Dancing with 26C

Something a bit different – a nonfiction essay, written back in 2004 and part of my contribution to Slices of Life.

Pilots often say their license to fly is, more than anything else, a license to learn. But sometimes the lessons to be learned in the cockpit have little to do with the mechanics of airplanes, and everything to do with the mechanics of life.

I’ve been an aviation enthusiast for many years. As a teenager, I dreamed of someday flying. I read all the books and magazines I could get my hands on. I went to the airport to watch the planes take off and land. And I dreamed that someday, I’d be among those who flew them.

Now, a decade or more later, I’m still captivated by that dream. I still read anything and everything I can. I still dream about the day I can join the sorority of those women who have strapped on mechanical wings and taken to the heavens. I thought I had a fair idea of what flying was about.

But that was before I met Two Six Charlie.

The gods of opportunity certainly smiled upon me, on a cool Saturday afternoon in May. I found myself at my small town’s airport, observing for a newspaper article an aerial fire-spotting drill.

By pure happenstance, I wound up chatting with a man named Bruce. Bruce is a pilot and aerial photographer, a thin, wiry gentleman with grey hair who’s been around planes longer than I’ve been alive. As usually happens when pilots – or those who want to be pilots – get together, our conversation soon turned to airplanes. In due course, I confessed that, in spite of dreams spanning two decades, I’d never been in a light plane.

“Well, do you want to?” he asked me after a moment, and the world seemed to stop turning on its axis. Go for a ride? How could I possibly refuse a chance taste my dream?

I borrowed a headset – a necessary tool in the noisy environs of an airplane cockpit – and we drove down the ramp to his hanger. The huge door rolled open, and there she sat – a 1956 Piper Super Cub painted a gleaming white, with a burgundy stripe bent into a lightning bolt along her side. Two Six Charlie, she was called in the curious shorthand of pilots.

She seemed at first impossibly too tiny to hold us both, and yet as large as all the vastness of the sky above all the places she could take us. I thought, in that moment, that she must be the most beautiful plane I’d ever laid eyes on.

I must confess that I’m not a size four supermodel, and squeezing myself into the rear seat of the tiny cockpit took some acrobatics. Anyone who’s ever flown in one of Bill Piper’s creations knows what that dance looks like: a choreographed series of steps and wiggles and shuffles that eventually, one hopes, lands the dancer in more or less the right place in the seat.

Bruce climbed in with practiced grace. At his suggestion I kept my feet resting lightly on the rudder pedals. I could feel them moving as he steered us along the taxiway. Any nervousness I’d felt of being carried aloft in a tiny machine made of wood and fabric slithered away and was gone. In its place remained only excitement and that curious sense of wonder.

The headset I wore did its job of muffling the engine’s throaty rumble, but I felt the noise I couldn’t hear. The sound resonated somewhere low in my chest and stomach, seeming to fill me as water fills a sponge before spilling outward into the cool air. It was an unfamiliar sensation to me, but also an enticing one, thick with promise and invitation. I savored it as Bruce guided the plane along the ground and onto the runway.

He advanced the throttle smoothly, and I felt the control stick in front of me ease rearward.

The Super Cub leapt into the air in just a scant fraction of the five-thousand foot runway, as though she was impatient and eager to reclaim her rightful place in the sky. We climbed swiftly into a clear blue sky, drawn farther away from the cares and concerns of the earth by the twirling black propeller.

It seemed to take but a few moments for us to climb above the roiling bumpy air close to the surface, and Two Six Charlie climbed smoothly and surely. “I am at home here,” she said with the rumble of her engine and the hiss of the wind over her wings. “This is where I belong.”

It’s one thing to stand at the side of the road and admire a field of wildflowers, to gaze off into the distance at the swell of the hills or the lush greens and browns where fruits and vegetables grow. It’s one thing to see the world from ground level and say, “this is beautiful.”

It’s another thing entirely to see the same fields and hills from 2,000 feet in the air. From that vantage point, the lush agricultural fields seem kissed with magic, soaked with it until they can hold no more wonder. From half a mile in the air, the world becomes a place of nearly impossible beauty, every hill and valley rich with possibility.

I’ve flown in commercial airliners before, sterile things meant to remind their occupants as seldom as possible that they soar miles above the earth’s surface. At two or three thousand feet, the exact opposite was true. Two Six Charlie spoke to the depths of my soul as we floated above the green earth. “There are delights and wonders yet to see, and lessons yet to learn here,” she told me. “I will teach you, if you let me.”

