by Dessa
My dad cussed, sanded, drilled, and mitered for the better part of a decade. He mixed amber-colored epoxy in beakers and spilled a considerable mess of it on the sidewalk, just outside the doorway of the garage. I thought of the resultant glossy puddle as a four-season ice rink.
It was nearly impossible to make one’s self useful to him in the garage (particularly if one’s self was only four feet tall and could not be trusted with a saw, vice, or epoxy blend). So, to impress my father, I memorized what I could of his audiology lessons instead. A plastic model of the inner ear sat on our dining room table, easy to study. Blown up to the size of a honeydew, the human auditory system looks more like something you’d find at the bottom of the ocean than inside your head. It’s all cilia and tentacles and spiral bone chambers. I studied our centerpiece, learning the nautilus shape of the cochleae, the semicircular canals, and the tiny little bones that fit like clock parts, ready to recite them for my father.
His own studies were marked by exhaustion. He often fell asleep while reading after dinner; the right margins of his notebook pages were striped with arcing lines, where his writing hand had slid off the page as he nodded out. Sometimes he passed out on the living room carpet with ankles crossed and arms outstretched, like the shadow of an airliner.
I figured when he finally earned his degree and got his own office, I could work there as some sort of assistant. I was intrigued by deaf life: I loved the idea of being able to pick a sign for your own name, the idea of applauding a performance silently, with hands waving overhead. It seemed like a secret world embedded right inside the regular one—my first exposure to the idea of subculture. Years later I’d have a poster of the finger spelling alphabet on my bedroom wall and a prized hardcover called The Joy of Signing, an illustrated dictionary. Without anyone to practice with, I never really learned to read sign, but I did get halfway decent at translating pop songs on the radio—or at least I think I did and nobody was around to tell me otherwise. Interpreting for an imagined audience, I exaggerated my facial expressions and dancified the movements to convey the feeling of the music. It was like being both a figure skater and a telenovela starlet, with a reference book in her lap.
Sometimes my dad took me with him to the audiology lab. To be in a place where actual science happened felt phenomenally sophisticated. I even got to participate; during one visit, my father put me in a glass room and outfitted me with an oversized pair of headphones to serve as a research subject. The headphones made my head big and heavy, like a hatchling’s. He told me to raise my hand whenever I heard a tone. The signals got quieter and quieter. I strained to detect them, excited to have a job and eager to dazzle with my keen hearing. My dad came in, looking stern. I was raising my hand when there were no tones. I was making false positives. I had to listen more carefully and only raise my hand when I was sure. I sat, waiting for the next round, ashamed to have failed him.
After my dad earned his degree, the plan was to move out west and start a practice in Montana. While he studied, my mom did most of the breadwinning. She was a foxy New York Puerto Rican who’d come to the Midwest for the greenery and a career in broadcasting. Maxie wasn’t quite two years old. He didn’t show much interest in learning to talk, but conceded to use a few hand signs to further his own objectives. More was a house favorite. It’s made by tapping the fingertips of both hands together, like two birds kissing. The four of us lived in a two-story house in residential Minneapolis, on the corner of Forty-Fourth Street and Forty-Fourth Avenue, an address I loved. My mother’s used Camry was usually parked in front of the house because the garage was full of my father and his plane.
Two of the very last parts to be finished were the wings and the clear, curving canopy. The wing surface was to be made of fabric, wrapped taut around wooden spars, set with a heat gun, and brushed with several coats of butyrate aircraft dope. The canopy was supposed to be made of plexiglass.
Plexiglass, however, cracked easily. It resisted drilling. After destroying a hundred bucks’ worth of the stuff, and working himself into a minor fury, my father adjusted course. “I decided that I needed to become a closer student of plexiglass, that I would risk only three or five dollars at a time until such time as I understood its characteristics.” He started running some small-scale experiments in the microwave, trying to get the stuff to melt and drape over a mold as he intended. Very often the mold he used was one of my softballs. I’d be late for practice, trying to pry a plexiglass half shell off my gear before running to the park. Eventually, he abandoned the temperamental substrate altogether and bought a pane of more workable Lexan instead.
