Falling in Love

  The two-toned white and blue paint was poor, but she didn't care. That was another cosmetic issue she could avoid.

  She slipped the chains on her tie-down rings and got in.

  "Clear," Lourdes yelled out the open door. The engine started smartly. She shut her door.

  Lourdes sat there with her headset on.

  Oil pressure up.

  Oil temperature low. It would warm up during taxi for takeoff.

  She turned the radio to frequency 118.45 and got the "ATIS," the Automatic Terminal Information Service weather for Van Nuys Airport, designated "November," that hour. The wind was light and variable. The temperature was comfortable. The stratus clouds were breaking up to the north.

  She changed the frequency to 121.7 to speak to ground control.

  "Van Nuys Ground, Cessna Niner Eight Two Hotel Sierra at the F.B.O., taxi for takeoff with November."

  Ground control responded over the radio with a chuckle, and then "Niner Eight Two Hotel Sierra, taxi one six left. Say direction of flight."

  He sounded new to Lourdes. She hadn't heard him before.

  "Two Hotel Sierra, taxi Runway One Six Left," she said. "Left downwind departure."

  Lourdes checked to make sure the ramp around her was clear, released her brakes, and began her taxi-when Ground came back with what sounded like a smile.

  "Ah, Two Hotel Sierra-" Ground said in a manner that seemed jovial. He paused then offered a curt "Disregard."

  Maybe his supervisor told him not to chatter, she wondered.

  A woman with "Hotel Sierra" would sometimes take some ribbing as "Hotel Sierra" usually meant a hangar-flying version of something like "Hot Stuff" in bawdy pilot parlance. Lourdes guessed that was what he was interested in, so she told him, anyway.

  She keyed her mike: "It wasn't me. It was two owners back who changed it."

  "Okay. Thanks," Ground said with a chuckle.

  Lourdes pulled out of her tie-down and headed north up the taxiway for Runway One Six Left.

  "Van Nuys Tower, Cessna Niner Eight Two Hotel Sierra, holding short one six left, left down wind departure."

  "Niner Eight Two Hotel Sierra, cleared for departure," Tower said.

  "Niner Eight Two Hotel Sierra, one six left, cleared for departure," Lourdes repeated to Tower.

  She rolled onto the runway, looked to the right for any incoming aircraft. Seeing none, she lined up on the center line for Runway One Six Left, and slowly added throttle. The plane began its roll. There was a slight swerve to the left, but she countered with a touch of right rudder, and in no time, she was at rotate speed. She applied a little back pressure on the yoke, and she and Bes rose gracefully into the sky.

  CHAPTER 3

  High over western New Mexico, Lourdes watched the world crawl by. The sky was clear and winds were out of the west, so she had a tailwind-as if the world were trying to blow her away from Los Angeles-though there was some light to moderate turbulence that could be tiring at times. Occasionally the plane would jump and shake, some things in the glove compartment and cargo bay would rattle.

  She cinched her lap belt and shoulder harness a little tighter.

  Her shoulder harness had pressed her long, dark hair against her neck, so she reached up behind her head to pull her hair into something like a ponytail, letting it fall behind her collar.

  What was that? The engine sounded different-louder than usual.

  She listened to the engine noise, sensitive to any cylinder that might be missing, but it sounded smooth. She put her hand on the top of the panel to feel the degree of vibration in the cockpit. It felt normal. Could an exhaust manifold be loose? She scanned her oil pressure and oil temperature-even checked her fuel mixture and R.P.M.-and couldn't find a problem. Maybe- Sometimes, on a long haul, she knew she could suddenly notice little sounds that had been there all along-

  Ah, no. That's not it. She realized the problem. The ear cup seals in her headset were old and didn't seal as well as they used to.

  She adjusted her headphones slightly.

  The engine noise went back to normal.

  She thanked the Lord again.

  With a moderate tailwind, her groundspeed was about 118 miles per hour, but at her altitude of nine thousand five hundred feet, about three thousand feet above ground level where she was, she appeared to barely be moving.

