betaphilings

“Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” —Jimi Hendrix

I worked for a small town daily newspaper once, in the display ad department. I was pretty good at selling ads. I always liked to draw and doodle, so it was easy for me to sketch out a boxy little ad and sell it to some retailer who hadn’t realized until I showed up that he really needed to run that ad. It was almost too easy. I was making the owners a ton of money and feeling uninspired doing it.

Then HE showed up in town, this studly, handsome young man who had taken a position with the pilot school at the airport. I was sent there to write an ad announcing his arrival and upcoming training sessions. Something lit up in me that day. All the elements of romance that I adored in film and fiction were staring me in the face. Flight. Adventure. Travel. Attraction. These notions wouldn’t go away as I trudged through each subsequent work day. It was as if the airport had taken a bite out of me and I had to go there to get it back, to be whole again.

So I concocted a grand advertising plan for this company that wanted to promote its flight school. I would convince the publisher to let me run a series of “Women in Aviation” posts chronicling my adventures in the hometown skies in exchange for pilot training. Terrific idea! I thought. It was the mid-70s and women were starting to assert themselves in the workplace and elsewhere. Surely I could fly an airplane just as easily as a man. Sarah Bernhardt had. Groundbreaking idea! I thought.

The publisher didn’t think so, but his wife did. She ran the advertising department and knew what a go-getter I was. After several discussions and many deliberations, it was finally agreed that I could do the series, under my boss’ careful supervision. After all, I was not a journalist. I was merely an English major who had barely gotten her feet wet doing whatever it is that English majors do, which is mostly nothing, according to some. In my case, it was mostly making money for other people.

Super! So now all I had to do was convince the guys at Natchez Aviation to give me free flying lessons in exchange for all this publicity. Not a problem for an ace salesperson like myself, I thought. But there was a problem. The price of fuel. That’s what they kept talking about. The price of fuel. . .

Ground school came before flight school, though, and there was no cost attached to my reading training manuals, so the guys agreed to let me take one of their big red plastic-clad binders home and get started on ground school. Since reading was my strong suit, I figured I’d breeze through that big fat notebook and be ready for flight in no time.

It took longer than I thought, much longer. And it was much more difficult than I thought it would be, especially reading the maps. Flight maps looked like nothing I’d ever seen. There was simply no point of reference to be able to connect them to any form of learning I’d ever done. I persisted, nonetheless, through the tell-tale doubts about whether I should be doing this. My desire to fly an airplane and write about doing it grew stronger with each passing month.

Finally, I finished ground school and it was time to take to the skies.

Here’s the short of it. After logging ten hours of flight in a little single-engine Cessna 152, I ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung. While I was in the hospital, my flight instructor called to tell me that he had accepted a position in Brussels, Belgium and would be leaving town that week. Double bummer.

Oh, well. I couldn’t understand a word the tower guy was saying over the radio anyway. And those aerial maps still looked like pages from a Tolkien novel depicting some fantasy place. I took it as an omen, a sign from above that I shouldn’t be up there. There would be no more flight time for me, but that was alright. I had a great time and made some wonderful memories. Taking a plane off the ground and flying it from Natchez to New Orleans and back and landing it safely both ways was the best thing I’d ever done.

As for the three articles I’d written about my experience learning to fly, I couldn’t bear to look at them unfinished and unpublished. I crumpled them up and threw them away.

My favorite memory from that time involved a night flight over Natchez. My flight instructor wanted to show me some rolls, the kinds of things you see at little county air shows. Aerobatics.

The night was so clear and the stars were so bright. When he turned the plane upside down and I saw stars where the city lights used to be, it took my breath away.  He flipped the plane again and again, until I couldn’t tell up from down,  earth from sky. There was a marvelous continuity about it, a sense of wholeness and cosmic wonder, a sensation of being enveloped by stars. Those are the kinds of moments you live for, the ones that take your breath away.

Nobody knew what caused my lung to collapse, but I think it was breathlessness.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 12:19 am and is filed under My stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.