This was a particularly frustrating stage of construction for my father, during which it was best to keep a wide berth. The tare weight of a child’s fear is not calibrated to an adult scale, so it’s difficult now to know whether my response to his anger was proportionate, but I do know that I was very, very frightened by it. He shouted and swore when he was angry, went red-faced and moved with enough speed and force to flip his dark hair down over his forehead. When he came home, I sometimes zipped Maxie into a sleeping bag and tucked him into my closet for safekeeping until the coast was clear. (Years later, I discovered that a vein of the same anger ran through me; I was horrified to see Maxie looking on quietly as I nursed my hand after punching a wall.) My dad wasn’t all temper during those years, though: he was also tender, poetic, and sentimental. When the Woodstock was nearly complete, he leaned inside the fuselage and wrote my name and Maxie’s on the wing spars—where the heart would be, if a glider had one. Whatever else was volatile, his love was constant.
The day that my father opened the garage door to wheel his finished product into the alley, neighbors gathered to watch. Most had no idea what he’d been working on; the sounds of industry emanating from the Wander garage never seemed to result in any appreciable improvements to the house or yard. The door shuddered as my dad wrestled it up. He brought the plane parts out into the sunlight: the auburn wooden body, the Lexan canopy shining like wet glass, and the pair of translucent fabric wings. With the help of a friend, he attached the wings to the body and there it was: The Woodstock. The physical forces that render sailplanes aerodynamic make them dramatic to look at—long and slender. My dad surveyed his work. Varnished wood is vivified by sunlight in much the same way that human hair is: strands of red and gold flame up for a moment and then resume their positions in the wood grain or the braid. In my giddiness I wanted to crowd him, but knew enough not to trample on the ceremony. Our neighbors’ stupefied awe delighted me; to see their faces, my dad might have just walked a unicorn out of our garage.
By his count, the Woodstock took six years, eight months, fifteen days, and eight hours to complete. It cost three thousand dollars.
My father’s attention could be hard to get for the same reasons it was worth getting—while other people’s dads wore wide ties and coached soccer teams and went to work as account managers or sales representatives, my dad had turned himself into a kite. But there was only room for one in the Woodstock. And scarcity functions in human systems the way it does in all economies: it drives up value.
Over the next few years, my most familiar view of the Woodstock would be from below, sunlight glowing through the wings as it climbed out of sight. My dad said it was like flying a violin.
My parents’ marriage started to give out soon after the plane was done. Their plans to move out west were canceled, which in turn canceled my dad’s plan to start an audiology practice; the market in Minneapolis was already saturated. He didn’t even bother showing up for the final exam—if he couldn’t put it to proper use, a degree would be a waste of ink and frame and glass and paper. The details of my parents’ conflicts, failed negotiations, and their respective heartbreaks are their own: not mine to tell, even if I knew the details of the story. I’m not sure exactly what my mother made of the plane. Maybe she was impressed by my father’s skill and discipline. Maybe she was hurt b
y how much time he chose to spend alone in the garage. They weathered it out for another few years before making the final split.
No longer a prospective audiologist, my dad needed a professional Plan B. To buy himself some time, he decided to spend the summer as a glider flight instructor. He’d instructed before, but never with the idea that it might become a proper vocation. To his surprise, the phone rang off the hook—evidently a bunch of people wanted to learn to fly gliders. What he’d expected to be a three-month gig turned into a full-time career.
Maxie and I spent a lot of time at the airfield. It had grass runways and a fraying orange windsock and a vending machine in the hangar. We were usually the only kids there, and almost always I was the only female on the premises. Because gliders land silently, we had to be very, very careful. To avoid reprimand from an adult, we had to stage dramatic performances of carefulness, looking up, down, left, and right, like panic-stricken mimes—vigilant cowards tiptoeing through the grass.
