Love Story: In The Cloud

by Ken Renshaw

  The bright sun coming through the bedroom window woke me. I quietly slipped out of bed and got dressed. I walked out to survey the sky and I felt the warmth of the sun on my face. Not a hint of wind. I went inside and found there was an email from my friend, the weather person, at LAX: she said there would be strong soaring conditions for the morning with a twenty-five-knot northwesterly wind developing in the late afternoon.

  "Sounds good," I thought. 'It looks like flying north up the Sierras will be good for an out-and-return goal flight.'

  The Fédération Aéronautique Internatinale or FAI has awards for soaring achievement. There are silver, gold, and three diamond awards. My goal has been to make a single flight in which I achieve the silver, gold, and all three diamond awards. To do that I will have to fly out to and return from a stated goal two hundred and fifty kilometers (155 miles) away, gain five thousand meters (16,368 feet), and be in the air for five hours. This might be the day.

  Somehow being awarded a small gold pin with three diamonds to wear on my soaring cap seemed rather unimportant now. I wanted to make the flight for fun.

  I said to myself. That's how I will do it: forget all the hard planning, the calculations, and the logic. I'll use my intuition and simply flow with it.

  Tina and I hurried through breakfast and got an early start so we would "put together" before it got hot. Tina insisted on joining me for assembly, saying, "I am now going to make sure the wings are bolted on and you don't take off without your little bottle of water and lunch."

  The sailplane trailer is almost twice as long as most cars, a big cylinder about five feet high, which opens like a giant clamshell. Inside, the wings are stored alongside the fuselage. Everything is mounted on dollies and is easily rolled around and assembled.

  Dan stopped by and showed me where Mr. S. had put his surprise package. No sign of anything unusual now.

  I told him my soaring goal for the day and he, acting as an official observer, loaded the information into the flight-recording computer in the sailplane. Upon my return, he would read the computer and officially verify that I had made the flight I planned.

  He walked away and returned with a pickup with a tank in the back. I took the hose from the tank and began pouring clear liquid into openings in the top of the wings.

  Tina asked, "What are you doing now. You don't have an engine, so why do you need to add fuel?"

  "I am filling these long bladders in the wings with water to make the plane fly faster in strong conditions. I'll drain them out later in the day if the weather weakens."

  I was ready to fly. We sat under the shade of the wing and waited, holding hands, feeling the love flow between us, and having quiet time. It was midweek and no other pilots were here this early.

  At 10:15, I noticed a small wisp of a cloud over the Devil's Punchbowl.

  "Look up there, above the Devil's Punchbowl. That wisp of cloud indicates that there is a thermal there. It will be time to start soon. Let's push the plane out and get ready to launch."

  When Dan saw me moving onto the launch area he started the Pawnee, taxied to the launch area, stopped a couple of hundred feet in front of me, and turned off the engine. He unrolled the tow cable and handed me the end that I attached to the bow of my sailplane. "It looks as though you can get an early start. Let's wait about ten more minutes."

  I put on my parachute and climbed into the sailplane. Surprisingly, I was feeling butterflies in my stomach. I was sweating in the ninety-degree heat as I stuffed my sweater behind the parachute.

  Tina was fussing with my shoulder straps and telling me where my lunch and water were. I loved it. She volunteered, "You will be home late but very happy. Can you accept that prediction?"

  "Gladly" I gave her a nervous kiss goodbye, closed the canopy and, gave 'thumbs up.' Tina held the wingtip off the ground, Dan started the Pawnee and we were soon airborne. We circled once around the field to gain altitude and then turned toward the mountains. There was no significant lift until we got over the Punchbowl. It was there, but weak. I released the tow cable, Dave dove away and I started to circle.

  Somehow, flying was different now: I was not getting uptight about getting away on my cross-country trip. I was enjoying the scenery, the joy of flying, and a quiet sense of freedom. High performance sailplanes make no noise as they fly. Anything that whistled would waste precious energy. Stealth is important when you don't have a motor

  As I looked north to the Sierras, the Mojave was what soaring pilots call a "blue hole," a large expanse of air with no clouds, no thermal activity. It was still too early to leave.

  When I reached nine thousand feet I looked at my watch and saw that it was 11:15. I was joined in the thermal by a hawk, which made one circle with me and then turned and began soaring out into the Mojave.

