Falling in Love

  Oh, but that guy got that waterproof tarp rain fly on.

  Pushed by the wind, the northern side of her tent pressed down closer to her face. So it wasn't the top but the side. The whole thing shook like an evil giant was trying to tear it apart, the tarp rainfly flapping against its ties threatening to tear itself loose.

  The stakes! Would they hold for the tent as well as the plane?

  CRRRACK! went another close one. Thunder seemed to bounce off everything at the airport, echoing off buildings, other clouds, the moon.

  "Goodness!" she yelled in protest.

  Rain poured down on the tent mercilessly. Its weight, in itself, nearly enough on its own to flatten her tent's fragile fiberglass poles. But the tent held.

  After a few minutes, the winds and rain moderated into a gentle storm. Thunder rolled more distantly, and Lourdes began to feel as if the weather were less an expression of her inner fears and more an expression of her inner turmoil.

  Which was comforting to her, she found. It seemed to take the pain out of her heart and dump it on the whole world.

  The tent was holding, she thought to herself in amazement. The tent held!

  It was a new experience for her. She'd been rained on in her tent twice before in California, but nothing like this.

  This is Oshkosh! She laughed at the storm. Big in every way.

  Secure in the knowledge her tent had passed the test, she rolled over in her bag and slept soundly for the first time in years.

  CHAPTER 9

  The morning sun peeked over Runway Three Six and Taxiway Poppa, illuminating the bottoms of wings and the lower half of Lourdes' tent. The top half was in the shadow of her fuselage.

  Lourdes peeked out the tent flap to have a look.

  The flight line was the most beautiful place in the world, to her. The morning sun reflected off tiny drops on planes and grass, which made them look like after-storm jewelry.

  By six a.m. Lourdes was walking through the grass alone, south along the Taxiway Poppa burn line abeam dozens of rows of planes, toward green fields beyond. She wanted to see what was down there, and if there was nothing, she needed some exercise. She felt her heart rate up where it should be and took a breath of fresh air to fill her system.

  God, it was beautiful.

  She didn't know how long it had rained last night, but everything was fresh and gorgeous this morning, with no puddles left in the grass to step in. The grass was wet, though, so she took higher steps than normal to try to keep her shoes dry.

  A biker blew past her on his way to the deep south, no plane in tow. It was early.

  "Hi!" Someone called from behind.

  She turned to see Jim gaining on her by foot.

  "Good morning," Jim said. "Good day for a morning constitutional."

  Lourdes didn't answer.

  He tried teasing her a little. "Are you that lady who flies all over the country without tie downs?"

  Lourdes ignored him.

  "How'd your tent hold up?" he asked. "You sleep dry?"

  "Actually, not a drop," she answered. "Slept like a baby if the baby slept well, thank you."

  "At your service."

  "And you?" She decided to speak with him. He had helped her, no reason to be stand-offish.

  "Same guy set it up."

  "I thought so."

  He walked along side of her. They were approaching the end of Taxiway Poppa, near the Vintage point shack called "Point Fondie."

  To her unspoken question, he answered, "It's because it's our nearest shack to Fond du Lac, a town twenty miles or so south of here. We've actually got a Fond du Lac city limits sign down there, at the end of the lawns."

  "Good, good. Need to know where you are."

  "Up over here to the right is where we tend to put amphibs," he said.

  "I can tell because of those amphibs."

  "Ah but did you notice there's a 'ditch' there? A gully, a wash."

  "You're a natural guide. They should pay you."

  "And right beside all of that are more gorgeous fields."

  "Amazing."

  "It's not filled up down here, though."

  "That's probably why it's not full of planes," she said.

  "It's Saturday morning, early. By later this afternoon, they'll have some of it filled in."

  "Do they ever fill up?"

  He walked beside her, breathing a little harder than she.

  "You're in shape."

  "I'm a nurse. I'm on my feet all the time."

