by Amy Seek
That time I smiled. He was still afraid of spoiling me. But even as he lay there, legs like solid rocks, I couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t need that van anymore, that he wouldn’t be pulling up in the driveway again with a box turtle in the back.
* * *
It was only after speaking to the ICU nurses, later, that I found out the real nature of August 2013’s particular significance for my father; they’d given him that long to live, and he wanted to see me on my way to having everything I wanted before he went away.
He was eventually moved out of the ICU into a rehabilitation facility. With his unparalyzed parts, he continued to study and work and learn. He occupied himself with engineering jobs and with questions that filled his clipboards. One afternoon, an architect called demanding drawings, and I impatiently informed him of my dad’s condition. I found out later that Dad had called back, apologized for me, and resumed work. He drew on a large clipboard and had his loyal draftsman, Wayne, come by the rehab facility in the afternoons to pick up redlines.
Another day I saw his clipboard, full of calculations of a different nature. They weren’t associated with a drawing, just endless math and a couple of angles. I asked him what he’d been working on. He said he was trying to figure out the exact degree of daily change in the sun’s location.
“I’d tried to figure it out about fifty years ago,” he whispered. “I spent twenty, thirty hours on it. I figured it out last year, but last night I realized I forgot it again. So I redid the calculations. It’s a sine curve, roughly.”
In the afternoon, when he had put in a full day’s work, the nurses would sling him up in the Hoyer lift and lower him into a wheelchair, and I’d roll him, cringing at every bump in the floor surface, outside to the front porch. Mom would bring dinner she’d made, and we’d all look out over the valley at the sunset, and then the moonrise. One of those sunsets, he said to her, “Days like this, you just don’t want to end—d-do you?”
He would tell me that he loved me, and, forcing one word to follow the other, the day he died, I would say the same to my son. I’d read through letters my father had written to his mother and discover that he had really wanted to be able to buy me a grand piano. Also among those letters Grandma saved, I’d find one written in an unfamiliar hand, thanking her for the photographs and gifts, for trips to the supermarket, and most of all for letting her see her son, Johnny, over the years, and I’d realize that Grandma knew more about open adoption than she’d let on. At my father’s funeral, my grandmother’s sister would tell me that we’d get my son back, and she wouldn’t explain, but I knew it was connected to the other thing she said, that I am one of the lucky ones in the world because I know what it feels like to be loved. I would commit myself to making sure my son felt the same. Little gifts. Visit more. I wasn’t sure. All of those were moments I’d contemplate for a long time after.
* * *
But that winter, I was just basking in that moment when Jonathan kept me from freezing to death. We all walked home, and on the way he asked me if I remembered when he was five and he sat in my father’s glider but was too afraid to fly. Of course I remembered! I couldn’t believe he remembered! He said that people perceived him as less brave, or overly cautious, because he was nothing like his brother, but he said he was just strategic about the risks he takes. All of it was amazing, that he could see himself, that he understood something about how others saw him, and that he knew his own perception was an inflection of theirs, not the opposite.
“Do you think you’ll be ready to fly someday soon?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, with certainty. But at that time I only hoped he would get to see my father again before he died.
THIRTY-EIGHT
You slip off the canopy cover and roll the glider out by its wings. Push it out from the hangar, silently, like a horse from its stable. Men sitting under the trees will be talking about the things they wait all week or all month to talk about, standing by patiently for their turn, looking for a reason to get up and help. Some are tow pilots, on call when you have the glider ready. Some of them are kids as young as fourteen, who somehow found this world and got licensed to solo. All of them tuned to the invisible language of the sky, watching the day unfold in wind socks and clouds.
Facilities are nothing fancy here. The runway is a field of grass, bordered on the south by marsh, on the north by Craig’s Creek, and on the east and west by the mountains. There are some stables, two small hangars, a few houses, the clubhouse—but no air control tower. Some days the guys sit at the north end of the field under the trees. Some days they sit at the south end, where there’s a tiny storage shed with plastic chairs and a radio.