  I said to myself, "If the hawk says it is time to go, it is time to go," and turned my sailplane to the North, starting my journey. It is always easier to let someone else make such decisions.

  I picked my way from weak thermal to weak thermal for forty-five minutes and found myself down to fifteen hundred feet above Rosamond Dry Lake. Despair was settling in.

  I'm going to have another visit with another Mason jar down there, I thought. Then, I saw a dust devil moving toward the lake and thought, I'm saved! Over the dust devil I found a very strong, narrow thermal requiring me to execute nearly acrobatic fifteen-second turns pulling a couple of g's. At first, I barely gained any altitude, but by a half hour later, I was up to ten thousand feet. Saved!

  I had been flying for an hour and a half and only gone about thirty miles with two hundred eighty to go. Ahead, cumulus clouds were forming above hills and mountains. Things were looking better. I found a powerful thermal over a small blood-red cinder cone mountain, the home of the Silver Queen Mine.

  As I circled, I remembered the time I had been forced to land near Silver Queen and had been greeted by a miner, the kind of rusty pickup driving, shaggy bearded, grimly clothed, shotgun–carrying kind. He had that wild look in his eyes, like one of the attorneys at my firm, which comes from a life driven by selfish greed. I had to pay him fifty dollars and a six–pack of beer for "crop damage" to his dry, barren field before he would let me remove my sailplane.

  I topped-out of the thermal at fourteen thousand feet and sped north. The crisp air at high altitude made me feel good, and I was having fun. I put on my Cannula oxygen feed.

  I passed the Mojave Airport on my right. I could see the rows and rows of a graveyard for airplanes; most wearing the paint jobs of the airline they retired from. They were stored for scrap and salvaging parts. Here in the dry desert air they age slowly, like ones' discarded toys from childhood.

  To the West of me, the barren tan Mojave Desert ends at the up rise of the Tehachapi Mountains. The area was calm today, a good sign for soaring. Most of the year the Northwest wind is funneled through the Tehachapi pass to make this one of the windiest places in the state. I could see hundreds of power generating wind turbines, row after row, lazily turning, waiting to do their thing.

  I was now at the southernmost end of the Sierras. The lift was getting stronger, and steadier, rising from the barren east-sloping faces of the low mountains. I didn't have to search for thermals; I could easily maintain altitude.

  To the right, in the distance I saw California City, sprawling, still waiting for the boom times of the last century to return.

  To the north of California City I saw the Honda automotive test center, dozens of laboratory buildings and the seven–and–half mile high–speed oval track where people had driven autos 24 hours a day in high speed life tests. It was now abandoned, for sale, a suitable major industry for California City.

  Now, I was flying over low mountains stippled with green trees. Ahead, I saw Owens Peak. Judging by the clouds, it would be a great source of lift today. I sped up, looked at my watch, saw it was now 1:30, and felt my stomach complain. I had been too busy to think of lunch. I ate my sandwich and enj
oyed the views, Lake Isabella to the West, nestled among low mountain ranges; and the magnificent Owens Valley to the North.

  The Sierra Mountains are a massive block that tilted up eons ago. The Sierras rise slowly, over a hundred miles or so, on the western slope, On the eastern slope they fall precipitously, going from high points at Mount Whitney (14,000 feet) and surrounding mountains, to the Lone Pine in the Owens Valley (3,700 feet) in only fifteen miles. A couple of dozen miles to the East, two ranges of high mountains arise, the Inyos and the White Mountains. Their highest peaks are only a few feet lower than Mount Whitney. Death Valley, the lowest place in the United States, is only a few more miles to the East.

  These tall granite mountains heat the air rising from the low areas and produce magnificent thermals.

  Circling at seventeen thousand feet, barely below the ragged bottom of a cloud, it was sixty degrees in the cockpit, time to put on my sweater. Soon, I was at Olancha Peak overlooking the Owens Lake bed.

  During the Gold Rush, Owens Lake was full of water. A steamboat ferried miners to the eastern shore and hoped–for riches. Now, it is dry, dust–blown. Early in the twentieth century, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) bought most of the land in the Owens Valley, drove out water hungry farmers, dammed the river, and piped the water to LA, so people could water their lawns.

  A few small towns that predate the DWP stewardship remain in the valley, mostly dependent on the tourist trade. Flying past Lone Pine, the gateway to Mount Whitney. I could see Mount Whitney below, a few miles to the West. I was tempted to fly over it and buzz the people on the summit who got there the hard way.

