Recap:
The following is the third and final part of a serialized work of creative nonfiction. As it was once a single whole, the pieces are meant to be read in order. You can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.
It was inspired, somewhat, by a piece of music by South Carolina-born singer-songwriter Edwin McCain. Again, if you're interested in hearing the music, you'll find it here.
Continued from Part 2.“Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
-- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
See Off This Mountain (pt 3)
(a memory evoked by the music and lyrics of Edwin McCain)
The next day I don’t mention this new knowledge to my parents. Instead, I drive first to the cemetery behind Bethpage Methodist Church and find my grandparents graves. A single headstone. February 24th 1960. February 24th 1983. Twenty-three years to the day. Then I recall that my father’s mother also passed away on that day and I make a mental note to take special care on that day in the future. From the gravesite I drive to the offices of the Kannapolis Daily Independent. I explain that I’m doing research on my family and ask if it’s possible to see the newspaper’s archives for February 1960. A kind clerk leads me to a microfilm machine, opens a drawer in a nearby cabinet, pulls out a yellow box and hands it to me. “Do you know how to work this thing?” I assure him that I do and he leaves me with, “Just leave the film in the box beside the machine when you finish.”
I begin two weeks prior to the 24th, stopping to peruse the headlines of the front page of each day. “Cannon Farm Road to Get New Bridge.” “Mill to Open Second Monroe Plant.” “Union Bid Fails Again.” When I come to the 25th, I am more thorough. I want to know what it would have been like to read that paper. I remember that I was a mere five months and five days old. Not until I see the story’s headline, top left corner of page A4, do I allow the truth of what Marty revealed to solidify. “Wife of Enochville Grocer Shoots Self.” The article is short, to the point. The Independent has no machine from which to print a photocopy of the microfilm. No, they are sorry, but they can’t let me take the reel to the university library in Charlotte. I copy it, by hand, to a sheet of notebook paper. I thank them for their courtesy and depart. That night, I stand in my old bedroom at my parents home. I look out the window, across Enochville Avenue to my grandfather’s house now rented to someone by my mother, up at the stars, and for the first time, I sob uncontrollably over the grandmother who knew my infant self, but deprived me of the chance to know her. My mother had been 24 years old for just one month and one day when it happened, two years younger than I am now. I try to imagine what it must have been like for her.
If I could see off this mountain
Through the clouds in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
On the night the stars fell
In 1979, during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, a friend from Colorado Springs flew home with me for the summer. As a double date, we made a day trip to the mountains with an old girlfriend of mine, home for the summer from Wake Forest, and a friend of hers. We picnicked in the front yard of Deer Haven on a blanket at the base of the stone steps. We hiked to the head of Linville Gorge and looked out over the falls. In my one photo album, assembled before I began piling photographs in shoeboxes, themselves piled on a shelf in my closet, there is a picture of Lisa, Jon, and Samantha perched on the edge of the wall overlooking the gorge. We ran back down the trail through a sudden summer downpour, Jon and I laughing, Sam and Lisa squealing because one—I can’t remember which—was sure we were about to be struck by lightning. Going home, we took the road that runs through the valley at the base of Grandfather Mountain, pulling over at one point, to park and recline on the hood of Lisa’s car to watch the hangliders soaring over the valley.
Before Scott started flying, building, and selling Pterodactyl ultralights, he used to hanglide from Grandfather Mountain. He was, therefore, a member of The Order of the Raven.
And see off this mountain
Through the tears in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
And the stars fell from the skies
I got to fly one of Scott’s Pterodactyl’s once. It was the day after I used a set of pliers and wire-cutters to remove what was left of my Tomcat from a stand of woods separating a farmer's two fields. I’d piled it in the back of my father's Chevrolet pickup at the wood’s edge and thanked the farmer once more for not calling the FAA nor the newspapers. Just the day before, I had been the lone Tomcat flying with seven Pterodactyls from Scott’s airfield, destined for the parking lot at Carolina Mall in Concord. On the way, we'd set down in that fateful field to survey it. One of the other pilots was going to lease it from the farmer to use as an airfield closer to home. The seven Pterodactyl's, built with large diameter tricycle tires, had no problem navigating the almost knee-high barley that was only thinly planted in the corner Dave planned to use as an airstrip. The Tomcat, sitting much closer to the ground on bouncy lawnmower tires, was another story. I came to a quick stop as both the guy wires for the leading canard and the main gear struts brushed through the green stalks. I began to wonder right away if I would get airborne again.
