Low Flight

Oh! I've slipped through swirling clouds of dust,

a few feet from the dirt.

I've flown my Intruder low enough to make my bottom hurt.

I've SRTC'd the desert, hills and valley, mountains, too.

Frolicked in the trees, where only flying squirrels flew.

Chased the frightened cows along, disturbed the ram and ewe,

and done a hundred other things, that you'd only care to do.

I've smacked the tiny sparrow, bluebird, robin, all the rest.

I've ingested baby eagles, simply sucked them from their nest.

I've streaked through total darkness,

just the other guy and me,

and spent the night in terror of things I could not see.

I turned my eyes to heaven,

as I sweated through the flight,

put out my tired hand

and touched The Master Caution Light

One of the luxuries of youth is a sense of immortality, of freedom from responsibility. But for most people that illusion begin to fade when the responsibilities of adulthood loom; a spouse, a mortgage, family, work. As the years go by, caution can replace carefree abandon.

This process isn't necessarily the case for some people. One of my friends on the phone the other night said I was "an adrenalin junkie", though when he told me that I was parked on the couch in my robe watching an old movie, eating a bowl of Grape Nuts for dinner - not exactly the picture of the adventuress I'm supposed to be. Yet I probably shouldn't think about some of the corners I mop myself into. I don't have a will any more, because it's as if I were to have one, I'm admitting that I might die doing what I do and then I should have to stop. Like that will work.

Mountaineer Jim Wickwire once said "I had this notion, that if I was outthere 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". As a climber, he wrote in Addicted to Danger, " I had remained in a kind of perpetual adolescence". Perpetual adolescence, a term I've heard several partners of friends or colleagues  utter, and not in a kind way.

Most of my closest friends now are either in law enforcement, intelligence, science or engineering. They all have this infinite way of looking at the world, like mine, and the acceptance into their fold falls on me with the warmth of a summer rain. As is said in an old Quaker expression  "they speak to my condition".  They understand what drives me, and I them. We all live life out of an open suitcase, never knowing what any one day will bring, looming disaster, a simple challenge or making ramen noodles in a hotel coffee pot in Hong Kong.

Yet, despite the differences in our jobs, my friends seem to be all cut from the same mold, charming, unconventional, full of interesting ideas and always in pursuit of that missing piece. We have difficulty sitting still for very long with nothing to do, get bored easily and always have to have a new plan. We are horrified by the thought of a normal life in a a cubicle and yet are able to work 14 hours at a stretch completely and intently focused.

There's nothing like it, almost touching the answer, teetering there in the solitude between smoke and noise; pieces and parts, aware of that giant puzzle of integers, lurking rhythmically just beyond your reach, unrecognizable, yet not.  Then, after hours and hours of sweat and introspection, it falls into place, revealing itself to you like a flash of night sky erupting out of darkness and all the hours you've stared at it, paced it, mapped it out, fall away.  In that moment you realize you can catch time if you stare at it long enough.

.

It's not an easy life for those who love you, and those you leave behind, especially when you have a family. You leave for those adventures and come home with your little bag of life's knowledge fuller than when you left, it's form but a shell for all you have gained.  What you bring back with you may well compensate for what you missed, but there is a tangible price tag. You may miss that family fathering, that celebration of holiday, that party, that event and you realize that what is absolutely integral to your soul has another price tag in addition to the danger. You're not home. You're not home a lot.

It's long nights away, it's whispered conversations on the phone, thoughts running hot and loud through veins untraced by the touch of another for weeks.   It's expectations from people that won't ever be met.  But we can't seem to give it up, not entirely. Despite it's costs, despite it's losses, it is as much a part of you as the one you love. If you're truly lucky, the ones you love recognize this life as much as you, cherishing the time you do have, for they live a form of it themselves.

For there is nothing like it, those times when all is going to hell in a hand basket around you, and there's a sense of this huge elemental power and you think "what the (#*@ are we doing, this is insane!, and you get out of it either alive or not blowing something up and you go "well that wasn't so bad was it?" As you're going home, you're already thinking about going out and doing it again. It's a sense of communion with the infinite, when you've stretched yourself to the absolute limits of your skill, senses cranked up to red line with the knowledge that if you screw up, you or others could die, or at least cost someone an incredible boatload of money. But if you don't, then the world will, for that instant anyway, have one moment of equilibrium, of order, of reason.

Those moments, narrow moments of perfection. Moments almost worthy of the price.

G'Nite - Brigid