  "They fill up in the North Forty regularly. Probably will today, if they haven't already. But this area down here? Rarely. It's good overflow. But it's so vast- I think it's only actually filed up once, in all the years I've volunteered here. We try to make room for everyone."

  "Ha!" Lourdes laughed briefly. "Sorry. I saw this guy, this morning, with a Pacer? He was putting his sleeping bag on his wing to dry it out. I guess he slept wet. I don't mean to laugh at him, but I just thought it was funny. It rained hard last night."

  "Yeah, that happens sometimes."

  "So what're you gonna do today?" he asked her.

  "I-" She paused to think. "I have no idea. Just be here, I think. Probably get some nerf herder to show me around. It's breakfast. I hear they have grass and trees- Do you eat trees?"

  "Little ones. Have you had breakfast?"

  "No."

  "Alrightie then," he said, doing a Jim Carrey. He guided her into a right one-eighty, heading back north. "There just happens to be a great breakfast tent right back up that way. Why don't we start there?"

  "I'll go eat and see a little, but no picking me up, okay?"

  "No, no. I've already had my workout."

  Inside a flight line tent cafe, down by the Ultralight Area, they sat to eat eggs and pancakes, sausage gravy and biscuits, toast with jelly, and milk. Everyone in there was abuzz with stories of how they weathered the storms last night.

  "The wind must have been forty knots-"

  "No fifty-"

  "Rain was blowing my tent sideways like a hurricane-"

  "That's why my wife stays in a dorm over at the University."

  "It uprooted my tent and sent it south with me in it-" one guy joked.

  "I saw a maple tree scooting sideways through the planes!"

  "With you in it?"

  "No."

  "Darn."

  "Mine flattened right down on me like a pancake-"

  "You need to get a Cabela's tent-"

  Lourdes felt alive and chuckled with the guys at her table. "How did I sleep? No problem. The secret is in the tarping. He knows all about it," she said, handing them off to the expert.

  "So what did you do?" they asked.

  Lourdes ate like she hadn't eaten all day.

  "You want your walking?" he asked her. "You don't need to go out of your way for it here. There's something to do everywhere, but it's so large, you'll get your walking doing anything."

  They walked together up Wittman Rd. past the Vintage Ops Shack, past Vintage headquarters, east of Theatre in the Woods, thence left 45 degrees, vectors to Pioneer Field, a grass strip nearby that specialized in rebuilding and flying antique planes. They angled for the new control tower as their visual waypoint.

  Jim's phone rang. "Hello," he answered. "West of Show Center, on our way to the Museum. It's a must-see." Another pause. "I don't know. Let me give her the phone."

  He handed his phone to Lourdes.

  "Hello?" she said into it. She looked at Jim then back ahead. "I don't know, maybe." Pause. "Can I say 'we'll see'?" Another pause. "Okay. Thank you."

  She hung it up and gave it back to him.

  "Do you have a phone?" he asked her?

  She gave him a dirty look.

  "The place is vast, and it helps, sometimes, to find each other."

  "Okay." They swapped phone numbers, and Lourdes put Mike and Millie's into her phone as well.

  "Millie invited me to come to her corn roast tonight over in Camp Scho
ller. She said you'd be there and thirty other people, too, probably."

  "Oh, that's nice."

  "What is a corn roast?"

  "You stick ears of corn on the barbie, husk and all, and burn 'em a little. Medium heat. By the time they're a little charred, you can set 'em aside for maybe just one minute, and you can then literally pick them up with your hands. Peel the husk back, hold it by the husk-the corn inside is hot-pour a little melted butter over the top, and voila. Delicious. Like a cocktail party, only it's a corn-husker party. Residence in Nebraska not required.

  "You know corn. How tall does your corn grow?"

  He held his hand up over his head. "By the time it's harvested. Like 'Field of Dreams.'"

  She looked at him, startled.

  He turned to face her in mock umbrage. "I never get any ghosts!" he laughed, turning to walk again. "And five will get you ten, Millie will get someone to make some ice cream, too. It's really more of a social gathering of friends than anything else, doubling as supper. And, as you know, the show isn't open yet 'till Monday, so restaurants are still scarce."