The gliding community is not very big, but within it my dad became something of a celebrity. He earned a reputation as a first-rate pilot and an excellent teacher. He found thermals in novel places, riding the lift rising from mall parking lots, warmed by the asphalt and the engines of just-parked cars. Those thermals, he said, smelled like pizza. He wrote a book with a bright blue cover called Learning to Fly Gliders and sold it through the mail. The public television show Newton’s Apple featured him in an episode called “Gliders/Suction Cups/Novocain/Leeches.” On screen, as in life, he looked like a handsomer Lou Reed and talked like an American Winston Churchill. He wrote more books during the off-season, lectured on a circuit, and put on a black suit to present and receive awards.
My dad used to tell his students, “You’re not driving a bus with wings on it, you are flying like a bird, and if you cease flying like a bird, you will fall like a stone.” He and his students flew alongside birds all the time; every soaring body relied on the same sources of lift. When the glider came near large birds of prey—pelicans, eagles, or vultures—my dad told his students, “Turn off the radio and make no speech sounds.” Human noises would spook them, he said, but the aerodynamic sounds of aircraft—the wind streaming past, that wouldn’t bother them at all. Both the birds and the glider pilots, he said, were accustomed to a soft, persistent rush.
To get airborne, the gliders were towed, usually by single-engine Piper Cubs or Cessnas. Most of the tow pilots were young; they were filling their logbooks with flight hours to qualify for a job with the commercial airlines. Sometimes I’d ride along on tow. After releasing the gliders, the tow pilots flew like daredevils, eager for any action. If you held a pen in your open hand while they dove back toward the runway, it would rise up and off your palm.
During my last summers at the airfield, I’d occasionally serve as wing runner. A glider’s landing gear is a single wheel, so when it’s on the ground one wing tip rests on the grass. To keep the craft level during takeoff, someone has to sprint along holding a wing steady—much like a parent holding the back of a bike seat on the first ride without training wheels.
As a teenager on the brink of real emotional trouble, I’d sometimes swipe my dad’s flight jacket, to wear ironically over ripped tights and cutoffs. Bob Wander’s Soaring Books and Supplies | Ask me about soaring was embroidered in arcing letters on the back. More than once I was stopped by a square-looking white guy wanting to know if I really was Wander’s kid—if so, my old man was a hell of a pilot.
* * *
—
My father stands six foot even. I’m almost as tall, a writer and a touring musician now. I talk to myself, in full voice and often in third person, to execute any multistep task. Many of the factors that were stressors during my childhood are the strengths of our adult relationship. I’ve inherited his widow’s peak, his curiosity, a share of his temper, and his work ethic. I stay up late researching my writing projects; I sleep with my phone beneath my pillow; I mutter half-written lyrics standing in line at the supermarket. When I visit my father’s place looking fatigued, he doesn’t harp on “work-life balance.” If a song idea were to strike during Thanksgiving dinner, my dad would leave the table himself to make sure I had a pen and a private corner—and he’d run defense to ensure no well-intended family member interrupted with a plate of food. As adults we can share books and talk until midnight drinking iced martinis. And when he’s caught in the updraft of some new enthusiasm—epigenetics or space flight—I can jog beside him, a wing runner.
My father is very proud of Maxie and me, and tells us as much. When I’m onstage, I can almost always tell where he’s seated in the house. Even if it’s a large room and the overhead lights are blinding, I’ll hear his Brava! through the noise. For all the people hollering at a pop concert, there is only one likely to be doing so in gender-appropriate Italian.
Some dynamics, of course, do not change. My father was a fully formed person when he met me, whereas I imprinted on him. Waddling behind him, he shaped my ideas about the sort of creature I was supposed to become and I remain unduly influenced by his opinion. His thoughts about my music, for example, matter much more than would seem reasonable. I write and perform hip-hop songs; my dad is hardly a member of the target demographic. Still, when I recorded my first and second albums, I couldn’t get him out of my head.
Would he like this part?
