Looking Down, Looking Back

I sit, with a pile of reports of days gone awry, intentions well meant, people and things you trust with your life and find out you can't. The moon is up over my pond and standing at the shore line is a night heron, it's reflection the only thing moving on the rippling surface. It waits and waits, in defiant countenance. Waiting for what? Dinner, or simply the water to respond to his presence. Maybe it waits because fate does not wait for him.

It's early, yet almost dark outside, the night upon us early with the arrival of some thunderstorms trying to intrude on the quiet. What is night but short space when the dark dims so soon, and the echo of a owl's wings brush against the windowsill? Just a short interlude in the sun's dance. Despite the increasingly chill evenings, I enjoy these times, lazy days that draw up into warm folds of dark cloth against my cold legs, a fire in the fireplace and a mug of hot tea to brush away any remains of chill. Just sitting as the brightness dims to a fog shrouded glow of streetlight. Breathing deep as I watch the trees, a few stubborn leaves still attached, a brace of tattered flags against ancient wood, branches a canopy of familiar order. Sitting until a half moon rose, and eased a heart quickened by a stressful day in the field, news to a family I didn't want to give.

As night creeps in,the smell of baking bread fills the room with warmth and soothes my spirit and these words, still cold, begin to stir. The house is dark, Barkley asleep on the couch in the sun room where my computer lies, nothing to do now but put my thoughts down, until I'm ready to begin some work, gathering those thoughts that scatter around the room this evening as if a window had been left open.

The book on which my tea mug rests is about the beginning of the Space Program, most of which I missed. White burned on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in 1967, with Chaffee and Grissom when I was too young to really be aware. To die while flying is something we all know is a possibility, but the two of them had already moved passed that fear, jockeying to the finish of an event that would mark our century, the race to the moon. Then the sudden unforeseen future immolated their dream and Aldrin went in his place.

We've all had that experience. The one that scares the wadding out of you, and makes you reticent to get back near what caused the situation in the first place. "Getting back on the horse" as they call it. Sometimes it's a near accident, sometimes it's the real thing. One of those days that was meant to be spent in quiet order when suddenly fate reaches out to bite you in the behind. You expect death to arrive with fanfare, but instead it usually comes in the most ordinary of circumstances. The Roman goddess Fortuna grabs the remote and changes the channel—click.

Show's over.
Sometimes you get lucky and survive, but the event leaves physical scars. Sometimes the scars don't show, but they are always felt.

Mountaineer Jim Wickwire once said "I had this notion, that if I was out there on the edge willing to push the edge, then I was somehow pushing back the limits of mortality. That by looking at death and then coming back to life I have made that mortality recede".

Like the first time a student tried to kill me in the airplane. Sure it would have been easy to pack it in that day, after I pulled the back of my pants out of my backside and unlocked his hand from my arm where the circulation was in danger of stopping from the pressure. No. I went back. More from the desire to eat than any philosophical reasoning on life and death. For after a close call, most airmen go back to the actuality of flight, not the dream of it. Of smooth polished metal. Something you can touch and smell. A symphony of sound and curves and surfaces that displaces the air that then fills your soul. You move past your fear and enter back into that relationship with the one thing that lets you be a part of something greater than you.


Yes, there's fear, but it's only for the moment. I think that is what propelled the next group of astronauts after the accident. They had that which most airmen do, that supreme confidence in your airborne destiny, like that of birds and their wings, that unruffled belief in your own abilities that launched you, hesitant but full winged from the safety of the nest out into the sky. Where you belong.

Even with the risk, for it's part of the attraction. It's the balancing the deep satisfaction of that with the need for caution, for weighing all the odds, the options, the infinity of what you are launching yourself into. It's never easy.

Light comes in my window, illuminating my form, startling the heron into flight. A neighboring teenager passing in the no pass zone, trying to get around a slower car. Not always wise on a rural road late at night.

I put my tea down to get some work done, autopsy results to review, other reminders of risk not won. Someone who took a calculated gamble with powers more mighty than he, and lost the roll of the dice. In doing so, in thinking on it, I remember the funerals of three astronauts Although I was just a child, I remember watching the remains laid gently in the ground, rain like tears outside of our house, falling with the weight of astonishing clarity.

Be careful out there, for there are lines you should never cross, for once you do, when you go over, you can not come back.