by Dessa
‘Well, how come your plane is tilted?’
‘Take a look, it’s only got one wheel under its belly, so either one wing tip is gonna have to set on the ground—’”
This is my favorite part of landing out stories, where my dad, a trespasser, has to rebrand himself as traveling circus act.
“‘—Hey, would you like to sit in my glider? Do you have any kids or grandkids?’
‘Well, yeah—’
‘Go get ’em. I got a camera here and we’ll take a photo of each one of ’em—you and your wife, all the grandkids, kids.’”
Within twenty minutes, the entire household is swept up in the grand diversion. My dad’s ground crew, meanwhile, shows up to begin disassembling the glider and loading it piece by piece into the trailer.
Before leaving, my dad would pull aside the farmer: “If there’s damage I’ve done I’m more than happy to pay for it.”
By his report, the farmer’s response was usually some variation of, “Damage?! We had a great time! Aah, that’ll grow back—come again!”
* * *
—
I’ve never been one to hang family photographs, but I considered buying a set of paper plans for the Woodstock to put up in my apartment. That set of blueprints would better represent my father than a framed portrait anyway: his face is just an inherited set of features—I don’t imagine he feels too attached to it—whereas he chose the Woodstock. Plus, I’ve always liked the look of schematics: the fine lines, the tiny text, the aura of expertise. I imagined my dad visiting sometime, surprised to see his plane beside my books and storyboards. He’d like that, I thought. One night, after some digging online, I found a single set of plans available. Half a bottle of wine later, though, I hadn’t gotten around to clicking Purchase. I’d gone down a rabbit hole, reading tips from one builder to another. I found photos of a wide-smiling engineer named Jim Maupin, the principal designer of the Woodstock. I want to talk to this man, I thought. I wondered if he’d ever seen my dad’s plane—maybe he’d say it was the finest one he’d ever encountered. I poured more wine and started searching for contact information, toggling through several windows at a time. Maybe it could be some sort of gift to my dad, to connect him with Jim directly. On an ancient website, just red text on a black background, I found an email address. But before I could finish composing a letter, I read a post on a message board relaying the fact that Jim “was no longer with us, regrettably.” I leaned back in my chair, reading. The post paid tribute to the excellence of the Woodstock’s design: “The first time I stalled my n20609, on her maiden flight, I broke out loud laughing. Perfect stall behavior; as mannerly as it is possible to be.” Mannerly. I scrolled down. The note had been posted nine years ago. By my father.
A few tours ago, worried about the sound exposure onstage, I went to see an audiologist. He outfitted me with a big pair of headphones, ran some tones, and assured me my ears were still pretty good. In fact part of the reason I found the stage so uncomfortably loud was probably because my ears were still good. (As musicians lose our hearing, we turn up the volume onstage—a stupid, upward spiral.) European festivals are often carefully monitored for volume, but the kind of concerts Doomtree plays on tour can peak at about 140 decibels. Noise-induced hearing loss starts at about 85. Looking at my scores on the doctor’s worksheet, I was enormously relieved.
Not all animals are as vulnerable to noise-induced hearing loss as rappers are. You might think that the birds nesting near an airport, for example, would all be half-deaf. But the little stereocilia in birds’ inner ears can grow back if they’re damaged. For humans it’s all one-way: when it’s gone, it’s gone.
* * *
—
After the divorce, my dad rented a one-bedroom apartment a few miles from our old house. Maxie and I slept in a bunk bed next to the washing machine in the basement. Flying gliders, my dad earned enough money to help send me to college.
Recently, my father let me read some of his old building notes from the Woodstock days:
Today I will make the aileron spars. I will mill the wood to correct dimension for the left aileron spar and the right aileron spar, and then mill in the correct taper for each spar. Then I will mark the hinge spots and glue on the reinforcing ply doublers and clamp them, then I will make coffee, really strong really black coffee, and then I will drink it.
Cellulose (the strength component of wood) is a sugar, according to my excellent, longtime friend, fellow soaring pilot, and microbiologist Ron McLaughlin. I built an aircraft out of sugar!
He noted that some of the wood he’d used showed 145 growth rings at a depth of 5 inches. That, he wrote, is Nature’s pace of construction.
Sitting with Leslie at the dining room table, my father and I talked about the arc of his career. His wife, Leslie, is an energetic, successful, semiretired food scientist. They live comfortably in the suburbs—which made my father uneasy for the first few years. He missed the thrill of the hunt at the Goodwill, the dollar-store victories, soldering his own broken things. He’d been proud to make his living the way he did—pulling it almost literally from thin air—and proud to have found a way to live well on modest means. “To be airborne in a motorless aircraft, quite silent, riding air currents that nobody can see; to be able to look up to see sun and moon, to see other birds doing what they’re doing . . . to see a storm front coming . . . to see all these things, to me, has been to be able to sort of live like a king.”
At the first opening, I interjected, “When you talk about butterflies, you say, ‘I see a butterfly.’ But when you talk about birds you say, ‘I see another bird.’ Which, like, implies that you’re a bird.”
His voice caught—he was moved that such a comparison should be considered. “To me they are the apex of evolution. It’s beyond comprehension that such a finely tuned living creature could have resulted from these conditions that we have on earth.”