Which part—the part you’re singing halfheartedly, distracted by this speculation?
Yes, that part.
Well, he’s certainly not going to like that particular take. Try again.
I regularly find myself engaged in imaginary conversation with my father. I might be listening to NPR, say, when an author I admire stammers during an interview. And I’ll hear my father’s voice issue his oft-repeated mandate to public figures: Speak like you write, sir! I’ll defend the author to my father: Not everybody’s a natural orator, Pop. Before I know it, we’re debating language and class while the radio blares on and I stand frozen at the kitchen sink, staring through the dishes.
* * *
—
Through my work in music, I received an invitation to visit an anechoic chamber: a room in Minneapolis that’s supposed to be one of the quietest in the world. The floor, walls, and ceiling are covered in pyramids of brown foam. The visitor stands on a pane of wires, like a chain-link fence laid on its side. It’s a small space, probably too small for a king-size bed. The entire concrete shell is mounted on a shock absorber to buffer it from any seismic rumbling. I’d read that the silence could be overwhelming; some people panicked inside the chamber, had auditory hallucinations. I was more concerned, however, with tinnitus—that I might discover a ringing in my ears that was obscured by the daily din of traffic and conversation. But I accepted the offer to spend a few minutes inside the chamber. When the door sealed shut, I sat down cross-legged on the chain-link floor. I sang a bit, but it sounded awful; with no echo at all, every vocal imperfection remained unnaturally crisp—like lunar craters with no wind to blow them smooth again. I could hear my respiration, the rush of blood, and the creaking of my joints as my heartbeat rocked me ever so slightly—the exertions of my organism keeping itself alive. There was no sustained high-frequency whine, as I’d feared, but I thought I heard a steady roar of white noise, which made me sad. That is the cost, I thought, of all these loud nights standing in front of snare drums and amplifiers. If you listen to anything long enough, you’ll hear it forever.
Over the years, I’ve heard most of my dad’s gliding stories: the orange haze on the horizon that turned out to be tens of thousands of monarchs, mid-migration; the hawk that landed on the lift strut beside his right elbow, to rest and ride awhile; the student who froze stiff, still gripping the throttle, so my dad had to deck him in the jaw to regain the controls. Once, my father made the mistake of wearing a coat with slash pockets and no zippers. “I was in a steep bank turn at about twenty-five or twenty-eight hu
ndred feet above the earth in the White Bear Lake area. I felt a slight disturbance in my right jacket pocket. And as I looked down I could see my wallet slide out, bounce off the plywood seat that I was sitting on, bounce down on top of the landing gear. I opened the door of the glider—these gliders have doors like old taxi cabs—and I looked down and I could see my blue wallet tumbling, tumbling . . . then I couldn’t see it tumbling anymore.” FAA regulations demand that the pilot in command have his or her pilot certificate on board. He’d been in compliance on takeoff, but not on touchdown: “My wallet had, essentially, bailed out of my aircraft.” Happily, a terrestrian found the wallet in a thicket, like manna, and walked it over to the airfield three days later.
Weather permitting, a glider can travel many hundreds of miles. On cross-country flights, pilots fly circles in thermals to gain altitude, then glide toward their destination awhile, then find another thermal to corkscrew back up. Sometimes, however, there is no next thermal. Sometimes the lift gives out. What happens next is called “landing out.”
As my dad explains it, “Landing out means landing in an unimproved area. And ‘unimproved area’ is a blunt euphemism for ‘not an airport.’” In the Midwest, these landings usually happen in a cultivated field, which puts the pilot in a position to introduce himself to a farmer with the news: Hello, I just fell out of the sky and I owe you some money for the rows of corn I took out on the way down.
Most of the farmers he encountered were hospitable. “Quite often, before I’ve been able to get out of the glider, the farmer pulls up on a tractor and says, ‘Are you okay?!’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Did you crash?’
‘No, actually, I landed here as a deliberate act of will—although I would have preferred to land farther along at an airport—but there was no airport within easy gliding range.’