If you don’t already know the area, you assess things for miles around beforehand. You look for the flat fields that might make for soft landings, in case you lose altitude too fast and can’t get back to the runway. I remember, as a child, walking across the fields scouting out landing sites as my dad explained that every landing in a sailplane is a kind of crash landing. I guess he meant because you don’t have all the controls of a motorized plane. But at the time I understood that they had perfected taking off in gliders, but they hadn’t yet figured out how to get back down.
This weekend my son will be flying. He says the only thing he’s afraid of is water, and not for the same reasons I am. Of the little bit of online television he’s allowed to watch, nature shows are his favorite; what he’s afraid of are river monsters and sharks. Flying he can handle.
When we get out onto the airfield, we inspect the plane. My father walks around it weakly, his shoulders shrunken. The wing flaps, the various dashboard indicators, the little hook at the nose of the plane that snatches shut to grasp the towrope and opens wide to let go. I pinched my finger in the little hook once, just as my dad was pulling the trigger to test it, and I was surprised at how strong those tiny jaws turned out to be. We walk the wings, holding their edges to make sure they don’t touch the ground as the golf cart pulls the plane into position. I’ve volunteered to be his passenger for this flight. It will be the first time I’ve flown in several years. My dad checks my seat belt, which has five straps all radiating to a central buckle. He points to a zippered pouch to my right, where he says, in a whisper, there are barf bags, and I realize he is not kidding. He is speaking as a pilot to his passenger, standard protocol. In the same manner, he explains that he won’t be talking much during takeoff because he’ll be concentrating, but after that we are free to talk. He has never been so forthright about his silence.
He settles in and begins to murmur to himself. Altimeter adjusted, dive brakes closed and locked, belts tight, canopy locked, tail dolly off, controls free and clear … The towplane pulls up ahead, dragging the towrope. The glass bubble of the canopy is a tiny, boiling, intimate space: we open the side windows to let in some air. Standing tall above us beside the plane, my brother holds the last five feet of the towrope taut between his hands, like a magician proving it is just a rope, nothing funny about it. He holds it there for my dad’s inspection, and this feels more like ceremony than safety check. Through the glass my dad can’t possibly detect flaws. He looks at it like a wine label displayed gratuitously and nods his head. I’m surprised this passes for an inspection. The towrope is everything. But then, everything is everything.
Squatting at the nose with his palm in the air, my brother uses his other hand to loop the towrope into the hook of the plane, which my dad holds open. When he makes a fist, my dad closes it. Now my brother is at the wing, swinging his arm to tell the tow pilot there is still slack in the rope. The towplane rolls slowly forward until my brother stops swinging his arm. My dad asks whether I’m ready, and I say yes. What choice do I have? My dad gives the left hand thumbs-up, and my brother starts to swing his arm in a full circle, telling the tow pilot we’re ready to go.
What is most amazing about all of it is the degree to which it is not rocket science. You check out every part of the plane because there aren
’t that many. You trust in the twenty-five pieces that comprise a plane, and beyond that, you trust the same thing the birds are born trusting. And as for me, I’m not trusting a pilot, an anonymous official with a license in magic; I’m trusting my father, who’s decided to let the cancer take over.
My brother runs the wing, keeping it from touching the grass as we are towed across the field, but as our speed picks up, he lets go, and we begin to take flight, imperceptibly, even before the towplane has lifted off. For much longer than any commercial plane, we are traveling at the height of what feels no more than your bedroom window. We are still sheltered by the high mountain horizon as we speed forward, our shadow born and racing like a good dog just below us. We ascend so gradually that I have to decide for myself when my fear of heights can relax into disbelief. There is no clear threshold between human heights and heights we can’t fathom. Human heights and heavens. Soon we are flying together, towplane and glider, like a big brother pulling his little sister along by the arm, flapping and flying behind.
