Sylvia's Journal

Bill and I went on our last flight yesterday. We had planned to go to Montpelier, VT, a route we had not flown before. The weather was perfect, blue skies and crisp, but a layer of clouds at about 4000 feet covered much of southeastern Canada, northern Maine and Vermont as we noticed on the radar before we left. We thought we could stay under them and make it to our destination.

When we reached the New Hampshire mountains a little north of Concord we decided to be prudent and not risk getting caught between the top of the mountains and the clouds. We diverted to Lebanon, a small towered airport that is hidden behind a hill when you fly in from the Southeast as we did. We were practically over the airport when I had to call the tower to say I couldn’t find it. Being in the mountains their radar could not pick me up and they had to visually spot me to redirect me to the right approach. Finding airports in the mountains is a little tricky and the Lebanon approach is difficult even under perfect conditions like yesterday.

The airport building is lovely; a huge fireplace is at the entrance on the tarmac side and upstairs is a large broad-beamed space that looks out over the surrounding mountains. On the walls are newspaper articles about the Learjet that vanished in the 1996 and was not found until a year after its disappearance. It had tried to come in on a rainy and foggy evening, flying IFR. I couldn’t begin to imagine landing there without seeing a thing.

Bill flew us back down the Connecticut River that winds itself this way and that between picturesque villages and gold and green hayed fields. The skies were blue again and the visibility was at least 40 miles; I sat back and enjoyed the magnificent New England landscape sliding gently by underneath us. Back at the flight center I said my goodbyes and promised to be back for a flight around Christmas time.

Back home it was time for some serious suitcase work. I closed the largest of my suitcases and discovered, not surprisingly, it was too full and too heavy. I added a suitcase and am now travelling with four pieces of baggage. During my travels I always see families from Nigeria or India or some other faraway place as they check in on this side of the Atlantic to go home with their elephantine suitcases. Now I am like that, except I am not going home but to Afghanistan. I can already hear people wondering.

Sita and Jim showed up in the afternoon, Sita returning from her adventures with the World Economic Forum (China) and the most powerful business women in the US (San Diego). It seems that these trips feed her (and Jim’s) conspirator theories about the ways of the world – but I think she is also getting to see that some of the bad stuff that happens is simply a matter of incompetence and people not paying attention.

I got to choose what to eat and chose cheese fondue, a meal that is always accompanied, both in the making and in the eating, with great memories and strict rules. It was as if my parents and siblings were leaning over my shoulder reminding me of all those rules: stir the cheese mass following the shape of the number eight, don’t eat anything else other than bread for dunking, drink white wine, and end the meal with a slice of canned pineapple soaked in Kirsch. No one ever explained the reason for these rules so I had no good answers when I was challenged by my American family. As a child I had internalized the punishment for not following the rules: a huge congealed ball of cheese would lodge inside my stomach and do terrible things. I never dared to test this assumption and thus never deviated from the rules; that is, until last night

Sita and Jim flaunted all the rules: we added new potatoes (for dunking as well), freshly dug up from the garden and Sita made tiny gourmet hamburgers, as a side dish, prepared over the fire in the new fireplace (which is now formally initiated, marked with grease spots on the bluestone hearth). For desert we had Dutch apple pie made from our neighbor’s apples, with a Julia Child apricot glaze and whipped cream. The final course was Irish coffee with a Caribbean touch, rum instead of whiskey, which we sipped watching the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with Dick Van Dyke – more old memories while new ones were created right then and there.

It was my first time flying since the Hudson River trip and my surgery. I left my sling in the car; it would take up too much room in the tiny cockpit. I took the left seat on our outbound flight with Bill making his left arm and hand available to do work that required right arm strength, such as putting in flaps. Since Bill also put in the frequencies (another right hand activity) and wrote down our journey’s progress, my only right hand/arm activity was handling the throttle which does not need much attention except to settle at cruising altitude and when coming in to land. In the left seat (when flying with Bill) the left arm is the one that works hardest.

The conditions for flying were perfect: no wind, little (air) traffic and clear skies especially over Maine. We followed the coast, cutting across islands here and there as we went further and further east. We landed at Bar Harbor airport for a brief break. Ground control asked every incoming plane how long people planned to stay and everyone said ‘till Monday’ – except us, we barely stayed half an hour and because of that were parked between two jets. For us the plane is not a method of transportation but a vehicle to enjoy the beauty of northeastern USA and a way to keep our brains finely tuned.

