mother took, while my brother,
In yellow shirt with Popsicle stains, grins through missing
Teeth, and my tiny sister grins obliviously from a backpack.

Endangered Species

A lot of thought and effort is rightly put into preserving endangered species. We value uncommon animals in large part for their rarity, like gems and most other things in nature. For good reason, we fear losing them altogether.

Not so with words. Did you know that endangered words can be removed from the dictionary? It's like saying to the cute but odd-looking vaquita, "Sorry, you had your day, but hardly anybody knows you exist anymore"--and then wiping the last one off the face of the globe.

Many people are not even aware the vast majority of dictionaries today operate descriptively of word usage, not prescriptively. In other words, the main thing they care about is what words are being used today, plain and simple; and that's ultimately what determines whether you'll find a word in a dictionary.

That's right, dictionaries are not going to prevent words from going extinct. Only you can prevent words from going extinct--by using them. Fortunately, it's easier than ever, since dictionaries can now monitor usage electronically. You don't need to be publishing books. You might just be a humble blogger.

Here's a poem I wrote in honor of endangered words, and sharing a love for them.

Endangered Species

In olden times a courting gent would go

A hunting for a dazzling bird to capture,

Which, gifted to his lady love, would show

His heart’s enthraldom to her cage of rapture.

The rarer bird, the greater gift it made—

Bright, speckled shafts and plumage colors gay.

So why the rarer word that’s seized and said

In lovesick missive falls so flat today?

In blackest depths of lexiconic tomes,

Some species flit and flaunt their feathered grace

That not in centuries have made their homes

In any work considered commonplace.

Their native habitat destroyed, they hide

In dusty warrens carpet beetles chew.

Each dwindling species light and life denied

Will perish without other words to woo.

So let me lowe[i] in limerence[ii] to thee

With logophilian[iii] philter[iv] overflowing,

And if lingual feathers fan philocaly,[v]

Then flock with me, and I will keep on crowing.

[i] To be ardent or passionate; to burn with love, passion, etc.
[ii] The state of being romantically infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily and characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.
[iii] Logophilia n. Love of words.
[iv] A potion, drug, or (occas.) charm supposed to be capable of exciting sexual attraction or love, esp. towards a particular person; a love potion. Also, more generally: any potion or drug having supposedly magical properties.
[iii] Logophilia n. Love of words.
[v] Love of beauty.

The Normal Day to Day

In an effort to force myself to write creatively with regularity, I've engaged several friends in a weekly poetry challenge in which we write and share a poem each week. I've found the medium useful in expressing thoughts and images that wouldn't otherwise have an easy outlet.

One of these thoughts hit me the other day. I'm a fairly deep-feeling person, and I enjoy challenge, novelty, passion, and maybe even a kind of melancholy if I can find a positive use for it. But I also occasionally find myself in one of those intense or discouraging moments having had enough, and struggling to find the end of it. To use the metaphor of boats, it's like feeling seasick without a port anywhere nearby. Or, as I've often heard repeated in the flying community, "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground." 

The thought that hit me was a thankfulness that the "ground" usually comes to me without my necessarily having worked through or resolved whatever issue was rocking my boat. Sometimes the only difference is a night's sleep, even if the circumstances are exactly the same in the morning. We begin another day brushing teeth, making coffee, scrambling eggs. It's all still there, and the world is somehow bigger and more stable than it felt.

Many times I've bemoaned the negative side of this normalizing tendency, how my human nature gradually (sometimes quickly) normalizes something that amazes me or gives me wonder. As David Wilcox observes in Travelling Companion, "I'm sure if we all could sort of...jump and fly through the air we'd be really happy for about, you know, a week. And then we'd be sitting around saying, 'Well, I don't know, everybody can fly, you know, I'm nothing special...'"

But perhaps the automatic relief normalcy offers outweighs the fact that we must fight as if against gravity to maintain the soaring wonder that makes our lives so exciting. I'd never wish my life to be mundane, but for the first time I've come to consciously appreciate that I don't have to beat every storm with my own resources. Sometimes all I have to do is wait a bit.

This is a poem about that:

The Normal Day to Day

Thank God for the normal day to day,
The firm ground beneath the heights we soar,
The plain daylight above our deepest pits,
The pull of gravity that meets our feet in the morning
And makes every next step sure and familiar. 

Thank God that when tragedy blackens the mind,
And loneliness promises to gnaw us every future hour,
They somehow dissipate on the sandy shore of normalcy,
And we need only wring our socks from the tempest
That tore at our tattered souls the night before.

Thank God the wind abates and between every storm
Miles of mild weather stretch out and seem to say,
“Not yet. No more for a while. Now is rest again.”

And though we will grow restless and hunger for adventure,
We shall surely meet it with bravery and strength drawn
From the normal day to day.

Postcards

Several years ago I went for a drive through the rural cornfields of Maryland's eastern shore, looking for nothing but whatever might come along. I came across an antique store that sold, among many other odds and ends, old postcards, many of which had been used.

I don't know how the thousands of postcards ended up there and for sale--perhaps auctioning off the estate of a deceased relative, hoping to liquidate anything of value. Today most would consider reading another's personal correspondence a brazen violation of privacy. We hide it all in deeply encrypted, password-protected, electronic vaults, and heaven knows what will become of it should we pass away.