My dad reads his dials, reads the landscape, looks for other aircraft. Wind is blowing noisily into our little windows so I can’t hear him, loud as he tries to whisper. I try to think about anything except the barf bags in the zippered pouch beside me. The towplane ahead of us is sometimes above, sometimes below us, looking like a remote control plane as it bounces in the sky. We rise and fall like a roller coaster, and sometimes I cling helplessly to the sides of the sailplane, searching the sky for signs of an invisible track to tell me where we’re going, signs we’re moving out of turbulence into smooth sailing. My dad is looking hard for the opposite; turbulence means heat, which is how we get higher. Without telling me, he releases the towrope and the towplane falls away and off to the side, and we speed up over him. My dad gives a wave to thank him for the lift.
And now my dad is doing what he loves most. Now we are a bird. This is what it is all about. All the planning trips up to New Castle, making free weekends, driving here, packing food, the hours preparing the plane, sleeping in the modest quarters of the clubhouse. Flight is a long descent, postponed by invisible lift. We are here to find thermals, and the proof of our detective skills will be our altitude and how long we can float.
Thermals are invisible tornadoes made of upward-moving heat. The world above the ground is like a leaning forest of them, sometimes dense and sometimes loosely scattered. A forest of mobile trees that grow and dissipate as the sun heats the surface of the world unevenly and sends hot air rising in these tunnels. They’re invisible except to the birds, so the easiest way to find them is by keeping your eyes out for spread wings. Other evidence is in the subtle circular movements of grass and leaves. You are always descending until you find one and, like an elevator, it reverses the forces of gravity and sends you upward.
Ridge lift is another way to gain elevation, a consequence of the world’s wrinkles. Air moves in layers across the surface of the earth, and when it hits a mountain, all the layers bounce; a ghost reverberation of the mountain is made in the sky, two thousand feet above, ready to be climbed. My dad has flown in this valley since 1965, so he knows the precise shape of these echo landscapes. We surf along the ghost–Blue Ridge as though it were a long wave.
My dad enjoys nothing more than taking people up in gliders, but I know that he’s in his own world inside the canopy. He is never more present, but he is inaccessible to me. I can see only the back of his head, the canvas bucket hat that every single glider pilot wears to protect his head from the hot sun, and a little of his profile when he turns. My dad facing the universe. The globe of glass containing us giving us a powerful panorama of the valley. I am riding on his back, having the clearest picture I will ever have of what the world looks like to him and what he makes of it.
* * *
When I was ten I bought my dad a sweatshirt and I used fabric pens to make a giant heart and across the heart I wrote: I’m loved. I guess I was afraid to have it read I love you, because that would be too much like just saying it, which I couldn’t do. The closest he ever got to acknowledging the sentiment was when he told me a client had popped into his office on a Saturday and caught him wearing it, and he was embarrassed. So I know he must have noticed what it said. Last time I saw it, he’d shrunk from the cancer, and the sweatshirt, which had for twenty years been tight around the ball of his belly, was several sizes too large. During that first bout of cancer, my heart racing as I was rubbing his shoulders, I decided to be an adult and I managed to say the words, in a whisper weaker than his own, and I don’t think he heard me.
He sees a bird, the kind whose flying mechanism is the same as a sailplane’s, one that soars instead of flaps its wings. One that lazily falls up in the air. He watches closely as the bird shows him the invisible shape of the sky. We follow and pick up altitude.
He dips the wing low and we lean against one side of the plane. I can make out the leaves of the trees on the mountains as we near them. One of the many lies I tell myself: the trees are soft. We are making a sharp turn in the sky, skidding slowly across clouds, with losses of speed and altitude my dad has already accounted for. The runway is not large. I want him to think I am enjoying this as much as he is, but I won’t relax until we’ve landed.
