It’s pinned to the plaster ceiling over my desk, which my wife doesn’t like so much, but I put it there so I could look up and always see it, a little model airplane. Two nylon filaments make pretend that it is flying, diving and making a gentle turn to the left, the pilot’s side. The unmoving propeller contradicts the illusion that the model is flying, but the mind fills in where the model maker had to leave off.
My first model was an SNJ, yellow, a trainer used by the Navy. My Dad left me alone at the picnic table with it to figure out how to assemble it. I was seven years old. That is what I remember. Dad was in the Navy. From his logbooks, I know he flew this type of airplane. I think he soloed in an SNJ. Like he left me solo with mine.
I loved airplanes and made more models of them, most if not all of them military aircraft. I made exceptions for beauty; not all of them were on our side. Built for speed and to pursue justice by vanquishing the enemy made them objects of wonder to me. My finished models became airborne, as I imagined the real thing moving through the air.
My golden age of model making was age 11 through 13 years old. The pine desk with the three drawers on the side was my workshop. Homework maintained a precarious position on the edges, when it wasn’t already tossed out out of the way on my bed. The acoustical tile ceiling made it easy for me to pin up each finished model. My sky was filled with airplanes, diving and turning, each one a story of itself, its time, and its making.
Eventually airplanes gave way to puberty, school and girls. The planes remained in the sky but I ignored them. They held no more interest than the airlines plying the airways above my house, hauling uninteresting multitudes to uninteresting places. Or so I thought, comparing them to the aircraft floating above my bed. Occasionally, F-14’s from Oceana Naval Air Station would rip the air apart with their military power engines, and would not be ignored. One could not even hear the TV when they were flying in the vicinity. “Anytime, anywhere” was their motto. Virginia Beach was a Navy town, and those tomcats guarded us, guarded America.
I grew up and moved away from that home. My model making skills were redirected to architectural models, which turned to carpentry. I forgot about airplanes. Except on July 4th and other occasional instances when a pair of F-15’s or some other aircraft announced their presence. The sound of their jet engine pulled me outside quickly, scanning the sky to find them before they were gone.
Out of the blue, a latent, suppressed desire surfaced as I was driving to work one day. A sign, literally, that pointed the way to the Norwood Airport, the next exit on the rotary. I walked into a flight school. An introductory first flight was $99. I said OK, thinking I’d go up right then, but I had to make an appointment. A few weeks later I got into the plane. They are not as spacious on the inside as they look on the outside. I was terrified as the plane lifted off the runway, gripping the yoke tightly as if to keep the whole thing from falling back to earth. But I did learn to fly. It was not the flying I imagined while making models; it was consequential flying, of being in a noisy machine, of looking at instruments, procedures, of total awareness. The pit in my stomach as I preflight—did I get everything? By gaining speed down the runway, rotating at 60 knots, I regularly committed myself to a safe competent landing at the other end. It was learning how to own all the possible consequences of the act of leaving the ground. That kind of freedom has its conditions.
There is joy. The joy of moving through and to a place that no one else has been—because this path of air I am traversing will be replaced by other air. You are flying!
I did decide to stop flying, and for a while, thought less of myself for doing so. How could I not abandon everything for its sake? The question was its own answer. I had climbed a mountain, and come down. I was not going to stay there. I was always going to come back.
One cool morning found me biking to school. Although I had stuffed a windbreaker in my pack just in case, the proprioceptive feeling of speeding along the street created a comfort that I was loath to end by stopping and putting it on. I would become inured to the cold. I looked up at the sky. A cold front was moving through, slipping under the warmer air, bringing discernibly moving clouds low to the ground while convective forces moved higher clouds high into the atmosphere. That’s what learning to fly does. You can never go back to seeing things the same way, just like learning to read causes letters and words on the page to forever lose their hieroglyphic fascination. Is it a fair trade?
I bought a model airplane on Ebay, a Cessna 172. It’s what I trained in and flew. I also bought some model paint and glue. I invited my seven-year-old self to make the model with me. He accepted, as long as I called him by his nickname. We opened the paint; inside was naphtha, pigment ,and air trapped there since 1969. Instead of the decals that came with the model, we painted it all white and put the tail number of the plane I soloed in: N53577.
We finished the model. It’s pinned to the plaster ceiling over my desk, which my wife doesn’t like so much, but I put it there so I could look up and always see it, a little model airplane of a visited and lived dream. Once in a while I blow in its direction. It sways back and forth, and I can imagine myself in that small empty cockpit, a few thousand feet over the ground.