After the seven of us had looked around, seen the spot where Dave planned to erect a hanger of sorts and admired the evenness of the terrain, we decided to get back into the air while there was still enough daylight to get to the mall and back. The best course, I decided, was to let the other seven take off first and wear the barley down a little more. As the last Pterodactyl lifted off, I said just a short prayer, and pushed the throttle to the wall. I gained speed quickly enough at first, where the barley was thinnest, but it grew thicker as I went, and the barbed wire fence at the far end wasn’t all that far away anymore. I was just about to pull the throttle back and resign myself to another try when the nose lifted out of the barley and I was airborne. Airborne, but instantly in a slight left turn. The left gear had drug in the barley just long enough to create a slight yaw, enough to induce about a ten-degree left bank. Now, in an aircraft with three-axis controls (a rudder, ailerons, and an elevator), that wouldn’t have been a problem. But the Tomcat was controlled entirely by the canard mounted some six feet ahead of me at the end of a four-inch diameter main fuselage. My fiberglass bucket seat was mounted directly to that fuselage. The main wing structure and engine tower were all behind me. There were no wires or frame around me. My feet rested on an eighteen-inch-long, one-inch diameter tube riveted to the bottom of the main fuselage in front of me. Flying the Tomcat resembled nothing so much as riding a broom. Nothing but a seatbelt between the pilot and the wild blue yonder. I loved it. But, because the canard was the only moveable control surface, there was about a one-second delay between any control input and an actual turn. Tilting the canard left or right pulled the nose around and created yaw. The forward wing developed more lift and induced bank, resulting in a turn. All of this happened within a second or so, but that short delay caused new Tomcat pilots to over-control somewhat at first. I was a new Tomcat pilot, and I’d made that mistake a couple of times already, but well above the ground, where there was plenty of time to sort things out. You would be surprised just how fast your mind can work when an aircraft does something unexpected on takeoff. I weighed the risks of over-controlling near the ground, and mentally calculated the distance to the fifty or sixty-foot-tall trees along the left side of the runway, factored in the shallowness of the turn I was in, and decided that I had the climb gradient to get over them. I only lacked about three feet being right.
Golf, bowling, and flying have at least one thing in common: men tend to talk to an aircraft the same way they talk to a golf ball or bowling ball. “Climb baby, climb baby, climb!” Actually, these sports may have a second thing in common: golf balls, bowling balls, and aircraft are similarly unaffected by these pleas. The low wing clipped the treetops. I cartwheeled once across the roof of the forest before the propeller bit into the tops of the trees and the sound of the engine was replaced by the sound of tearing sailcloth, splintering wood, and bending aluminum. The thought that I might be about to die, if it came, was so fleeting that I don’t remember it. What I do remember was mentally replaying the scene from First Blood in which Sylvester Stallone’s character jumps off a cliff into the top of a pine forest, spreading his arms, and depending on the branches to break his fall. They broke that and a few ribs. Hollywood though that may have been, I remember thinking, "maybe the wings will hang in these branches enough to slow my fall or maybe stop it altogether." And I remember thinking, as I came down, hanging upside down and watching the trunk of a tree go by and by and by, that they were slowing it enough. The chest mounted parachute I was wearing, on loan from Scott, protected my chest from what broken branches might have been a threat. At the end, the engine tower, it turns out, was about two inches taller than my head. I came to rest with a jolt, hanging in the seat, upside down, with my helmet just two inches off the ground. I had a tiny scratch across one cheek. There is something to be said even for short prayers.
None of the Pterodactyl pilots even missed me until after they landed at the mall. A stranger, one of several who lived nearby and had seen the eight of us circling into the field and driven over to see the aircraft, gave me a ride back to Huntersville. That trip, I don’t remember. Physically, I had a single scratch. Emotionally, I was grappling with the fact that my venture into homebuilt aviation hadn’t fared much better than my venture into matrimony.
When the kind gentleman dropped me off, Scott was at the field, tying things down for the night. He listened while I explained what had happened, then surprised me as much as anyone ever has with what he said next. “What you need to do is come back here tomorrow afternoon, after you get the pieces out of the trees, and fly my Pterodactyl.”
"That's pretty brave," I said, "considering what I just did to my Tomcat."
He just smiled. Scott was the only person, other than me, who had ever flown my ultralight. I’d invited him do so on the very first day I’d brought it to the field on a trailer. "Anyone who could fly that thing,” he smiled, "can fly one of these with his eyes closed."
I did. It was fun, but I still preferred the openness of mine to the web of aluminum tubing that surrounded the cockpit of the Pterodactyl.
In the air I hear a fiddle
Down along Hickory Way
And the mandolin guitar
Like we used to play
About a month later, Scott was flying from our Huntersville field down to the Carowinds amusement park. His flight path took him well east of Charlotte's Douglas International Airport. But we always flew fairly high, so that the huge parachute we carried would have time to deploy in the unlikely event of a catastrophic airframe failure (they were designed to bring down both craft and pilot). At 9:00 a.m., according to FAA tapes, an Eastern Airlines 727 called Douglas tower and asked if they could see "one of those powered gliders out here on final? We just had a pretty near miss with one. I expect it shook him up a bit."