  She looked at cars going east on Interstate 40 below, measured their progress against her wing strut. Slowly, one after another, her wing strut would overtake them, so she felt satisfied she was going faster than the cars.

  Flying cross-country in a slow airplane meant hours and hours of watching the earth slowly pass underneath, with thoughts, wanted or not, covering a desire go get somewhere.

  She thought with apprehension about what she was doing. She had left apartments before, left the area of Los Angeles she'd lived in, but she had never left in such a major way as this before.

  I must be out of my mind.

  Where am I going?

  What am I leaving behind?

  Everything: Los Angeles, her family, friends-

  That was a joke! She'd had lots of "friends" over the years, but never any that seemed to amount to much-people who wanted Lourdes to enter their life intermittently, but who didn't want to enter her life beyond a grace period, who would gossip behind her back, or who kept her away from their other friends.

  Leaving Los Angeles? She'd been born and raised there. Her parents still lived there. How would she see them again? She would, she thought. Maybe. She wasn't leaving them entirely, but in truth, they were no piece of cake-like "friends" she'd had in the past, her family claimed loyalty but seemed to be happier when she wasn't there.

  Raul. She was leaving him entirely. He had divorced her years ago due to family pressure, but she'd dragged his memory around with her all these years, in her heart. Love the guy who dumped you? How can you really love someone who drops you under family pressure? It had been so long since he dumped her, she thought. Maybe she had been loving a fantasy.

  It wouldn't surprise her, she thought.

  Chaco Canyon was somewhere over here, she thought. And Navajo and Hopi behind and to the left. She looked at the land. Some of my ancestors were here, too-how their lives were different.

  She looked ahead. There were some clouds forming over the Sandia Mountains, east of Albuquerque. She hadn't flown through New Mexico before, but she'd heard monsoons, during July, sent a lot of moisture up from Mexico that built over the mountains in the hot afternoon air-a mix of convective and orographic lifting.

  She checked her tablet. The last time she had flown over a town and gotten cellular data coverage, she'd downloaded a new radar image to overlay her flight chart.

  The rain fell hard and steady on the ramp. Lourdes stood by herself inside the old, country F.B.O., sipping coffee she got from a machine, watching gray behemoths overhead dump Niagara Falls all over three isolated airplanes on acres of ramp and miles of brown dirt, empty land.

  Am I surviving? she thought, watching rain water drip off the planes. I'm running away in the biggest way ever.

  No, maybe not in a bad way, she thought. Life's problems are almost more than I can tolerate, and I deal with that as well as I can by leaving when the stress is too high.

  She wondered if she believed that.

  Some people blow off the handle, she thought, and commit suicide, or violence or do drugs or something, and I don't. All I do is leave. That sounded better, she thought.

  Then she realized again that is exactly what Raul had done. He left her when the stress was too great. The family pressured him, and he left.

  She set her coffee cup on a small table by the window and looked around the deserted F.B.O. for something to eat. There wasn't a soul there. Quiet echoed off the walls. There was a help-yourself feeling to the isolated, small-town airport, with candy bars in a vending machine by the coffee machine.

  She bought a Snickers for lunch.

  She sh
owered in an old motel by the airport and slept in a tired bed. The room was as quiet as a coffin. And she was more alone than she'd ever been.

  Her altitude had drifted up to nine thousand six hundred seventy, a little high. She corrected. She hadn't heard anything on the emergency channel, so she clicked the push-to-talk button. It seemed to still work. Over Tucumcari, she dialed her radio to 119.275 to listen to their automated ASOS weather report and reset the barometric pressure in the Kollsman window so her altimeter would read correctly, then dialed 122.95 to listen to their air traffic, if any.

  It was quiet. No aircraft was using a radio around Tucumcari. If her radio still worked.

  She looked outside again. The traffic slowly slipped behind her wing strut.

  Do they know where they're going?

