Captains Log - 9-13-09

I looked at my Stat Counter this morning, and saw the number. I'd been tracking return visitors but checked the stats for total unique visitors and there is was.

One Million Visitors to Home on the Range. My recipes go back a couple of years but the first public post was in the Spring of 08. In the last year and a half, a million people have visited here, many returning daily, many becoming friends. A lot has changed in that time, and yet it has not. Another Sunday in a quiet house, with a cup of coffee and the computer, and the need to simply write about my day, my thoughts, sharing with those who have become part of my daily life. Reaching out to like spirits, those of us that love the shooting sports and the outdoors, our indomitable desire and will to pursue and grasp beyond all limits of flesh, the great outdoors, teeming with life. To defend and protect and teach. To share a simple meal, the renewing power of family and a belief in a way of life that goes back to our forefathers.
Though many people have come and gone through this small space, the quiet has not changed. I'm often amazed how very quiet it is around my place early on a Sunday morning.

Here I am, all said and done, after 40 something years of roaming this planet, a wanderer, an adventurer, on this small piece of land , in a small state, finally stationary, easing into quiet.

The summer has been one of change, of hard decisions, of renewed joy. A summer of astonishing rain, falling like coins onto parched earth. But even the rain grows quiet now, the earth soaking up only sun, the corn turning, dying slowly, the cool, solacing stalks spinning the last of golden radiance from a white hot sun. I arise early, the smell of biscuits baking, the land beginning to stir.I wish I could sleep in, but too many years of living on a small cattle ranch broke me of that. A reader commented last week that farmers are all basically on government welfare, the small family farm dead, and I looked down on callouses that remained after the work on that farm ceased, and didn't know whether to laugh at that or cry. Tears won out, splashing on hands whose last grasp of that family farm were as they lay on top of a coffin, a touch goodbye to one who in defending that way of life lost his very breath.
Still, years later, on a much smaller piece of land, the sun draws me up, Barkley snoozing on the little fabric couch in my office after one soft bark at ducks still floating on dreams. The coffee has perked, and the world falls into still again as memories of youth come unbidden, stories I do not write about, but that stay with me.

The sounds of a flight to Ireland, a small fuel stop on the way further on. A cockpit is rarely quiet, but it's a symphony of familiar sounds. The voice of the air traffic controller, a reassuring sotto voice confirmation that two minds are in agreement, and all is well with the world. The clatter of a trim switch and the beep of an altitude alerter, sounds of warning that the earth is approaching. The ground. It's solid underneath you, and hard, and if you flared too high you'll break your aircraft against its incontrovertible passivity.

Aloft and level though, airplane sounds stabilize into a gentle song with just the occasional background chorus of the controllers, and you would have time to think and perhaps chat a little. We rarely talked about the mission, but like pilots everywhere we talked of everything else. We talk of the spiritual and we talk of the mundane. We talk about families and jobs, spouses, children, food, sex, food again and surprise, we talk about airplanes.Then, with the remark about someone we knew, lost in combat, flying more dangerous work than we'd ever know, that familiar awe-filled sadness enveloped our little space and we grew silent, remembering him, sounds of mourning and respect. Airmen, like Patriots, are a small community of thousands, and we never forget our fallen.

The descent and the landing were at hand and the day was drawing towards sunset, or would if we could see it through the prevailing overcast of our world, so we paused. The sound of conversation ended there. We simply basked in the hum of the engines and the view out the window to our world, clouds disbanding with the disinterest of late day, and the contrail of another aircraft 1000 feet above, vanishing upward like smoke as we descend for landing.

For just a moment, I leaned my head against the side wall of the cockpit and felt the vibration rattle through my bones, breathing in and letting the surge of the engines push my thoughts inward and breathing out in unison with the straining metal of the airplane. The sounds of our craft and the exhale of our breath mingled with the voices of those guiding us. Talk of things past fell away, for we knew that for now, we all had a task to do. We were so alive in that moment, and thoughts of our own mortality disappeared behind us like vapor trail as the sounds of our aircraft drove us towards duty and home.

Home, now, 15 years later, where the world is simpler, quiet, the only motored hum I hear that of a tractor or a small little Bellanca tailwheel plane. I still travel, my work takes me around the world, but it's sporadic and done from business class, not the cockpit. But there are many more mornings tending the earth, afternoons tending to myself. Quiet gatherings of people I trust over for food, wine, stories and laughter.
None of them are pilots, yet all are of the same cloth. Determined, strong, traveling great distances within themselves to find the life they wanted. Things are never the same, yet they are.

Home on the Range. Days of work and weekends of sharing bullets and beer with those who believe as I do. Late evenings spent in front of the computer, writing, a book, letters to my daughter, writing to you, as you chat back with me like the air traffic controllers of years ago, giving me guidance and encouragement, propelling me onward into this life that I lead.I get out this Sunday morning, like most, and head out walking, passing gardens past their prime, and flowers still unfolding in lush morning dew in defiance of their season. I move quickly forward, gun on my hip, black lab by my side, watching life scuttle out of my path. Walking onward, out through a thick yellow lake of placid corn, unmoving and shallow in the great streaming light, out towards the trees. In those small woods a mile or so back from where I live, I look around my world, changed, yet unchanged, a scattered mosaic of leaves and cornstalk, the small bones of a broken bird laying among dried needles of pine, footprints of invisible deer. The hushed sound of my breathing, thoughts of a hand on a pine box, thoughts of another hand on my skin, tracing a scar that stands in stark relief to white skin, fingers kind, strong and forgiving.

Too soon it's time to get back in and start my day, the sound of the train forlorn in my ears, breath quickened but quiet after my morning absolution. I need these Sunday walks out in my surroundings, a place more quiet than church, in a place where my God lays his hand on me, a hand also kind and forgiving, giving me strength to go on. It's a different life, yet the same. Days of hard work, countless days marked with bitter cold and radiating warmth, monotonous wonderful days of work and friends that I love, of water, woods and sky. Countless days here retreating like fields of corn, leaving their mark on the landscape even when they are nothing more than dust.

On the porch are old-fashioned glass milk bottles, from cows that live as well out in this beautiful countryside, in my world. I look at the clean lines of the rinsed glass, carefully washed and dried, stark, clear lines against a backdrop of country life, empty now, but soon to be filled with all that is good from the earth. Things that were worth waiting for.
It is not the life of spoiled subsidy, it is not the life of a adventurer that I once led. It is my life, strong, quiet, true to myself. It is stalking a deer in drowsing sunlight, wrestling life from the ground in a flaying of green, sore muscles, mending heart. It is soil and sweat; it is books and reports and hours spent looking at the smallest of life's tragedies through a microscope. It is a life of putting together the pieces of shattered lives, pieces of me. But it is that life that all those contrails led me to, and I thank you all for sharing it with me.