Symphony of Sound

What is the first sound you can remember? Most might say their mother's voice. I struggle to remember her voice but I do remember her smell, a mixture of clean rain and Chanel No. 5. It's a smell, like that of sandalwood, that I can't catch a whiff of now without going soft and quiet.

One of my earliest memories of hearing comes from the sound of the ocean during summer vacation, flirting up against the sand while I played with a little bucket and shovel while gulls cried around me like mewing kittens. So many sounds as I grew, the clatter of my Mom juggling pots and pans making us dinner every night, the spray of the garden hose as my father washed our station wagon every Saturday, the wind pouring through the masts of trees, and later . . . . the sound of an airplane.

When I travel, I hate sitting in the back of the plane, it's noisy, but the noise of strangers. Give me the cockpit any day. 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, throttles coming back, there it is. The ground. It's solid underneath you, and hard, and if you flared too high you'll break your aircraft against its incontrovertible passivity. But sometimes the earth acquiesces and the wheels kiss the pavement like lips against a warm neck at dawn


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. Pilots talk of many things aloft settled into a long cruise on autopilot, and the adage is true, when with women, pilots talk about airplanes, and in an airplane pilots talk about women. We talk of the spiritual and we talk of the mundane. We talk about families and jobs, spouses, children, food, pranks played, food again and surprise - we talk more about airplanes. Then, there are the days when all you can muster is a look at your copilot and your "dinner" with the words "gee, I bet this would taste good warm".

I think of a flight back before I hung up my flying squirrel wings, taking a jet to the Middle East to be based there. Up at altitude, across that vast stretch of blue, we laughed and we shared. Much of it was happy, but occasionally a story would come back from a compatriot Gone West, and through the laughter, tears stung our eyes as a familiar awe-filled sadness enveloped our little space and we grew silent, remembering him, sounds of mourning and respect. Airmen and soldiers are a small community of thousands, and we never forget our dead.



It was still dark as we flew over the Prime Meridian after stopping for fuel in Greenland. The Prime Meridian is the common zero for longitude and time reckoning throughout the globe. The one place where we are all at one point, and the moment stands still, an absolute where for a second, time and motion are tethered to our aircraft like a careless rope.

As we cross over I'll synchronize my watch with my copilots and attempt to capture that time, to somehow gather it to us. Only then does it hit. all we have experienced from this cockpit, Different languages and sights, smells and sounds - the roar of an Allison engine, as it starts with that artistic endeavor of curse words and meditation, the underlying scent of jet fuel, oily and dark, that hangs in the mist on an early morning ramp.


The morning air burning with cold as we trace the soft scratches in the panel with gloved hands, trying to keep them warm while we wait for orders, the worn red ribbons of red laying like frozen icicles against the landing gear as the crew chiefs finish their tasks Yet such thoughts disappear as the sound of the engine brings us back to our tasks; we're still at the Prime Meridian where there is precision and accord, spoken with the deep anesthetic hush of sameness.


The sun began to awake as we neared our destination, the shadow of our craft skimming the clouds. The descent and the landing were at hand and the day surged towwards sunrise or would if we could see it through the prevailing, thin mist of a foreign world. The sound of conversation ended there. We simply basked in the hum of the engines and the view out the window to our world. The clouds gathered up in a huddle of virgin thunderstorms. Up above, through a small portal of light, the trail of another aircraft 1000 feet above, vanishing upward like smoke as we started the ballet of preparing a jet aircraft to land, staring mutely through a spattered windshild across which the wipers swung like metronomes.

For just a moment, I leaned my head wearily against the side wall of the cockpit, as the thin sun, my ship and I were for a moment joined, an eclipse of light and sound and motion. Up ahead the outline of land, there in the thin clouds, dissolving away beneath unfettered virga rain as if eroded by the sea. For just that instant, I felt, rather than heard, the vibration rattle through my bones, breathing in and letting the surge of the engines push me on into the light. The music of motion pushing me on towards home.