And down on Dunn's rock
Brothers boasting a dare
We tell them they're crazy
And pretend we don't care
During the Cold War, I spent eight years flying in Boeing KC-135 “Stratotankers,” four-engine jet refueling platforms from which the civilian 707 was developed. We used to practice “minimum interval takeoffs,” launching four or eight heavy aircraft from a single runway a mere twelve seconds apart, practicing for the occasionally all too real possibility that the Cold War might turn hot. We flew preset headings designed to minimize the likelihood of one heavy jet flying through the wake turbulence of those before it. Wake turbulence is the deceptively benign term for the small horizontal tornados that flow off the wingtips of a large, heavy aircraft. They tend to spread down and away from the wingtips, somewhat like the waves that follow a boat on the water. They dissipate with distance, growing in diameter and lessening in velocity until they simply exist no more. But, like young venomous snakes whose bite is reputed to be more deadly than the adults’, they are a dangerous, invisible, and deadly force in their infancy, and the heavier the aircraft and greater the loading of the wings, the stronger they are. I’ve seen a 200,000 pound aircraft roll suddenly into thirty degrees of bank or more in their grip. An ultralight, by definition, weighs less than 350 pounds, engine, frame, sails, and all. If the Eastern flight took any evasive action, pulling up, or turning, thus loading the wings even more, the vortices would have been stronger still, only ten, maybe twenty feet in diameter and rotating at over 200 miles per hour. This, they knew, when they said they had probably shaken Scott up a bit. Imagine a paper crane in a blender.
An ultralight, in 1983, was still a rare enough site that there was hardly a moment someone on the ground wasn’t watching as you flew by. The police report said that witnesses saw the big jet go right over the little glider, and then Scott's wings just "folded up like paper." They saw him deploy the parachute that he wore on his chest, but the broken, twisted wings caused the craft to spin, "like a maple seed," and the chute became tangled in what was already wreckage before it ever returned to earth. Scott, and his crippled Pterodactyl, impacted the ground at 9:01 a.m.
If I could see off this mountain
Through the clouds in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
On the night the stars fell
And see off this mountain
Through the tears in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
And the stars fell from the skies
The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that there was no connection between what the Eastern flight reported and Scott's crash. As for what the witnesses saw, they attributed it to "an illusion of parallax." As a result, I haven't put much stock in anything the NTSB reported since.
I don't think Scott felt any pain at the end, but he had way too long to think about what was coming on the way down. I was on Alert (seven consecutive days living at the end of a runway, ready to fly away in less than the time from launch warning to impact of a Soviet warhead) at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base when I got the call just before dinner. Sharon called. I don’t know how, but she did. She could barely speak. Nor could I. Nor could I leave and make the drive to Huntersville to comfort her. “Not family. Not authorized. Sorry.”
The following weekend, on "C-square" (Combat Crew Rest and Recuperation) I did go home though. And that Saturday, I coached our group of flyers on how to create a missing man formation. Standing at Sharon’s side, at the end of the field where Scott and I had both flown one another’s aircraft, I watched a set of five Pterodactyls pass over the field at 200 feet, saw the left slot pull up and out, and per Sharon's wishes, scatter Scott's ashes over the field that had utterly revolved around him.
And the mist tastes like moonshine
In the wind a carnival tune
It soars with our laughter
But we'll all leave too soon
Raven Lambert was born two months later. I last saw Sharon and her daughter in their apartment in Charlotte, some time in 1984. I took them to dinner. It will seem presumptuous to say this, but it was one of those rare times when I wished to God that I could clone myself. I've since lost track of them. That is a source of sadness now so profound that no words can describe it. I understand though, how it happened. And I know that Sharon, because she could look through me, understands as well. It was all that I could do to walk away that night. I couldn’t have done it more than once, and I had, I thought, another life yet to live, a different destiny to fulfill. What are we to make of those choices, those moments in time when two roads lie before us, equally vivid, equally appealing? One marriage of remarkable brevity, one ultralight, and one Spitfire (totaled just 13 days after the crash of the Tomcat) behind me, I chose, for once in my life, what seemed the prudent course.
So I raise a toast to family
Put thanks in my glass
In the arms of your loved ones
It's the only home that lasts
If I could see off this mountain
Through the clouds in my eyes
I would see off this mountain
On the night the stars fell
And see off this mountain
Through the years in my life
I would see off this mountain
When the stars fell from the skies
The song "See Off This Mountain" by Edwin McCain (c) 1999, is in blue throughout.
|