On Hunting

A bad hunter chases. A good hunter waits.

Terry Pratchett 

The Tether of Breath

I have a garage full of various projects, including a British car that's in the midst of restoration, alongside everything else stored there. The guy that drives down the street on trash day, looking for discarded "junk" items, stares longingly at the open door, the garage full of everything from small steam engines to a lamp made out of an old Sanka coffee can.   But amidst the projects and clutter, things are waiting to be repaired.  We're not ones prone to throw things out if they can be fixed or made to work more efficiently. 

I don't know when I realized that some things will never work the way they were advertised (which includes most products I see in ads on Facebook), and what was built to last for 50 years in your youth may now last only 5.  (I've gone through as many clothes dryers as some of my old pilot friends have ex-wives).

We come to expect things to work a certain way. As a pilot it was certainly that way, for an airplane at altitude has a way of bringing the irrational into every emotion, every fear  Even now, in a single engine plane I'll look down; checking to see what airport was near if indeed an engine ever quit, even if I'd flown years without having that experience. It's not paranoia, it's those long moments of quiet, especially at night or over vast bodies of water, where your imagination takes you to places you don't want to be. The engines know this and will make those unusual noises only in such situations and at such times, a bluff, a lie, planned by the gods of maintenance and foiled by the steadfastness of the crew.

I learned early on about the life expectancy of certain things, be it a living creature or the cumulative effect of creep fatigue on a turbine blade.

As a small child, I was asked by my best friend to take care of her "pet" frog while she was away for the weekend with her parents. I didn't want to do it, but I felt like I had to. It wasn't a real frog, but rather a stretchy, green, iridescent rubber creation. She loved playing with it, dubbing it an "enchanted frog" that could lift any evil spell her brother could place on her princess dolls.

Unfortunately, Mr. Frog Prince was involved in an industrial accident involving an Erector Set and the laws of physics pertaining to stretchy rubber. He lost a couple of legs as a result.

I was heartsick over what I'd done, especially since it was never my intent, just another childhood experiment with tools and toys. I placed the remains gently in a piece of Kleenex and put them in a box, and cried my eyes out. My Mom was less than pleased, and visions of Lutheran hell (which likely involved Lutefisk and 1970s gym class wear) danced in my head as she made me write my apology. I delivered it with the ruined toy and a new, better toy to replace it, paid for with my allowance for the next month.

My friend forgave me, but I did not forgive myself. Not for a while.

Years later, frogs fared no better in my care, but eventually I was entrusted with not just power tools, but hearts and lives. It is why I do what I do. 

I took yesterday off to get some things done before I turn in my gear next week.  I was up early, the heater kicking on, waking me up. Outside, the low light gave the landscape a quality of time standing still, if only for the hour. The air from the door breathed on me a damp, steady exhalation of rain. It was a good day for some projects while Partner in Grime was traveling, as the antique lamp flickered yet again, hopefully only needing a new bulb, but more likely needing wiring that would put Lucas to shame. It's a day familiar to many of us: things break, plans go awry, and things tear away like sails in a storm; there's no liberty for probing one's heart.  There's only irresistible motion, a hammer's blow, the screech of a shop vac.  

On the dresser are two phones, including the one that tethers me to duty. I never know when it will ring, a call signaling the excessive burden that is nature, fate, or someone's personal jihad.  As the day crept into evening, I somehow expected it to go off, even though I knew it wouldn't, a week out from retirement.  Still, I couldn't help but think of grabbing the bag and jumping into the truck. Gear in the back, teetering as if to fall, I'd accelerate too fast, the high beams flickering through the fog.  When I arrived, it would be surprisingly quiet, given the number of red and blue lights flashing, but perhaps that's just in my mind. As I stood over yet another victim, the sound was as if they had never been. 

As I worked, all I'm aware of was the intake of my own breath, each one a fresh cast of the dice that has already been loaded against us.  Our hopes, our dreams, and our own remorse matter little to the fickle dice man, yet I'll continue to play, for my losses have been paid for in advance by someone more forgiving than I. 

