My first flight instructor was an asshole. His name was Boris, which should tell you enough. His one redeeming act, however, was when he showed me 10,000 feet in a Cessna. The poor contraption sputtered and trembled the whole way up, but it made it nonetheless. Once we leveled off and trimmed it out, I looked below us, squinting through the cloudline, noting how the squares of farmland, divided by the straight, intersecting lines of roads, looked uniform. Like the borders of countries on a map, little oblong slices of cake. I remember thinking that.
The reason why I wanted to become a pilot is simple. When I was sixteen, I was on a redeye flight from Atlanta to Florida—a family trip to SeaWorld—and spent the entire descent into MCO thinking about how Orlando looked like a clock. Not because it had a face or hands, but because it looked mechanical: in the darkness, the dots of light from highways, lines of shops, corner gas stations—all of it—looked like the cogs, pinions, and springs that made up the innards of a clock. From that vantage point, I remember thinking everything looked like it made sense. It wasn’t a jumbled mess of post-industrial metal and cement but a working, breathing machine with no extra or missing parts. Everything in its place, completing its designated purpose, just like the mechanisms within a clock.
When I entered university, I noticed my fellow aviators didn’t seem to recall ever having similar sentiments. Most of them came from families with grass runways in their backyards, who could name the make and model of an aircraft just by hearing the specific vibrato of its engine. That wasn’t me. I loved flying because I loved the poetry of it, because I could use it to ascribe meaning to the world at an age when the world doesn’t make sense.
I chose to become a pilot at seventeen. At eighteen, I enrolled in flight school. Eighteen means possibility. Eighteen means dreaming. That’s why we rarely end up doing what we said we would when we were eighteen.
I received my private pilot license at nineteen. But two semesters into university, I wanted nothing to do with flight school. I was miserable. I realized that I preferred describing what I saw up there more than the responsibility of flying an airplane. I was in too deep to quit, though. I had a privilege most only dream of, and I was going to just piss it all away? And for what?
I started to reevaluate why I even wanted to be a pilot in the first place. Why I had my heart set on flying for FedEx. What, who, was I doing it all for? Maybe I wanted to prove it to my backwater town. Hey, whatever happened to that girl? someone would ask as they pointed at my yearbook picture. Oh, her? would reply the other. She’s a damn pilot. Or maybe I wanted to prove it to myself. I hated that the only thing I ever cared to do was write. Writing isn’t flying. We make planes out of paper, not the other way around. Maybe I wanted to prove that I could be more than a writer. I wanted a brain made for deciphering IFR charts, not words.
Sometimes I think of Cormac McCarthy. How he said, I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else. Maybe I failed at being a pilot. However you want to look at it.
But at least I’m honest about it. Think about it. Would you want a writer piloting your flight? Knowing that she was comparing infrastructure to innards of clocks instead of focusing on not flying you into a water tower?
Maybe it’s good we writers stay on the ground. I do, mostly. But don’t be surprised if one day you see me in a Cessna circling your city.
Jodi Goforth is an M.A. Strategic Communication student at Liberty University. She holds a B.S. in Writing and is a certified private pilot. Recently, she launched Animals on the Stairs, a writing/lifestyle blog. Her work appears in the Afterpast Review and As Surely as the Sun Literary.