Bill flew back and gave me his fancy camera to click away. I must have made nearly 100 pictures. My tiny old PowerShot makes poor snapshots in comparison. Clouds had come in from the south and we flew back below them. I watched the pattern of light and dark on the ground reflect the movement of the clouds above, quite beautiful.

Instead of swimming in the full cove, Axel had decided that it was time to organize his thoughts about Afghanistan on his website. Wherever he goes people express strong opinions about what we (the US) should or should not be doing over there. So now he has added his own opinion to this cacophony. I liked his piece.

Anne and Chuck showed up later afternoon with bags of mussels. We used to be self sufficient and pick our own. I could not imagine going to a store and buying them when they were available for free in our back yard. Before our accident the cove was endowed with a enormous mussel bed; last summer we noticed it was gone. Maybe the owners of seafood-serving restaurants who would show up now and then and cart mussels away by the bucket are responsible for our empty cove; more likely it was one or more winter storms at low tide that scraped the cove clean. Sigh.

We had a mussel fest preparing each batch with a different sauce: first Isabelle’s sauce with plenty of cream, wine, shallots and mustard which, like a thick and slow stream of lava, adheres to the shells inside and out as well as the mussels. Eating mussels this way is a slow process that requires much licking and bread to soak up the good stuff.

The next batch was prepared by Anne who poured liberal amounts of honey-dijon cooking sauce over the mussels, which left a good amount of liquid at the bottom, also requiring much bread; and there was more but I can’t remember as we ate plate after plate after plate.

We concluded the evening by sitting in front of our new fireplace and hearth – we have it on every night now, to make up for the nights of the coming winter when we will be sitting in our Kabul rooms in front of smoky old diesel-fueled bukhari stoves.

I am following two people on Caringbridge, one is my dear friend Susan who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Yesterday her husband posted her final farewell message on the site, which included a recipe for a Thanksgiving turkey – so like her and so bittersweet. Only 4 months ago she was writing that she had pain in her belly and was going for tests in Boston. Life’s too short to postpone doing and saying and living what’s really important.

I am also following Nadin, a young woman in her twenties who has a rare disease and has been in and out of hospitals for years. The spirits of these two women remind me not to get too wrapped up in trivial worries and concerns and that connecting with others is the essence of the human experience.

We watched the Pixar movie ‘Up’ with Tessa and Steve the other day. It is a perfect accompaniment to the Caringbridge journals we are reading. It too speaks of connecting with others and doing the stuff that’s important because life is short and waiting gets you nowhere. My move to Afghanistan fits that prescription. We are open to what will reveal itself there, here, everywhere.

Yesterday morning Bill and I boarded his small plane for one of the few remaining outings before I leave. We headed southwest into Connecticut through a narrow corridor where the clouds were not hanging too low and the rain and wind had not yet arrived. I flew the outbound leg. Since I had not flown for several weeks I had to muster all my attention to fly the plane well and asked Bill to do the radio work and navigation. I should be able to do it all myself but flying is a skill set that deteriorates rapidly if you don’t keep it up. Bill offered to let me fly back to Beverly as well, but I was too tired and wanted to enjoy the ride back and relax.

Flying very low (between 1200 and 1700 feet) to stay under the clouds (some people call this scud-running), gives you the best view of the landscape below. We had not flown this route before, to Hartford-Brainard, a small but busy airport east of Hartford at the edge of the city. We had a hard time spotting the airfield and asked the tower to guide us in.

After landing at Beverly I made my customary call to Axel that the eagle had landed. The afternoon program was organized by our friend Anne who has a B&B in Newburyport. She took us to a mixed media show at the Firehouse Theater about urban renewal, crafted with slides of a depressed and yuppified Newburyport and stories from all walks of life telling the good, the bad and the ugly. After a light dinner at Anne’s house we drove back exhausted and I tumbled into bed at 9 PM – knitting a few more rows of a sweater while reading about Rory Stewart’s valiant struggles to create order in a chaotic Iraqi province in 2003. 

I got my first mosquito bite of the season. It produced a huge welt on my forehead, as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat. It will serve as an inoculation against the many bites that will follow.