Coming down, the back of my dad’s head against a fast-approaching field of green. My heart races. Every landing a crash landing. We float low above the bed of trees and storm in slow motion toward the runway. The wing brakes rise and rip the air, and finally we touch down and roll heavily across the grass, popping up in the air and back down, skipping across the ground until we are riding on the landing gear. Satisfying squeaks of solid mechanics, heavy rubber rolling smoothly. I wish all of flying could be this moment of high-speed travel across a field of grass, bounding without risk, wings and wheels passing off responsibility, freedom in the redundancy, celebrating all the bumps and irregularities of solid ground. We’re like a galloping horse.
We extract ourselves as if we’re dismounting the saddle, walking funny our first few steps. A golf cart drives up to retrieve the plane, and I walk the wing back to the hangar. We hear that another pilot came down early because of a possible storm. Dad would never do that, I think. He’d fly right into it. “Perfect landing,” I hear someone say. “It’s Walter Seek,” I hear from another. We guide the glider back into the hangar, where we’ll clean the front of the wings with soapy water and stow it away until the next flight. Big Lick, this precious plane is called by the club.
On the way back to the clubhouse, a little bungalow shared by all the glider pilots, its walls covered with photos of men all the way back to the sixties, we might run alongside another glider, steadying the wings like a giant kite. Flying is a kind of team sport. It takes a lot of hands to send a glider into the air, all of them with a silent understanding I never acquired of why it is so important to get up there.
* * *
My dad had been anticipating this moment for weeks. A tiny window when he could regain some strength, between the end of chemo and the unknown. He rented a house for us and sent long e-mails to Paula and Erik, reminding them of the various offerings of the area. If they didn’t like flying, there was a creek; if they didn’t like creeks, there were swinging bridges, zip lines, golf carts, hiking trails. He wasn’t sure it was enough for them to want to do this thing simply because he wanted so much for them to do it. He sent links to websites that explained flying. None of this: renting a house, cc’ing multiple people on e-mails, finding websites and gathering their links—were things my father knew how to do, until he had this important reason to learn.
Gliders have two sets of controls, front and back, and my dad was always happy to let his passengers take the controls, always with the sneaky hope they’d get hooked. He didn’t care whether his passenger was old or young or family or not. He just wanted to pass it on. But at twelve years old, Jonathan was the perfect age to learn to fly—only two years from being able to solo. I’m afraid to know whether it was Jonat
han’s age, or whether my dad had a special affection for him because he is his first grandson, that made my father so determined to take him flying.
* * *
Paula and Erik drove eleven hours from New Haven and we met at the house Dad rented. It’s nestled in a valley, with raspberries growing in the back and rainbow trout swimming in a small system of man-made lakes in front. The mountains are beautiful. They’re like the Tennessee I remember from my childhood. The Tennessee that makes me roll my eyes when people tell me they’ve been to Tennessee, and it’s beautiful. They don’t know how beautiful it is, because it’s gone. Now there are Walmarts and Gaps and every store you could ever want to shop at. Dad helped build them; Mom boycotts them. But somehow New Castle still exists. A town of just over a hundred. A place no one has gotten around to destroying yet.
What place will my son remember as home? He won’t remember Tennessee. I rode my bike with him in my belly there, swallowing every curve of those hills, hoping he would taste it, too, but that would be as much as he would know of the place I grew up. In the end, our family was just a blip there, emerging and disappearing with me. My son has been all over; he has already moved to North Carolina, to Boston, to New Haven. But his family is from Florida and Indiana. Who will be responsible for all the places we’ve been? Who will be responsible for the mountains in Tennessee?
I find myself making plans to always love this place of my father’s. I have that impulse I had when I fell in love with Ralph Macchio, and I was helpless to do anything about it but suffer, and teach myself karate from library books, and write his name on my high-tops. I decide to admit New Castle onto my list of places to love and, by loving it, to keep it from disappearing. After my father is gone, I will love it for him.
I wonder if my dad will try to crash a plane and die here. I think he would, if it wouldn’t mean a lot of inconvenience for the people on the ground.
