SOMETHING WE ALL HAVE IN COMMON
“Dad, I left my heart up there.”
Like most non-aviators, I didn’t know one aircraft from another, but while driving in the country I saw one swoop low overhead that looked unlike any I’d seen. It moved slower than I thought planes could fly, and even with my window open there was no sound except the rattling of my my old pickup at highway speed. ‘Is that what they call a glider?’ I wondered, and pulled over to watch as its long wings slid low over treetops, down out of sight.
Did it CRASH? There was no loud bang…
I bounced up a dirt road through those trees until they opened on a private airstrip, and there lay that strange metal bird, one wingtip resting on a grass runway. Was it busted? As I drove up the canopy opened and two people clamored out, smiling… An hour later one of them would be me.
Fascination hardly bearable, I stood awhile at the periphery to listen and look, and gather the courage to part with twenty bucks. It was reassuring to learn that the pilot, Ed, was a school teacher and family man, a far more responsible bloke than I. Others in that loose and chatty group exemplified what’s true of soaring people everywhere: a tribe of boggling diversity, from Girl Scouts to diplomats, bound by childlike curiosity and inspired appreciation for the aesthetics of silent flight. Many are engineers or artistic types, but the majority are ordinary, practical salt-of-the-earth folk (heavy equipment operators make fine soaring pilots, which might surprise you, but makes perfect sense to them). And of course some of us even our mothers would classify as flakes. Hi Mom!
So alien was that first experience, and now so long ago, I recall few details. The bustle of new information was disorienting, but even more stimulating. I only hoped these people knew what they were doing! Our craft was hitched to the tail of an old crop duster by what looked like ordinary ski rope and pulled up the runway on its one wheel, wobbly at first like starting out on a bike.
I was 24 at the time, and had been on airliners, but never seen out the front of a plane before. Tailing another one in flight from close behind was the second first in what became a flood of novelties. Soon the tug peeled away, leaving us enthroned above a lush crazy quilt of farms and forest, floating in silence. Already I felt caught in a current of destiny, and then the pace quickened.
Responding to the faintest bump, Ed sighed as if kicking back an easy chair, and rolled into a sensuous turn. Instinct pulled my eyes that direction and down, as it apparently does for everyone. “The wingtip’s moving backwards!” I laughed. “We’re spinning around like a top.”
“Spin’s a four-letter word,” Ed chided. “That wingtip’s moving forward at about fifty, believe it or not, and of course the other one’s going faster.” I understood that intellectually, but my eyes still said otherwise.
Ed narrated the entire performance as we rose, pointing out details of all kinds while I struggled to absorb the spellbinding moment. It seemed dreamily unreal, yet so much more natural than the highway that brought me there! My strongest impressions were a euphoric, fleeting kind of peace, and a vacuous roar of nearly limitless potential…
“So this is what you’ve been missing,” Ed concluded, rolling level two thousand feet up. “We could keep climbing higher and easily stay up the rest of the day, soar over to those mountains and even get back if we start an hour ago, but we should hurry down now to give my next victim a turn.”
He had me pull back on the big blue handle (ever drive off a cliff?) and suddenly the ride was over. Our landing on the grass felt like easing into a feather bed, and when feet again touched the ground my spontaneous delight only fed the others’ pre-heated contagion. Someone clapped Ed on the back, “Looks like you’ve hooked another one,” and everybody chuckled, looking fondly at me. Nothing would be the same, ever again.
I must have asked the same predictable questions I would later answer for hundreds of other dazed first-timers in all the seasons since — the one thing we all have in common. My second flight would be my first lesson and the beginning of a long career, but in the fifty years since, I have yet to take a second glider ‘ride’…