On my head is a ball cap with the letters of my duty.  In my pocket, a piece of brass on which rests a number that will retire with me in another week.  It is shown with respect only to access those places where the sanctity and story of what remains are inviolate. In my truck is a blue lunchbox that looks like the Tardis. All are parts of me, the one who will be forever the child amazed by the unknown, and the other, the one who was entrusted with something precious, determined this time, not to break it.

For I learned the pain I can cause, as well as the pain that can be brought to me by not fixing that which could be fixed, and not walking away from what would never be whole. For despite what they say, those hurts never truly go away, they're just cataloged and stored in those shadowed places that see little light.  As I turn off the light, from somewhere outside comes the screech of an owl grabbing its prey from the earth, its invisible tether to heaven torn asunder as it's carried aloft.

On the nightstand is a scattering of coins, a petrified gummy bear, and the bits of an alarm clock that's woken me for the last time.  Morning will be here soon enough.  Till then, I'll lie in the embrace of the sheets, all the thoughts of what I have lost and what I am still blessed with tickling my senses like electricity, a flicker of current before the darkness. - Brigid

Memorial Day 2025

It's not a day off from work.

It's looking at history, and what has withstood time and conflict.

It's not meeting friends for a meal and fun.

It's not ice cream and a barbecue.

It's not sitting in your lounge chair.

It's raising your flag, remembering what is important as you look hard at everything.

It's being thankful for those with the courage to serve.

It's remembering brave sacrifices.

It's expressing your pride in your country for all to see, not just

 on this day, but every day of the year.

It's remembering duty, courage, and the willingness to defend. 

It's honoring the memory of all of those brave men and women who gave their life in the service of this country, so you could live, here today, in the safe place they made for us. 

Happy Birthday Sunny D.

Dad's Home!

Who is that redhead on the porch waving two treats like semaphore code? I don't know, and I don't care because DAD is home!!

Sunny, the rescue, just turned 2. Adopted from a rescue organization that got her out of a puppy mill on a small farm, where she'd been left to grow in a too-small crate, her legs permanently "wonky," she has grown strong and healthy. She doesn't let her orthopedic issues slow her down at all.

The first six months were "challenging". We still had Lorelei with us (we lost her to sudden, inoperable cancer a couple of months later), Partner in Grime was on the road a LOT, and Sunny was 10 months old, with NO socializing or training, but TONS of energy.

She and Lorlei bonded quickly, but she was a handful when she wasn't sleeping.

Don't let this sweet face fool you.

THIS is the look you'd get after she'd do a zoomie in the house, launching off of the recliner like a Flying Wallenda to hit the sofa, which was just before "Bitey Hour" (that time before dinner when one has to gnaw on EVERYthing, including Mom's fingers, toes, and backside)  

There's a reason that since I don't drink alcohol any longer and I cut back on black coffee, I had to resort to THIS to get through my mornings.

We also had to do a little training on proper social interaction with our landscaping, including the large lilac bush.

But she's turned into a great dog, finally mellowing. Having gone through the "teen years," she learned how to burn off extra energy outside, first by learning to play ball in the yard, then with her new best friend, Napoleon, the Golden Retriever, whom the neighbors behind us brought home with them one day.  

Happy birthday, Sunny D. Lab. Like your predecessors, Lorelei Lab, Abby Lab, and always- Barkley, you are loved and you are safe now.

Flutter of Wind and Fabric - a February Musing

It was a beautiful, clear, cloudless day with just enough breeze to kick up a little whitecap on the lake. A good day to be out on a boat, if it wasn't 20 degrees out and most of the boats weren't put up before winter was tapping at the door early one morning, with portents of the coming cold, a Jehovah's Witness of chilly repentance for summer frolic.