  I was now flying over Manzanar, a National Historic Site, where in 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ten-thousand people of Japanese descent, many of which were American-borne children of American Citizens, were interned in a concentration camp of flimsy tar paper-cover wood barracks. These people were rounded up, mainly in Los Angeles, dispossessed, and shipped to Manzanar, without any legal proceedings, simply based on their apparent ancestry. In 1945, at the end of Word War II, when the camp was closed, they were released, given bus fare back to Los Angeles, a few dollars, and no apology.

  All that remains from Manzanar today is a historical center building and a national disgrace.

  In about a half hour, about 3:00, I was approaching my turning point, the town of Independence, and the county seat of nearly nothing, about the size of Rocky Butte. The lift was weakening. I circled to gain altitude. At seventeen thousand feet I turned east for the dash across the valley to the Inyo Mountains, which spawned a street of clouds that went south toward home.

  Air that goes up must come down; the rising air over the mountains comes down in the valley. For about ten terrifying minutes my altitude dropped to within couple of thousand feet of the bottom of the valley. At the bottom of the Inyos, I found weak lift, circled slowly and tried to assuage the adrenaline flowing in my body. I looked at my watch. It was 4:00, uncomfortably late in the soaring day for someone only half the way around the course. The lift slowly increased and then got strong as I went south. Soon, I was at eighteen thousand feet again, traveling at ninety-five knots, silently scraping the bottom of the cumulus clouds.

  Pilots have to be careful not to get sucked up into the clouds. A sailplane pilot decided to explore flying into a thunderhead during a legendary flight in Germany seventy years ago. A half hour after he entered, his frozen body and the shards of his splintered wooden sailplane fell out of the bottom of the cloud. It might be a legend, but I have decided not to try it myself.

  In about a half hour, I could see that I was nearing the end of the street of clouds and the Mojave Desert ahead looked like a big blue hole with no sign of any lift. Twenty miles away, I saw a very large, isolated, cumulus cloud, perhaps topping thirty thousand feet. It was yellow in the late afternoon sun and bent over by the late afternoon wind. I flew fast over the sinking air, loosing thousands of feet of altitude, to get under the cloud, into being sucked up at nearly a thousand feet per minute.

  I did a calculation. There would be no lift between here and CrystalSky, ninety miles away. There would be a tailwind. I would need to get to twenty-five thousand feet to glide home. Cloud base was at eighteen thousand feet, and I wouldn't risk going into the cloud. Then, I remembered the thunderhead was bent over by the wind, and there would be a stream of wind flowing up the windward side. When I got to the ragged underside of the cloud, I flew to the upwind side and sure enough it was there, a river of air flowing up and over the side of the cloud. Tacking back and forth near the cloud, occasionally speeding up to keep clear I climbed steadily. At twenty-three thousand feet I was sure I could make it home. I called Joshua Control, the station that controls the airspace over Edwards Air Force Base and the test ranges, and asked for permission to overfly. It was granted. It was 5:00. All the test pilots were dead, retired, or in a bar at California City; I had the airspace to myself.

  A minute later, I heard Dan at CrystalSky call me.

  "King Romeo. Where are you, we were worried?"

  "I am eighty-five miles out. Starting my final glide."

  "Did you say eighty-five?"

  "Yes, I'll be there in about an hour. Would you call Tina for me?"

  "Wilco," He replied. I could hear cheering in the background.

  As I settled into the long, quiet glide, I reflected on the day, the excitement, and the occasional terror. I was achieving my flight goal, maybe a life goal, maybe an inter-life goal. I would get an FAI gold badge with three diamonds, an alternative to the Blue Max without having to kill anyone.

  I had traveled in space and in time, from noon to evening, from CrysalAire to Independence. I had traveled in space-time, fulfilling the goal from another space-time.

  I thought of Tina and could feel her love through space. I recalled our time at Rocky Butte and could feel her love from that space-time. I also felt that she was worried.

  I felt Tina's vibration change from worried to joy: Dan must have called her and told her that I was safe and on my way home.

  I thought of Mason and his task and dreams-come-true now remitted to me: love, marriage, and new job, fulfilling future; possibly a vine covered cottage, with a white picket fence, and a Golden Retriever.

  I glided on wings of gratitude.