CAPTURED BY THE CAMERA

 For decades I kept a daily journal, not subjective reflections so much as common details on a temporal scale of weeks and months. Today most of that’s no more relevant than old newspaper, but it’s still interesting to look back at what seemed important then compared to present memories of the same experience.My scrawl from October 26 twenty-three years ago:mostly cloudy1st day soarable in some timeskipped classes to get great wave footagecamera fizzledvery disappointingYes, but I still enjoyed it, and learned a ton. So here's what actually happened. Back before the stone age, when most folks carried neither telephone nor camera in their pocket, I was a forty-something return-to-college student who seemed to enjoy it far more than those whippersnappers fresh out of high-school (interpret that however you wish). Rather than partying all weekend like younger contemporaries, I wanted to film a meager little video of soaring above clouds in wave.In that millennium video meant video tape, and the equipment, though vastly inferior to anything these days, cost too much for kids in my class. So from the college audiovisual department I borrowed what was then called a videocam and felt, well…  👀👅.Eighty miles southeast of Montreal, soaring season ends when snow you can't knock off your boots is melted by body heat and evaporates to fog the canopy. When moving aircraft on the ground involves shoveling out first. When runways don't get plowed because roads are more important and besides, no sane pilot would want to fly in this X$!&? anyway.For these reasons and others this flight would be that season's last.Conditions were ordinary for wave in that region, near solid overcast holed by oval-shaped ‘foegn’ gaps marking troughs in the wave. Cloud base was four thousand feet AGL and tops two or three thousand higher, so we could go a mile above everything without needing oxygen. Up on top, visuals are perfect, super clear above enormous loaves of shining undercast on three sides, and to the cloudless west, Lake Champlain from end to end with the Adirondacks beyond.I’ve already learned that panoramas you love staring at in real time quickly become boring when viewed on a screen. To keep it interesting you need to vary perspective with sweeping turns and wingovers et cetera, then always finish a sequence straight and level focused squarely on some especially compelling scene. Videocams are made to be held in the right hand, so you have to fly lefty. No sweat, I do it all the time in 2-32s because of that awful trim wheel on its starboard side.With right eye in the eyepiece and left eye squinted (stupidly) shut, I’m doing wingovers and contorting my upper body to hold composition in the frame, thinking only partially about how to fly the aircraft. Several times I stagger into extreme slips or stalls and need to abandon a shot to regain control. No problem there either. No one’s watching. Just get back in lift and start over again. Still plenty of tape in the cassette.Really getting into this, ultimately I fall sideways into an inverted spin. This occurs one long moment after the first tickle of nausea, which by the end of spin recovery has blossomed into cold sweats and (please don’t tell) a dry heave or two. Price of doing business.This is also when I fall out of wave sink into nasty rotor. So now it’s try not to spew chunks on the camera while fighting turbulence in what truly feels like some kind of gravitational anomaly. Why do I do this to myself? Because no one else will! Of course it worked out okay. Gutting it up from that fiasco was my best flying of the day, if also the most miserable. Standard fare on steroids. After beating the sweats I climbed all the way back up again just to say so and by then both the film and the feeling in my toes were gone, so I declared that flight a success and called it a season.Impatient to view my cinemagraphic extravaganza, I rationalized my deepest rapid descent ever, though it may as well have been a slow one. For what did I learn?Six or eight seconds into a splendid skyscape the video turned to snow (the electronic kind). Beginning and end. All she wrote, as Dad would say.  Too late, I learned to always clean those recording heads beforehand — wisdom of utterly no practical worth in this age of solid state.  Behold the cruel equanimity of fate.All my logbook entry says is:1+ hour      wave video       camera nixSo as we see in almost every context, written records retain certain value, but hardly supplant the mental imprint of real time ‘been there’.