There is part of me that likes the winter, the part that likes to hole up and cook casual dinners for friends, watching it snow while I watch old movies, curled up with my Lab on the couch, lazing under thick soft blankets after that half hour bubble bath. But yet, what I want is another day of summer. The free and clear call of running tides as the dawn breaks gray. A day to feel the sway and the splash, the kick of the wheel and the taut shake of the jib, the rhythm of the tasks that keep the wind in the sail, the choreography of brain and hands, wood and metal, that drive you towards the horizon.

I divided my quality time between the sea and the sky for many years. A vagrant gypsy life of the spray of laughter and sorrow, salt water, salt tears. Either in the waters of the womb or as far above it as I could be. Both environments are so different, yet so essentially the same. There is probably a reason that many pilots also own boats. Boaters and pilots take great pride in their craft, and there is a sense of camaraderie amongst them, though they may not actively socialize when away from their favorite element. Most of my friends share this world, and we all share one other thing, despite variances in gender, age, or upbringing. We are people who just cannot thrive between clustered walls, walking asphalted trails to small offices, breathing in the fumes of yearning, working and dying earthbound, with nary a thought of the sky or the clouds or the sea. To stake us to a plot of earth, however shaded, safe, and watered, is to watch us wither and die.

I lived for a time on a tiny rented houseboat when I was a young airline pilot. Probably the best place I'd ever laid my head. The marina was small, and I relished going to bed at night with the tremulous cadence of the water rocking me to sleep, the sounds of the cove, music to my empty heart. It was a quiet, sheltered place where no one locked their doors, and people respected your things and privacy.  I secretly smile when I think about the Simpsons' episode where Homer comes home with “Marge! Look at all this great stuff I found at the Marina. It was just sitting in some guy's boat !!" It was one of the best times of my life, houseboat living between flights and tagging along with new friends and neighbors, one with a large Taiwanese ketch; on weekends, we pilots raced the locals up and down the waterways. The times were few and far between with our flying schedules, but the joy of those days still remains pooled in the backwaters of my mind, and I can take myself back there with just the sound of the wind filling a sail, testing its seams. 

There is something magical about the elements of water and sky, with their constant change in mood, shape, density, and color. The great variances of their forms, like music, can either calm, uplift, or excite; a power over the mind and thoughts of those who have the depth of soul to hear. But like the sky, the water, too, has its dangers, eddies, and currents. There are days when the whisper kiss of the wind turns into a whetted knife, and you and your craft are simply a storm-tossed play toy of the gods. As Sophocles stated in Antigone: "Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. This power spans the sea, even when it surges white before the gales of the south-wind, and makes a path under swells that threaten to engulf him".

I've seen that power, caught out in a unexpected storm, on wing or sail; where my tiny craft pitched and rolled in weighed indecision as to stay pointy end forward or not, debating as to which way was up and which way was down, into final blackness, while I frantically went through the motions of piloting it, hoping to at least get the opportunity for one last "%&#^" shouted for immortality before I left nothing but a splash of debris against the surface. It's a mistake you don't make twice, and when you size up your sky, assess your horizon, you think and remember. For it's easy to lose yourself in the drifting quiet, mesmerized by the tranquil stillness of the blue, the brilliance of the elements, and forget the strong, wild heart that beats beneath the lacy spray of white. -- If you don't learn, you die. If you do learn, the danger becomes part of the attraction, not in a reckless fashion, but rather with the confidence you gain in knowing that you have choices and strengths. That with the right choices, whatever the sky, the ocean, or life can throw at you, is not enough to destroy you, as you have the power that Sophocles wrote of, of man over the wind.

That is why I wish I could get out into the blue again, to test my mettle before another long winter, to put my hand into it, leaving a wake trail behind me of all the worries and wants and desires, to wash my mind free of all but the grip of my hands on the wheel, the clouds anchored above, guided by the flutter of wind against fabric. - Brigid

Barkley Memories - Road Warriors

It's hard to believe it's been 10 years since we lost Barkley. But I am so happy with all the photos we took, especially the ones we took during our commute from Indy to Chicago for several years. I never took my eyes off the road; I just held up the little point-and-shoot, aimed it into the back of the truck, and took a shot. Thanks for the memories.