  East of the Rockies, the land began to slope downward, leaving her at a higher altitude above ground level, though she remained at nine thousand five hundred feet M.S.L., Mean Sea Level. The Rocky Mountains disappeared behind her. Jagged canyons blended into flat plains that stretched to infinity. Circles and squares of crops became more numerous. "Crop Circles," she thought. The land was alien to her. She'd never seen such vast openness.

  It was beautiful. No mountains to fear crossing.

  Since leaving Los Angeles, Lourdes had seen little of the earth other than brown, rocky dirt, with some trees at higher altitude, but by the time she flew past Tucumcari the land began to green beautifully. The brown-forever-nothingness-of-before became the lush-and-colorful-of-the-new, like the scenery in "The Wizard of Oz"-only in reverse, because the color she saw, in this case, was over Kansas.

  Lourdes' mind wandered through a brief moment of sarcasm. The folks in a Pride parade would love that!

  Do they have water sprinkler systems everywhere down there? she barely thought to ask. Because if they do, they must have a budget deficit like California.

  She didn't laugh at her joke; she was too tired.

  She stared out her window at airports below crawling by. Wheat. Small towns.

  Where did they get all that green grass beside the airports? Beside everything? Real people live there? They have lives? They live in those lush surroundings? She imagined a countryside full of crops, town events where people shared together, the occasional snow at Christmas, a real spring-time when flowers bloomed and leaves grew back on trees.

  Emotionally, she reached for the life she found beneath her, but her arms were too short-so her heart drifted away, again, on its own, deeper into her solitary depression.

  I could never have- Her mind stopped on its own, not finishing.

  Nothing that real- She blocked something else.

  I could never have anything that beautiful in a real life, she was finally able to think. Not me.

  "Here you go, Sugar," the waitress said, refilling Lourdes' coffee.

  Lourdes ate her eggs and hash browns, in the airport diner before take-off, thankful she got to eat something, thankful she wasn't dead, yet feeling she surely was dead, everywhere inside. Her heart just didn't know it yet.

  Lourdes stood alone on the ramp by the right side of her cowling, the oil door wide open. She screwed an eight-inch filler-extension tube onto the top of a quart of oil and poured it into her engine.

  Over Iowa, Lourdes consulted her tablet computer mounted on the passenger yoke. It told her Dyersville floated by underneath. Could it really be there? she wondered. She looked for a baseball field-

  There it was, northeast of town.

  CHAPTER 4

  During the week of the airshow at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Wittman Regional becomes the busiest airport in the world, landing thousands of aircraft of all kinds, large and small, parking them wing-tip to wing-tip, or sometimes T-ing them together, around major runways, over miles of sculpted lawns, and between more exhibits and displays than most people could see over the course of the week with an electric scooter. While many people seek accommodations in town in hotels, university dorms, or in people's homes, tens of thousands of other people camp beside their plane in tents.

  It's a busy place during the week. Aircraft are always in the air: landing, taking off, or flying by. Among all the activity, landing approaching aircraft, sometimes two at a time on the same runway, without mishap-in an endless series, all day long-is a testament to the skill and ability of both the pilots and controllers. It's as if Air Traffic Control is the conductor with a huge radio baton leading dozens of pilot musicians who carefully fly their planes in concert, for the enjoyment of all.

  The F.A.A.'s NOTAM was in effect-a "Notice to Airmen," which in this case set requirements for the operations at America's largest annual airshow.

  Lourdes had studied the NOTAM. She was ready to join the orchestra.

  Approaching Ripon, Wisconsin, she looked for other airplanes in the sky and found four. She selected a white Cessna to follow, fell in behind it, and flew, per the NOTAM, northeast up the railroad tracks.

  Over Fisk, her radio barked with instructions from A.T.C. Normally, pilots repeat instructions from A.T.C. but under this NOTAM, they were to rock their wings in acknowledgement. "Blue low wing, follow the red high wing outside the blue water tower, make right traffic landing Runway Two Seven, rock your wings!" There was a slight pause on Lourdes' radio. "Thank you," A.T.C. said, "that's a good rock. White high wing, follow the blue low wing downwind outside the blue water tower, right traffic Runway Two Seven, rock your wings." Slight pause. "Good rock."