It was a mosquito that lived at the airport of Orange, MA, where Bill and I landed in the middle of the morning. It was a glorious blue sky kind of day, without wind, perfect for parachuting which is taught and practiced there. We watched the sky divers for a while; a wonderful sight as they twirled downward with their brightly colored parachutes. A grey haired gentleman stood by the fence intently watching the plane circling upwards for another round of jumping. I asked him whether he wanted to do that himself self and he answered yes in a way that indicated this was an impossible dream. Sigh.

I never felt a great desire in my adult life to do this kind of jumping although Axel and I did jump of a mountain in the French Alps, some years ago, on the back of our instructors. But somehow that’s different from jumping out of a plane at 5000 feet.

As a child I had a poster by my bedside that was developed by the Dutch dairy industry (or may be the Dutch Ministry of Public Health) to increase milk consumption by kids. Every time I drank a glass of milk I was allowed to cross off a small white glass in rows and rows of such glasses. Around the edges of the poster were pictures of various professionals with glasses of milk in their hands. There were only very few pictures of women in the poster (the nurse, the sales girl and the teacher) but one stood out: a young woman in a skydiving outfit. She became my heroine. I wanted to be like her and I drank all my milk to make that happen. Sometime during adolescence I lost that fervor and skydiving lost its appeal.

Bill and I took off from Beverly airport under special VFR because of the wall of clouds coming our way from the ocean. Westwards all was clear and sunny but we had to get through the wispy clouds and so I got to experience flying under stricter rules. Since it was new to me Bill did all the radio work. On the way back Bill had to request IFR clearance to land at Beverly and I was happy he was the pilot. I had already decided that an instrument rating is not something I am eager to do quite yet, and yesterday’s landing confirmed that; too complicated, and too much work.

In between the departing and arriving at Beverly I did a few landings at Gardner. This remains a tense experience for me, especially when I come in too fast and too high – but with coach Bill by my side (and Arne earlier) I have been doing pretty decent landings at my former crash site.

I made my usual phone call to Axel (‘the eagle has landed’) and drove home to see him mow the grass with his new machine as if it was actually fun (and fast). And then we drove to Gloucester to pick up a present for Molly and Brandon who were re-celebrating their marriage, about a year after the original ceremony – for friends and family in their old stomping ground of Salem. We picked a book of children’s stories by Virginia Lee Burton (from Folly Cove Designers fame) not knowing that a baby is on its way. We spent the evening with them, family and friends at the magnificent Hawthorne hotel in downtown Salem to celebrate unions, friendships and new life.

Under blue skies and temperatures that had brought people outdoors everywhere, Bill and I flew north to a deserted Skyhaven airport near lake Ossipee in New Hamsphire. I landed, taxied off the runway, then back on and headed west to Concord. This airport was a little busier with lightweights, little planes like hours and even a helicopter vying for airspace. The gusting winds blew a lightweight a little too close to our plane. He wasn’t doing his radio work very well and also flew too high. But I got a chance to look at it from close up and it looks like fun. I might try one in the summer at Plum Island where I have seen them parked.

From Concord we flew to a lovely small place near Keene where I learned there is an ice-cream stand near the airport, something to remember for when summer comes. As we taxied to the apron a man was waving to us. This turned out to be our aviation doctor who holds the power to let us fly or ban us from the skies, every two years. Of course he has his own plane. Both Bill and I have contributed to that plane, and will continue to do that, every two years, with out-of-pocket payments that no insurance company will reimburse us for.

Bill took over and flew us back to Beverly the remaining 50 nautical miles where we arrived exactly when the plane was due home. I gave Arne a postcard of an aviation painting from Ethiopia. I am trying to get him started on an ‘aviation art’ collection from developing countries. It is a slow collection process because aviation is usually not part of the artist community’s experience in those countries. The postcard joins a woodcarving of Garuda, the Hindu god of pilots, from Nepal that hangs above the desk. For Bill I brought a bag of Ethiopian coffee beans.

I got home just in time to join Axel on an outing to Gloucester to get native shrimp, pretty much straight of the boat. During the few short shrimp fishing periods – most of the time shrimp fishing is out of bounds – you can get enormous bags of the small shrimp for very little money and eat until to you’re full. Across the street from the shrimp place is the Fisherman’s Brew pub which happened to have its Grand Opening and so we joined a noisy crowd of beer testers, 5 different varieties. Only the stout did not get our thumbs up. The small fish shaped plank with five 6 oz glasses was accompanied by a platter with smoked fish, cheese and olives. This became our lunch.