Mom,  that's like the third burger place you've passed up!

 

As the truck headed south, into farmland, happy to be away from the thicker traffic, the snow was still piled high from the massive storm almost two weeks ago. The drifts looked so serene, waves tossed up against farm fence, but other signs told of the dangers that had been here, two cars still in ditches and the one jackknifed semi in the median, as well as spots where a Saturn and a Smart Car shed their skin, bits of fiberglass and plastic strewn about, the rest of the remains removed in a bucket.

But we were even happier to be past the city's outskirts, that short stretch I must travel that makes me very anxious not to break down.  There's one stretch where, but for the highway and the knowledge, you wouldn't know you were in a city.

There are the houses, some farm style, probably erected when this was just farms, fading and falling, some windows shuttered or broken, some still lived in, overgrown plots littered with the broken and the unused, buckets, tools, machines, things that once were crafted to serve a purpose of function or work, left to lie idly by those that either abandoned these places or live idle within.  Even the trees, bend down as if tired of making an effort, blossoming each year in the sullied impiety that is a once thriving place that dies through uncaring neglect, its burgeoning, nothing more a bitter and tenacious scrap of another season's memory, than a desire to grow and thrive.

With a sigh of relief, I take that final dogleg south.  

This stretch of highway has been driven a hundred times, yet I notice something different on each drive.  It's not the obvious, giant "HELL IS REAL" sign (we're on I-65, we already know that) or the XXX Family Restaurant (sorry, when I think "XXX", family restaurant just doesn't spring to mind). Instead, it's an old barn, now razed, a river that's left its banks, a tiny little cross with a name by the side of the road.

I don't listen to books on tape for these drives. Sometimes, music plays; sometimes it is silent. Mostly, I keep my senses on the road, for this is a treacherous stretch of large trucks, often as inattentive as they are massive. Sometimes you have one in front and one behind and gaining, no place to go if the one in front decides to stop, the Bat Truck only the Oreo filling between several tons of steel, and I retreat to the slow lane, where I'll happily let teenagers give me that "look" as I do the speed limit.  I've driven this stretch often enough to know that the opposing forces of a semi's mass and my will, if drawn suddenly together, would be a meeting that could be irremediable.

Sometimes they give you a warning before they try to kill you, a signal before they suddenly dart into your lane,  just feet in front of you, making you slam on your brakes, so they can pass the truck going .3 mph less than them. Usually, though, the danger is inarticulate, not knowing it's danger. So I listen as well as watch.

There are always the signs, fast food, gas stations, some bright shiny new, an Arby's, and a Super 8 that's been a welcome respite from this road in bad weather for many people. There's a new McDonald's, advertising large clean restrooms (a welcome change from the ones further north, where they have to lock them because someone might break in and clean them). Then there are old signs, weathered, leaning away from the wind.  Failed businesses dot the landscape, "Boom City", a faded but futuristic-looking abandoned fireworks place that stands in isolation in a landscape of cornfields. So out of place in a remote, rural area, it looks like some alien craft that just landed there and built itself a parking lot as they waited for the mother ship.

What is there to look at, some of you may be thinking?  It's Indiana, flattened out by giant glaciers millions of years ago.  It's flat, there's corn, that's about it.  But beauty can be like that, as subtle as a whisper, yet as strong as faith.  Beauty isn't always young, perfect skin, vast mountains, or the vivid colors of velvets and fine gems.  Beauty is there, on an open road, in the sky, in a vast field of ripe corn,  in a church with a crucifix that likely came out here on a wagon, the serene and battered Christ upon it, transcending the marks of time and generations, a visage to which you can only lower your eyes in humility and ask forgiveness.