  They were all flying northeast up the railroad tracks, and "right traffic Runway Two Seven" meant they would make right turns to the runway, landing in the direction of two seven zero degrees, magnetic, straight west: Runway Two Seven.

  Then Lourdes' plane was controlled.

  "White and blue high wing, follow the white high wing, right traffic around the blue water tower, landing Runway Two Seven, rock your wings." Lourdes rocked her wings vigorously, a hard dip left then right. "Thank you. Good rock! Yellow low wing, follow the white and blue high wing?"

  The sun was warm and yellow-just a little before apex, right where you'd want it at ten in the morning. The sky was the deep rich blue they only make in late July, and green lawn grass, mowed to perfection, stretched for miles, all the way to the horizon.

  Jim and Mike sat on their little Honda scooters by Taxiway Poppa in the "South Forty," the parking and camping area for Vintage planes in the southern area of the airport, along the west side of Taxiway Poppa and Runway One Eight/Three Six. Their scooters were turned off for a moment. They were listening to the music of airplane noise.

  Jim moved his orange safety vest to the side and withdrew a little white tube. "Want some sunscreen?"

  "Thanks, Mate," Mike said in his British accent, taking a squirt into his palm.

  They put a fresh layer on their faces below the sunglasses, and neck as well, finishing off by rubbing the remainder into the backs of their hands.

  The winds were light and variable, but Jim synched up the neck strap for his Tilley sun hat, anyway, as when he rode the scooter down Taxiway Poppa to park planes, he'd make his own twenty-five knot wind.

  "Look around at all this," Jim said in admiration. "That's my Favorite color scheme. Tell me where it could be better."

  "Your blue-blockers are darker than my granny's knickers," Mike said. "How can you see beans?"

  Jim smiled.

  "You think this is like 'Field of Dreams?'" Mike asked.

  Jim paused for a second, then "More movies?" he asked. "You mean 'Is this Heaven? No it's Iowa?' kind of thing?"

  "I'd say," Mike said in agreement.

  "Yeah," Jim agreed, "But around here, it's more like the question is, "'Is this Heaven?' And the answer is a simple truth: 'Yes.'" Jim looked over at Mike more intently. "The whole earth can be, with a little effort."

  A Grumman Goose taxied slowly south on Taxiway Poppa. Jim yelled to a relatively new biker on the taxiway near it. "That's it! Take him all the way down. He's amphibious! Amphib camping i
s down past the runway near the ditch."

  The new biker nodded and got the pilot's attention by patting himself on the head to signal "Follow Me."

  The pilot nodded to the biker, and the biker slowly rode south on the taxiway, Goose in tow.

  "I'm not so sure he knows where to go," Mike said about the new biker.

  "Yeah. Better check." They both started their bikes and raced south across the lawns.

  Runway Two Seven was full in Lourdes' vision, a huge runway over six thousand feet long-manicured off-white concrete surrounded by more of that impossibly green grass.

  Lourdes had throttled back, pulled on her carburetor heat, and used the Johnson bar between her seats to partially extend her flaps. With her "barn doors hanging half out," she felt Bes noticeably slow down and begin descent. She managed her throttle setting and pitch cautiously to keep her airspeed perfect while descending right behind the plane ahead. Airspeed too high, and her plane wouldn't land, or she'd float and land too long. Airspeed too low, and her wing could stall, which, this close to the ground, could be a problem. She held it steady.

  Lourdes could see the white high wing in front of her on short final, following the blue low wing over the approach end of the runway. She noted the large colored dots painted on the runway per NOTAM for this special airshow.

  The A.T.C. Maestro controlled the dense landing traffic.

  "Blue low wing, keep it up. Keep it up. Don't land yet. Land long on the large green dot, half way down the runway. Green dot. That's right. White high wing, land short, on the orange dot near the beginning, at the thousand foot markers. That's right. Both of you land now. Both of you land now." Slight pause. "Good."