Taking Flight

“The sky is home to the dreamers of the earth,” Leonardo da Vinci

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

We recently returned home after going to see our granddaughter graduate from the University of Arkansas. The last few days were about maneuvering in airports under construction, getting to motels, finding places to park, eating at restaurants on Mother’s Day along with the masses of people who came for the graduation ceremony. All of which led me to think about air travel and other related rabbit holes.

The plane we took to Arkansas had a narrow row of two seats on each side, and the plane coming back was even narrower, with one seat on the left side and two seats on the right. We could look down on the clouds and rivers and lakes: the wonder of being up in the air, which we all take for granted. (I’ve been up in the air about a lot of things these days.)

My actual first flight was when Uncle Sonny took me and Vince for a ride in his little Piper Cub that was parked in a small empty field somewhere in the country. I got a little scared and so Sonny took us back down.

By D. Miller from MI. USA - IMG_4731, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57402068

The second time I recall being on a plane was when I was a freshman at the University of Texas and flew home on Trans Texas Airlines. I remember the cost to be $13, and Houston to Dallas back then was $16.40. People jokingly called it Tree Top Airlines, because the planes were the same used in WWII. I do remember flirting with the hostess, and we actually sat together in the first row holding hands. Looking back now, that seems like some kind of alternate reality dream.

These airplane experiences remind me of visiting the Air and Space Museum on a trip to DC a few years ago . . . which in turn led me to write this poem:

The Guide at the Air and Space Museum

said the Wright brothers were not scientists
so got no respect like Langley, but they could build
their own aircraft as they had their own bicycles,
and their own wind tunnel to test wing designs.
They used bicycle technology to turn the propellers
in opposite directions for stability. They had a mother
who died too young and a father often away on business
while they tinkered with how to move people
down the street and into the new century’s sky.

The guide soared as he described the cold
and muddy New Jersey field where Lindbergh’s
fuel-heavy plane rolled and shimmied
its way toward—then past—a white flag, the point
where he’d better rise from the Earth
or surely crash. But he did rise and nearly clipped
the tops of trees, an early hurdle on his way to France
and fame and eventual grief—lifting the world’s
spacious spirit and innocent faith in what is possible.

The 1903 Wright Flyer makes its first flight in Kitty Hawk, NC. Image courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The Spirit of St. Louis carried Charles Lindbergh from New York to Paris in 33 and a half hours, the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. (Image credit: Library of Congress)

And there’s this final philosophical thought from George Carlin: “If black boxes survive air crashes, why don’t they make the whole plane out of that stuff?”