I feel differently about personal correspondence, at least I like to think I do. Almost four months ago I sailed down the Pacific coast of Baja, California with several friends. Reaching the end of our journey in Cabo San Lucas, a friend and I went up to surf in Todos Santos, and camped out for the night. In the morning my backpack, along with everything in it, had disappeared from my side. The first thing I thought of was my journal and the nine months of daily musings in it, as well as two letters I'd written to friends during the journey but not yet had time to mail.

Oddly, I felt sick at the idea of the loss, not chiefly because my journal was gone, but because nobody was ever likely to read it, in a place where English speakers were relatively few. I imagined it in a trash can somewhere rotting, and just found myself praying it wouldn't be a total waste, that something good would come of it.

I used to think I journal daily for my own benefit, but I began to realize I write for posterity--for the unknown later generations, hopefully mine but perhaps completely unrelated to me. Yes, I write about many intensely personal things, but who am I to clutch them so tightly as my own? An intricate web of circumstance and relationship connects me inextricably to the beautiful, tragic, mysterious world around me.

Several weeks ago an artist from Canada who had a house in Baja contacted me through my photography website and asked if I had lost a journal. Someone left it on a rock in her driveway. I had given up all hope of ever finding the journal again, because I hadn't even put my own name in it, let alone any contact info. But apparently on one of the pages I had affixed a name tag from some special event I had attended, and my name not being a very common one, this woman eventually succeeded in tracking me down.

When I received the package in the mail, she had slipped between the pages an original watercolor of the glorious desert mountains in Mexico she passed by on her long drive back north. I found myself thumbing through the old familiar pages, kind of hoping this stranger had perused some of them, and maybe even resonated with something I wrote. I doubt I will ever meet her, but perhaps that anonymity lends ease to our longing to be known. Perhaps that's why blogs exist at all.

In any case, I felt little compunction looking through the postcards at the antique store in Maryland, and choosing some to take home and muse upon. A Lake Como landscape from a college student to his professor, probably at Dartmouth. Someone's first trip on a ship to Copenhagen. A daughter writing to her mother from a cabin in the mountains, discussing flowers, and worrying about something ailing her father.

I came across this wonderful article about the endangered species of handwriting. Maybe we feel safer and happier with our correspondence locked away in virtual fortresses, though even there rumors buzz over who's being allowed into them and for what reasons. I'm obviously not one to worry too terribly much about my correspondence being read either way. But I like to think about how much we have benefited from yellowed, inky letters and manuscripts, both published and unpublished, famous and obscure.

When I am long gone, I hope a little treasure trove of letters, postcards, journals, ideas, and paintings seeps out through that tangled web of relationships and inspires more of the same among loved ones and strangers.

To Have and To Hold

This is a poem for the shopping season. It was inspired by an experience I had once, of throwing away a receipt intentionally.



Behind a veil of pixels lies
A hundred million fancies for my eyes.

A googolplex of shiny things in every shade and shape—
New or used, i will find every option, every possibility
Of satisfaction (guaranteed), and at speed, at no added cost
Or inconvenience. It makes sense for the conscientious consumer
To shop around. Competition and comparison are my companions.
i need walk no aisle to find something special.
Red and green, Black, Brown, and Cyber,
i-deserve the very best. As for the rest—reviews
Reveal how shoppers feel about flukes and false advertising.
These are the days of honesty, and i know where my loyalty lies—
The generous cards and companies; my friends with benefits
Have my back. And should it finally crack or lose its luster,
i’ve one more saving grace to set me free,
The blessed bond of warranty.

I wait in line. It’s time I traded
Something whose excitement finally faded.

Receipt in hand, I turn it over, recalling how enthralling...
How I waited, and after the click, the ticking
Clock counted two days of expedited shipping.
I was a little careful, I confess, to do no damage lest
I void the contract and someday contact the seller in vain
When a better thing surpassed the last.
Holding that receipt in line, I felt and suddenly knew
The thing had never been mine—only loaned, or borrowed,
And for a short time. A little bit of anger warmed within me.
My thrifty cunning kept every option open,
But I owned nothing, not unlimited things, and that sudden knowledge stings.
Is my receipt another’s lasting claim on what I wish to have and hold?
For just one moment, caught between, I remained, and for the first time
Counted cost—all things lost, or one thing gained?

Another choice, another veil,
We make exchange, but on a human scale.

No safety nets or guarantees, I stand to lose more than is mine,
Risking more than I ever will, or ever have before.
In fact, this day, I give it all away. My worldly goods I thee endow.
Take them now.
                            —I take them, but they’re not enough.
Then take not only them, but me, I give without restraint, and free,
To have and hold, for richer or poorer.
                                                              —Give me not only you, and all,
But give me all your options left, and leave yourself devoid, bereft,
Forever without any other, and be set free, to fully have and cherish me;
And count yourself both rich and blessed today, for riches are what you can give away. 
You wish you had more to give away for me, but looking through the veil you finally see—
Every soul retains the world potentially. Now, Love, place my finger in the band,
And don’t forget the feeling of this hand, which years will wear and tarnish until death.
But though my beauty dim and fade away, you’ll know from now until my dying day,
In every second ticking till the end, the joy of what it really means to spend.

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.