We drove to Salem to join Kairos and Christine who had ventured out of Boston and Cambridge with thousands of other city folks. The occasion for us getting together was the Mahjong, Contemporary Chinese Art exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum; an exhibit that delighted us both in its organization and the quality of the pieces. We drove back in a girl car and a boy car. The girls got home first, made tea and talked about pregnancy, childbirth and raising children in various languages – Chris is 7 months pregnant. The boys went out and bought exquisite wine after a long study of the contents of two wine merchants in Manchester by the Sea that surprised Kairos who thinks we live among country bumpkins. We consumed the exquisite wine with the shrimp and sat around the table for hours, discussing China, Japan, architecture, movies and becoming a father late in life with few (but very strong) expectations for this baby (we predict sparks in about 15 years).

Just before I tumbled exhausted into bed I examined my sore arm and noticed that the bruise on my upper right arm had grown bigger and was edged by dark blue lines. We contemplated going to the emergency room but the prospect of a midnight wait in an emergency room shoved the thought aside. We home remedied with a bag of ice. This morning the colors are more subdued but it is still sore, and being my right arm, interferes a bit with normal functioning; a visit to the doctor might be in order. 

Next to my computer, open on that page in Flight Training magazine for over a week now, is an article about how to land in strong cross winds (Uncrossing crosswind landings) with a picture on one page of a technique called ‘Crab and kick’ and on the other page one called ‘Slideslip.’ I have been looking each morning at these pictures as I sit here writing. Yesterday afternoon I saw it all put into practice, as Bill set the plane down in exactly that crosswind condition. The wind blew right between the main runways, gusting from 17 to 26 knots. I was glad I was sitting in the right seat. We could hear the voice from the tower over the radio saying softly, ‘wow!’ after the landing. We all agreed.

It was the end of a lovely trip over snow covered landscapes to Glenn Falls in Upstate New York; the place we had not been able to reach last week because of low clouds. This time we approached from the south, flying first west to North Adams, slugging it out against a forty knot northwesterly wind that doubled our flying time. As the outgoing pilot I added another 2.3 hours to my logbook for cross county flying. I have surpassed the 50 miles you need as a minimum precondition for getting one’s instrument rating; something for which I have no appetite (nor money) at the moment.

I landed us in perfect conditions at Glenn Falls airport at the southern end of Lake George. We parked between many other small planes that were taking advantage of the perfect conditions: unlimited visibility and clear skies with very little wind on the ground. At Glenn Falls you could see the snow covered mountain ranges in the north and when we left Beverly we could see the Blue Hills in back of Boston’s skyscape.

It was Bill’s birthday in addition to Valentines day and this seemed enough occasion to have lunch in the airport cafeteria. The tiny 3-table and 1-counter restaurant was (wo)manned by the frightening Tessie the Terror as she called herself. A picture of Tessie in younger days stood on a bookshelf on the side. I think it was made by the same photographer who memorialized Penny in her early days of beauty.

Tessie did things her way and at her speed and made it clear that she was not to be challenged or hurried. Tessie’s place was full of graying and balding men who were drinking decaf coffee and bitching about our new president. The menu had probably not changed much over the years, basic American fifties fare. Bill had a bowl of potato soup (with oyster crackers) and I had a thick grilled (American) cheese sandwich. We split the fries.

Bill piloted us back so I got to be the navigator. We flew a few miles north over frozen Lake George before turning east to Rutland and from there direct to Beverly. I could see the ice fishermen sitting quietly waiting for a bite – I imagined them escaping from wife and household duties. If they were anything like the folks in the restaurant, they probably were much happier out in the open far away from women like Tessie who treated them like unruly and irresponsible little boys.

We flew over Vermont’s ski areas and I could see the skiers get on and off lifts, fix their bindings and slide down the slopes. As we moved further east the winds began to pick up leading us eventually to the crosswind landing that took all of Bill’s concentration and accumulated flying experience.

Back home with my own Valentine, we took advantage of Tessa and Steve not being around and cooked a wonderful fish soup while listening to a detective book-on-CD that plays in the days of the janissaries in Turkey. Dinner was followed by watching one of the 7 movies we brought back from the library, ending a day that was perfect. I fell asleep feeling blessed.