Miles Beneath our Wings

The hum of the airplane tires on the pavement is soothing, the running edge lights going past me like years. I’ve already been awake a few hours as living in the middle of a large city the country airport I fly out of is not close. I don’t mind as during those years I commuted to work as a pilot I got used to a long drive to work. 

 Many pilots commuted, finding homes where housing was much cheaper and making the trek each week to work. I did enjoy when I didn’t have to drive to “work” every day. Normally with airline schedules, I would fly out and be gone for days. But I enjoyed the drives in when I made them, often in the dark, before the roads are busy.

I've made most of my long drives by myself but before I got married, a female friend from college and I drove across several states together to visit our families who lived in the same area. I remember when we pulled into the subdivision where one of my relatives had moved. I'd only been there once, and I got lost in all the streets, each bearing the same name, but with a different ending. Magnolia Lane, Magnolia Drive, Magnolia Trail (that's not confusing), and so on. I had a map printed from MapQuest out, but it lay unwanted on the back seat. My friend said “Uh, you want to grab that map” and I said, “No. I've got this; this street looks familiar” as we got further lost. She said again, “Say, how about that map behind you” and I responded, “Nope, I'm sure this is it.” She started laughing and said “Oh my. You're a GUY! You don't want to ask for directions.” 

If I'm alone, sometimes I watch other drivers. People often drive as they think, modestly, slowly, recklessly. Some move in and out of traffic with the brisk efficiency of a surgeon, others, shyly and with hesitation, invite themselves out to dinner with the Reaper. Myself, I just roll along, not faster than anyone, not slower than anyone, not wanting to stand out, simply watching the centerline break underneath of the vehicle. 

 When I tell people that I sometimes drive or fly in a small Cessna to visit family in another state they look at me like I'm daft. “You can fly commercial airlines there in an hour.” Yes, I can. But I like that time to myself, no schedule, no commitments. When I get hungry, I stop and eat. When I get tired, I find a quiet, clean place to sleep. If I want to land at a small rural airport and go visit the site of the world's largest ball of yarn, no one is going to tell me “Sorry, that flight has already left the gate.” Though, I still wonder about some gas station bathrooms. Why do they lock them? Are they afraid someone might break in and clean them? 

I'm not sure why I enjoy the slow and hard look at things. Perhaps it's just the process of becoming slowly born that is those years leading up to middle age. Perhaps it's what I do for a paycheck. Maybe it was all the hours hiking up into mountains of the West as I grew up. You really learn to appreciate the slowness, the detail, the stillness of a day in the outdoors. The ascent may be hours or it may be days, but with a compass and a few tools, you simply gather your wits around you and head uphill. What you expect to greet you is up ahead of you, even when you can't see it. It's there in the blue, and it only remains for your body to reach it. Patience, one blister, one tear, at a time.

The wilderness gives you time, for the wild, though changing, is still eternal. That's what long road trips are like for me. I keep the horizon in my window but still look back, savoring the journey. It's time, my time, filled with the immaculate sameness of hours bathed in the sun's warm honey. Anything that requires detailed thought, the engine setting, a scan for traffic, occurs in brief, unhurried intervals. The miles roll by with the thoughts, miles of tears, of laughter I've not known since youth, of love, of mechanical, rhythmic memories of the past that I carried with me as I started this journey. 

Those memories are not always happy ones, which is part of the trip you will make. As the miles flow past, you realize that when you are young, no one tells you the truth about love, about life. About coming into your heart and your strength and what it means when you realize what you have beneath you.

Talking frankly about past relationships and lost friends seemed banal, like proving a right angle or finding the equal distance between two lines but it felt good  on that drive with my friend to share our joys and our griefs as we headed into our future. The two-lane highway rose slowly out of the Plains as I tried to navigate through words that carried with them both joy and pain, holding me back like the weight of a dead end. So, we talked, not in a great gush of words, but as friends do, in small bits of ourselves spread out on the table like a show and tell of things that troubled us, those hurts that built up over years of living. The miles and hours flew past, fields clutching onto the skeletons of flowers that long ago died, of bare, windswept trees, and clusters of burrs that stick to everything with a tiny pinprick of pain. Things that were sticking to us both.

All that was left were the words; and they flowed, like the laughter and the tears, until I opened the window to let the wind dry my face. The wind that would carry those old hurts to where they would simply bounce off the landscape as if they were a piece of discarded trash, delicate, crumpled tissue best left to be disintegrated by time. Better left behind as the sun began to relax on what would be a renewed journey; the road pulling away from discarded thought, the highway lines breaking up like Morse Code as we moved forward and moved away from that painful past, those roads best not traveled, till it was just a speck in the rearview mirror. 

I sit here tonight so many years later thinking back to that long drive. My friend has found her happiness, and I found mine, nothing left but the memories that I'm making now, moving into new skies, open roads. Time ticks past. The diorama of life unfolds in the window up ahead, the rush of the world, fast food, and fast life, suspended for a few hours. The truck still moves on, this time to find a place to rest for the night and I do, cleansing myself of the grime of the day. The hotel room has all the warmth of a doctor’s waiting room, and I can't help but wish I was instead at hunting camp, sleeping under a fluttering tent, canvas murmuring to the whispers of the rain. As I lay there, I think of Heraclitus, of whose writings are now just fragmentary remains, who said it better than I, expressing the nature of reality as a flux in words, the way I'd express them in motion today. 

The rule that makes

Its subject weary 

is a sentence

of hard labor. 

For this reason 

change gives rest.

Sometime it's time for a change of landscape, of thinking, a journey forward. No agenda but to see the day unfold before you up ahead. You need those moments alone, those miles of open road, and miles of open sky.

Mark Twain wrote in Huckleberry Finn, “We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lie on our backs and look up at them and discuss whether they was made or just happened.”  But I know they were made.  Made to serve as tiny points of light to guide a distant traveler back home.

 - Brigid