  "Right. Saturday is still a little early."

  "So we have to ban together to survive," he said playfully.

  Just past the tower, and still surrounded by airshow-related traffic and vendor tents being erected, they picked up Waukau Ave., which eventually lead west past the museum and off the airport. But they didn't stay on that road long. After the airshow's buss stop, they angled right, off the road, through a large picturesque park area with a lovely duck pond, finding a charming chapel to the north of it.

  Lourdes read the sign: "Fergus Chapel."

  Lourdes was struck with its beauty. She felt she could stop right there and stay, it was so lovely.

  "Have you ever been in?" she asked Jim.

  "Actually no. You'd think I would have, but I haven't. I've always seen it, but I've been busy with the show."

  "You go to church anywhere?" she asked.

  "Every day," he answered. "Mine is the church of life. I worship, as it were, every time I breathe, every time I see, every time I love someone. I'm in church right now."

  She enjoyed hearing this from him, and it seemed fitting by the chapel.

  "I'm struck, existentially, with the beauty of life," he said. "I'm amazed we're here, that our atoms have collected from stardust into this thing we call life, that we can appreciate everything we have, and that we are aware of it."

  Lourdes could hear the church in him.

  "You sound like you've said all that before."

  He grinned. "I have. Lots of times. I think I'm filled with it. Always have been. And I share it with others."

  "What religion are you, if any?"

  "Ah, I'm Christian, but not in a classic sense. My view is more like- Have you seen 'The Man from Earth' starring David Lee Smith?"

  "No."

  "It's of a play. Beautifully done. A fourteen thousand year old Cro-Magnon-or Early Modern Human-lives and learns, knows Buddha, and in doing some teaching in Canaan, he is defined as one of the messianics predicted in the area, and he becomes the story of Jesus."

  Lourdes looks at him funny.

  "No, I don't mean that I believe in fourteen thousand year-old Cro-Magnons. What's beautiful in the story, though, is the idea that Jesus was a man, a person, who taught a philosophy of love and inclusion-and that likely his story and message was built up after him. Stories grow. And then, later, it became what we know of as Christianity. But underneath it, is the message of a person who talked about acceptance of others, of peace, of loving each other, and appreciating this miracle which is life. To me, that is my Christianity."

  "With a little Buddhism thrown into the mix?" she asked.

  "I think a lot of religions are similar, if you look deeply enough. Do you go to a church?"

  "I recognize them two out of three times," she said.

  He looked at her.

  "I don't like them when they put people down-me or anyone else."

  "Me, neither," he said.

  "Do you believe in predestination?" she asked.

  "Um," he put his hand on his chin for a minute. "I think the ideas of determinism or randomness are man-made simplicities, that probably don't describe most of the universe. I think there are so many things about the universe we don't understand, that we can't guess, yet, what's really going on."

  "So how is it best to see the future?" she asked.

  "An old friend of mine, Joe, used to tell me to have faith in the Big Picture. And know what you need to get there."

  "Used to?" she asked.

  "He's passed on, now," he said sadly.

  "What big picture?" she asked.

  "Not sure."

  "Then how do you know what you need to get there?"

  "Um- I feel there is a Big Picture, but I can't know what it really is, yet, as a human. But I feel I'm part of what's going on, so I think, with some effort, I can work with it."

  They continued walking past Fergus Chapel on to Pioneer Field, which was immediately to the west of it. The Museum, to come later, was to the south of Pioneer Field, along Waukau Ave.

  The lawns and the grass strip through the area were lush, the trees in the area were plush, the scent of life was rich in the air.

  "You think God does things to us, good and bad?" Lourdes asked. "That he's responsible for the state we find ourselves in, sometimes?"

  "Actually no. I don't think God micromanages our lives. I think life is what it is, and that we can learn to work within it."

  "So you think there is a God?"