Yes, it's flat, but some roads stretch and glisten like jewels in hard rain flowing down as if to wash the landscape clean.  There are weathered homes and stubborn farms, there is a sudden rise to a river that has carried more than history to its silent end.  There are miles and miles of fields, with nothing but corn and fence rows, a barn, and silo jutting up like one of those pop-up greeting cards, set there, flat on the very edge of the earth's table. It's the windy sunlight of space and summer, a morning filled with bells, an afternoon filled with grace, it's the church of God's creation, as farmers tend to its Host and our history.

As I drive and look, I think—to the phone hopefully not ringing at 2 a.m., to the days ahead, to the days past as I see the Indianapolis 103 miles sign and realize I'm more than halfway there, smiling as I relax into the seat.

There's a time in every trip when you settle into the drive, no matter how long.  As a family, and for my Dad, when we were kids, driving on our vacation trips seemed almost effortless, as we watched the landscape change from green to brown to mountains and back to brown. We'd hear stories of his youth, of him and Mom growing up together in Montana, the radio off, the only music the sound of my Mom's relaxed laughter, a laughter I can still sometimes hear. For I hear her voice in mine. I'm told we sound alike, and there are days I can crack open the window and the warmth of the wind will blow in and around me, warming my cheeks and the back of my throat and as look up to a contrail that has caught my eye, our laughter will echo in the wide spaces ahead.

What I recall of those long-ago trips, other than the laughter, was just sitting and looking out the windows for miles, for what was most memorable were the landscapes, stopping when we got tired or thirsty, and actually looking and touching the wonders we'd read about in school. The Grand Coulee Dam, the drive-through redwood tree. Then back in the car, with postcards and maybe a souvenir baseball hat. I saw mountains and tumbling landslides, and fish leaping against gravity up a ladder, and once even a buffalo, kept on a small piece of range on which resided a little restaurant.

I had never in my life been next to an animal that big. He was old and completely tame, raised by the husband and wife at the restaurant, with a few acres to roam and enough wild memory to twitch in running freedom in his dreams. I was afraid at first to approach him, almost blind in my fear, but I crept up, drawn by soft eyes the color of earth, and the warm flank. Judging by his breathing, the slow, patient release of air, that great steam engine of sound, I knew he would not hurt me. I reached out through the fence rails and touched the giant soft velvet bloom of his nose as he looked back with those knowing eyes,  set in ancient bones as enormous as the future, a countenance as powerful as history, as motionless as memory. And we stood together, a little auburn-haired girl and that lone remnant of a past that's faded to nothing but dust and cornered thought, all alive, yet still alone.

But on this drive, all I am thinking about is what I have in front of me, the tumbled landscapes of glacier stone and great pristine rivers, thin as a rope from the air. Anything that really requires my mind, the gas and engine instruments, a scan for traffic, occurs in brief, unhurried intervals as the truck carries me with it, all those memories and thoughts of past road trips, of tears, of childlike bursts of laughter, of family, mechanical, rhythmic memory of the past that I carry with me forward.

Everything that I  might worry about, whether the phone will wake me at 2 a.m., that case I have to finish, a washer that broke beyond repair and needs to be replaced, lies suspended for this time as the sun creeps back inside the earth, driving the shadows forth.

The open road, a dimension free of time and space that flows from childhood to the trembling, secret ardor of the future. It's a road little changed from a child's hand out the window in the breeze, to the older foot on the gas pedal of an old British car, on a Summer day,  pressing down, carrying with it the echo of childish want, the passion, and unrest of adulthood. The road rushing under, rushing on. Way too quickly.

As we near where I will live during the work week, Barkley leans into me, as if recognizing what is going past the window, flowing smoothly from left to right, buildings, and doorways, a small expanse of marsh, each in its ordered place, there in the dimming light. Perhaps he recognizes those things as we draw near. Either that or he is listening to something much further away than the small, confined vehicle we inhabit. Perhaps he only pretends to be listening because, in his heart, he already knows the sound.

I listen to, not just look, to the whoosh of the garage door, to the creak of a door, to the feeling of falling into a simple place with old Mission furniture, a framed photo on the shelf, and a Cross on the wall, reminding me that I am all alive but never alone.

Brigid