I’ll admit that I don’t understand the airborne world the way that my father does, but apex of evolution? It seemed like humans might put up a fight for that title. I wondered if his assessment fully considered stuff like satellite communications, strike-anywhere matches, Babylon.
My dad doesn’t speak as reverently about anything as he does about birds. But he doesn’t go in for a Disneyfied depiction of the natural world either. “I read somewhere, ‘Nature is beautiful, but it’s under no obligation to be merciful.’ When you see a hawk come in and attack the nest of a goldfinch and eat the eggs of the goldfinch and you see the male goldfinch bravely fight the hawk off and then he gets eaten next—I happen to be a goldfinch fan, I love ’em—I know the hawk has to eat. I know the goldfinch has to eat. It bothers me that the hawk has to eat my favorite bird, the goldfinch. That’s nature. Beautiful, yes? Gorgeous creatures? Absolutely. Merciful? No obligation whatsoever.”
I wished there were a way to know what these creatures thought of him. I’m not sure if birds can recognize the Woodstock among the other gliders in the sky. And even if they can, it seems unlikely they’d be able to differentiate the wooden kite from the human body inside it.
* * *
—
If my dad spots a hawk while he is driving, he’ll lean over the steering wheel, straining to see. He’ll mutter some pilot-y observations—high ceiling, winds from the north-northwest at ten to fifteen knots, alright, alright—before returning his attention to piloting the sedan.
Driving alone, I’ve caught myself doing the same: craning to see a bird overhead, squinting into the sunlight. But of course, I have no special meteorological knowledge, so my observations are just vague generalities: There it is, a brown bird, flying pretty high, but not too high, looks pretty safe.
Recently, over a round of after-dinner drinks in his living rom, my dad told me, “I made a little compact with myself when I first started to learn to fly in the mid-1970s. I’m going to get a parachute and at the end o
f my flying career—and the day is now approaching—I’m going to hang that parachute up over the fireplace never having had to use it . . . never having injured anybody, including myself.” That sounded like classic Bob Wander to me. The most noteworthy part of the remark was that my dad expected he might one day have a fireplace. But I don’t like the idea of my dad staying out of the sky; my whole life he’s been part bird.
* * *
—
It occurs to me that when my father stops flying, when he’s fully earthbound, the soaring birds will make me sad. But I expect I’ll still fold myself in half to watch them circling above me, peering through that little band of blue at the top of the windshield—a little strip of sky held captive in my car. Even if I barely know what I am looking at, let alone what I am looking for, I’ll watch them until they’re too far away or I’ve drifted onto the rumble strip.
And even if I’m driving with the windows up, I’ve got this soft, persistent rush ringing in both ears. Pop, if you gave me that test again, I don’t think I’d ever put my hand down now. I always hear you.
The Mirror Test
—
I recently bought a very fancy tube of lipstick that has to be applied with a small brush and then allowed to set. After that, you can kiss a thousand sailors and drink from all their coffee cups and it will still stay on. It’s a matte crimson—pinup stuff that requires a surgeon’s hand, no margin of error at all.
I know that one corner of my mouth is a little higher than the other, but I can never remember which side tilts up and which tilts down—I’m too accustomed to my image in the mirror. It takes one of those three-paneled mirrors, the kind you can angle to flip your reflection, for me to perceive the asymmetry. Then it goes off like a car alarm. Looking at the woman, it’s impossible to miss the fact that the right side of her mouth slopes downward, making that whole side of her face look like the unhappier half. It’s as though she were wearing only one shoe when the feature was installed.
But with my little brush in hand, I can paint us a perfect, level mouth.
* * *
—
The mirror self-recognition test is supposed to determine whether or not an animal is self-aware. The protocol is simple. First, a researcher puts a mirror in the animal’s environment and gives him a minute to check himself out. Then the researcher takes away the mirror. Next, the animal is marked with a bit of odorless paint, often bright red. (The animal can’t know about the paint, so the researcher has to be real sneaky—or real tranquilizey—about the application.) Finally, the marked animal is set in front of the mirror again. And all the observing scientists lean in, pens hovering over their clipboards. Animals that fixate on the mark and try to remove it are deemed self-aware. Those that aren’t interested in it are not. Very few organisms pass this test, and you could probably guess which ones—chimps and dolphins and a few other members of the vertebrate in-crowd.
The mirror test sounds lousy to me. The visual nature of the thing seems to stack the deck in favor of some animals and against others. If bloodhounds had been in charge of the experimental design team, I imagine the test might involve a scented hydrant rather than a daub of paint. And what would it feel like to be fully conscious, but not self-aware? Are we sure that’s even possible?
* * *
—
When she first brought me home from the hospital, my mom said she just stared into my face all the time, blissed-out. She couldn’t find the line between us—couldn’t figure out where her self stopped and my self started.