  "Well, I think the view I shared is mixed with the idea that there is a God, but I don't think God is anything we can directly understand. You remember 'Avatar'? How Sigourney Weaver was telling us about the synaptic connections in Pandora? How it's all interconnected and conscious?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, we have consciousness." He motioned the both of them.

  "I do, anyway," Lourdes teased.

  He smiled.

  "We do. And what is that? It seems to me it may be a complex of synapses-some of which do tasks in our body but others of which seem to monitor those other synapses that do things, such that we are literally aware of ourselves. Well, Sigourney Weaver was talking about that with Pandora, an example of how a planet can also be alive. I like the idea. And then there's Dark Energy."

  "I know what that is."

  "Right," he said. "It's an example of how galaxies all across the universe are connected. We didn't know that existed several years ago. We don't know what it is, let alone what all it does. And I'm sure there are other ways we haven't begun to imagine yet. Think what we may understand in a million years."

  "Okay."

  "So what if the universe is interconnected in some way, in ways we can't begin to guess?"

  "The universe may actually be alive and awake," Lourdes said, "aware of itself, in ways we don't know, but that we are still a part of."

  "Yeah. I don't know if it is," he said. "And for all I know, the feeling of 'God' is just an active circuit in our brains right over here," he pointed to an area above his right ear, "like I saw in Discovery Channel documentary. But I think there is likely much more going on that we're aware of and that it might be aware. To me, that could be God: an intelligence behind a universe. Flaky?" he asked Lourdes.

  "No. I don't think so. I actually think there may be something to it. It's a whole lot more reasonable to me than the old man on the throne thing, or the dictates of one person or group on what is morality."

  "Me, too."

  They approached the large hangars of Pioneer Field, filled with antique airplanes being restored, or even being built for the first time.

  "What about life after death?" she asked.

  "I don't know there, either. But I do think there's more going on than we see directly-goodness, we can't even perceive most of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it's real. There could be an energy that coalesces in life, started by the organ
ization of the body, that continues after the body ceases to function-a way of bringing other energies in the cosmos, such as food and minerals, together into a new formation which could be a soul or spirit, or a continuing-something that contributes to the cosmos at length. I am excited to be alive, Lourdes! This miracle of life! And we're part of it. We get to fly and love! And grow corn!"

  His smile was infectious.

  CHAPTER 10

  Pioneer Field was another example of heaven on earth. Antique airplanes were being restored. There were old-style hangars, a beautiful grass strip angling mostly east and west between the hangars and the Museum. Lourdes could just about see Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart working on planes there.

  And the Museum was as professional as any in aviation she'd seen.

  They shared together through the afternoon in the museum's air conditioned peace, watching short films presenting planes or designers, a mock-up of the Wright Brothers' plane; a mock-up of SpaceShipOne, the space craft that completed the world's first manned private spaceflight, in 2004; the world's smallest plane; antiques with large radial engines on them; and warbirds.

  After scouring the museum, the two were walking back toward the flight line, when Lourdes began to feel the need for some of her own time again.

  "It's nothing special," she told Jim. "I have been having a wonderful time. I just haven't been in a good space for a while. And I'd kind of like to sit and rest."

  "Ok," he said. "Lets find a bench-"

  "I mean alone," she said.

  Jim hung his head.

  "I'll look you up later, okay? I just need some time."

  "You promise?" he asked.

  "Okay," she said, smiling at him.

  Jim beamed.

  Lourdes wondered alone with her life's thoughts through myriad vendor tents being set up, John Deere "Gators" driving past, and cars, motorcycles, and people moving about, working and watching. Eventually, she wound up back at the Brown Arch by the flight line, surrounded by aircraft, reading people's joyous or sentimental thoughts, placed permanently on tile.

  She sat down, cross-legged, rubbing her hand over the tiles, needing to feel closer to them.

  One tile made reference to someone's first solo, and she thought back to her first solo at El Monte, California. She remembered she used to think a cross-country flight was so complicated-but now, it was primarily what she did. Instead of a labor, it was a labor of love. Nothing could be as beautiful.