She responded to Bruce’s touch on the controls, moving with a nimble surety that my mind, already overwhelmed, struggled to comprehend. It felt as though she must have some sort of bond to her pilot, as though the two of them were dreaming together, thinking together and moving as one. I breathed deeply and turned my eyes to watch the world sweep by beneath us.

My reverie was interrupted by a faint crackle in the ears of my headset. “Why don’t you put your hands on the stick?” Bruce’s voice came gently through the intercom. For the second time that day, a thunderbolt of sheer magic seared through me. I was going to fly, honest-to-goodness fly!

Into that endless moment, Two Six Charlie whispered at me, and I heard her promise. “You are new to my world,” she said, “and I will take care of you, if you will trust me.”

“I will,” I think I might have whispered, just as my hands closed around the stick, and my feet settled just a touch more firmly onto the rudder pedals.

There are no words to describe how the next minutes felt. With Bruce’s guidance, Two Six Charlie and I danced across the sky, wheeling and turning with a freedom that made even my most vivid dreams of flight seem lusterless and pale. She moved with an agility that surprised me, responding to my inexpert touch, pirouetting through a 180-degree turn as smoothly and crisply as a ballerina on stage.

Americans speak often of freedom, but the kind of freedom I felt that day was utterly unlike freedom in any other form I’ve experienced. When we talk of freedom, we often think of choice, of the ability to make choices without interference. The freedom Two Six Charlie showed me that day was a different sort entirely: the freedom to wheel and soar with the hawk, to swoop into a valley and gracefully sweep upward to follow the swell of a mountain.

All too soon, it was time to relinquish the controls and head earthward once again. I felt a sharp pang of regret when I said “you have the airplane” into the intercom and took my hand from the stick. And yet, even in that bittersweet moment, I knew I’d return to the heavens one day soon. Somehow, I knew with crystal-clear surety that I’d visit Two Six Charlie’s home again before too long.

It seemed as though the airplane felt a flash of sadness too, a sadness that any creature of the air might feel when destined for the ground. “I want to stay up here and play a while longer,” she seemed to say, even as she resigned herself to the fact that it was time to return her earth-bound charges to their home. On final approach, she weathered the turbulent air with confidence, and delivered us back to the long strip of pavement with scarcely a bump.

“What did you think?” Bruce asked me off-handedly as we walked back across the ramp afterward. I was behind him, but I heard the smile that must have danced across his lips when he said it.

What did I think? Words seemed so inadequate to express what I thought, what I felt, what I’d learned during our brief sojourn heavenward. I am a writer, a creature of words, and yet words utterly failed me in that moment. I said nothing for a while, contemplating the lessons Two Six Charlie had indeed taught me that day.

We only spent an hour or so playing among the birds and the warm summer breeze, and yet the person that returned to earth was changed, somehow, from what I was before we left. I had a new appreciation for the almost impossible beauty of the world we all share. I had a renewed resolve to learn and study, to gain my own pilot’s license.

And I learned, with a dazzling, blinding clarity, this essential truth of life: Embrace the beauty and the magic while you have it, for our time on this earth is limited. The years and decades of our life pass in the blink of an eye against the time of mountains and forests. Life is transitory and precious. Each minute, each hour, each day is a treasure to be grasped with both hands before it slips away and is lost forever.

In the grind of our daily lives, in the blur of work, errands and children, it’s easy to lose sight of the immeasurable value of each moment of our lives. We can give all of ourselves – body, mind and soul – to whichever moment defines “now” for us. Or, we can let the moment slip through our fingers with its boundless potential unrealized.

But either way, once it’s gone, we can never get it back. The hourglass only holds so many grains of sand, and we never know how many until they run out.

As my feet tapped out a soft rhythm on the concrete, I pondered these lessons. As the roar of a Cessna’s engine on the nearby taxiway wafted to my ears on the gentle summer breeze, I struggled to find the words to express what I thought and felt.

But in the end, I merely turned to Bruce, with eyes that shone and the broad grin of a child on Christmas morning.

“That was wonderful. Thank you,” was all I said.

And somehow, in that moment of clarity, I knew that both he and Two Six Charlie understood how much more than the flight I was thanking them for.