At two and a half, I understood my mother’s given name to be Mom. In my first memories of her, she looks a lot like I do now—like I’m a Polaroid that took thirty years of shaking to develop. She typed very fast, did a bedtime hand-puppet routine that enthralled and terrified me, and had a wide smile that reinforced her resemblance to Whitney Houston, who she could match note for note. When I first heard someone at a dinner party call out for a Sylvia, I presumed we’d tell this person to keep looking, wish him luck, maybe send him off with a sandwich cut up into little pieces. When my mom responded to that name, natural as could be, I began to suspect the truth—this woman had a secret, double life. We’ve known each other for almost three years and you don’t even tell me YOUR NAME? You know MY name. How long does it take to get a proper introduction? She had a whole other self and the nature of the relationship between Mom and Sylvia was unclear. There were, at least, three of us in the room.
* * *
—
Some elephants can’t pass the mirror test, which surprised researchers who knew them to be otherwise smart and social. Eventually some scientists asked, Well, what if they see the red dot, but just don’t care about removing it? Or what if they see it, but don’t know that it hasn’t always been there? After all, elephant culture doesn’t usually involve mirrors; primates are the relentless groomers and self-admirers. There must be more than one way to fail the mirror test: Narcissus didn’t fare too well either.
* * *
—
In high school, I read about a tribe of people that slept on the skulls of their ancestors to induce lucid dreams. I was fascinated by this idea; I found a list of techniques that could be practiced during the day to increase the likelihood of lucid experiences at night. I read that hands often look funny in dreams, so I checked my own regularly. I habitually asked myself, Could I be asleep now? Eventually the techniques worked—I caught myself in a dream and set about trying to manipulate my environment. I never managed to create a total virtual reality—for me, learning how to drive a dream was like learning how to drive a clutch: the experience sometimes bucked and surged away. But it was a thrill for a teenager who was eager for more control than anyone was willing to cede to her in waking hours.
My most successful dream was set on a sandy island, with dozens of people preparing for a big storm. We were building shelters and gathering food, urgency in the air. Then, as I’d been training to, I realized I was dreaming. And the sight of all those people working together—their fear, their hope and purpose—became very sad. I called for attention. You’re not real, I said. This is my dream and you’re just figments in it. One guy asked me to stay asleep as long as I could. I said I’d try. The mood changed from a Habitat for Humanity build to hurricane party; everyone was reckless and sentimental, saying their goodbyes. When my alarm woke me, I felt vacant. Those people, who’d felt like friends, were all gone. And I missed them. But those people were just me, right?
* * *
—
Years ago, I met a fair-skinned, dark-haired woman who’d recently kicked a meth habit. After she got clean, in the course of a casual conversation someone asked what her favorite color was. She realized she didn’t know—the drug had just erased big parts of the person she used to be. So she found some swatches and splayed them out in front of her. And, at twentysomething, she set about choosing her favorite color.
It sounded so strange, like she was a house that had not quite burnt down—whose walls had vaporized, but the paint was left still standing. She was a half self, rebuilding from within: the M. C. Escher hand that draws the other.
* * *
—
The European fire ant can pass the mirror test. Nobody has the slightest idea what to make of that.
* * *
—
In my thirties now, I earn my living as a songwriter and a performer. Usually my job involves singing about intimate, personal feelings—lots of stylized self-expression. However, there are some performance environments in which the objective is to blend voices completely, so that no single singer can be perceived in a unified, choral sound. When I’m working up a vocal treatment with my longtime friend and collaborator Aby Wolf, we synchronize our breathing and worry over every vowel. (Are you doing that last syllable as eh? Or more of an uh?) Aby is tall and dark-haired like me and when we stand beside each other in rehearsal, our
hands lift and dive like sparrows, an improvised notation to express when each note will dip or bend or crescendo. We synchronize our consonants so that the k’s all leave the gate at once, like a perfect horse race, and the p’s all land together in one little puff, like gymnasts on a mat. I might have spent more time looking into Aby’s eyes than anyone else’s—while our mouths are busy with lyrics, I watch for a lift of her eyebrows; a friendly blink to reassure me I’m on pitch; or for the hint of strain that means one of us is running out of air. And when we have polished our parts and we are singing them with others in tight harmonies, our voices dissolve into the larger sound. To perceive a single singer—a single self—would only be a distraction, like the black-clad puppeteers just beneath the real show.
* * *
—
After a trip to India in my twenties, I stopped wearing makeup, kept my hair short, and wore plain, shapeless clothes. My mom asked me about it (or maybe I just started sermonizing, unprovoked) during a visit to her mother’s house. I explained, “The way I look has nothing to do with my character. I just don’t want to get too attached to things that are fleeting. Any beauty I’ve got is leaving anyway.” I went on. She listened. I went on. Finally, she said, “You have a beautiful voice. You didn’t earn that. And you don’t get to keep it either. So, what? You shouldn’t sing?”
You are beautiful for a while. Then you’re not. You can sing. Then you can’t.
But I didn’t want to conceptualize myself as a quicksand pit of changing variables. I wanted something permanent, stolid—a cinder block of a self. Would I be the same me if I couldn’t sing? Yes, I think so. But what if I forgot how to read, forgot my name, forgot that I like whiskey, forgot that red is my favorite color? What am I subtracting from? Is there some part that can’t be ruined by violence, or time, or fatigue? Is there an apple core at the center that stays fixed?
