Sylvia's Journal

The FAA may request to re-examine a pilot. This authority is found in 49 U.S.C. §44709. In pilot’s jargon, this is called the 709 checkride. I was informed of this necessity back in August in the letter Sita claimed came from a robot. I finally took that test this morning. I had to show up at 9 AM at Hanscom Airfield in Bedford and report to the examiner. This meant I had to leave Beverly about 30 minutes earlier.

I had reserved the plane at 8 AM. When it is below freezing temperatures, the plane does not start easily. We use gas heaters that blow hot air around the motor. I have come to supplement this mechanical intervention with Arne’s magic touch. But Arne was in warm Florida and his daughter Wendy does not claim to have that touch. In fact we couldn’t even get the heaters to work. At times like that I can become superstitious and I was ready to cancel my checkride. But may be there was Arne’s touch after all and it works even from a distance. Someone got the blowers to work and after 10 minutes of heat I was able to start the plane on first try.

I was nervous. I had not flown since the first day of January. And I realized that I had not really researched what a checkride really entailed. When I looked it up on the internet I found descriptions that ranged from complete full-fledged re-examinations (re-testing my entire private pilot credentials) to a couple of take-offs and landings. I pulled out my study books and tried to activate dormant knowledge between the early hours of 6 and 8 AM. That would not have been enough for a complete re-examination, but it was enough for what I ended up doing. I was primarily tested on landing on the first 1000 feet of the runway, something I had been practicing quite a bit with Arne. And so I did well and passed.

Flying at Hanscom is a challenge because there is much commercial traffic and many large jets. Compared to Beverly Airport, Hanscom is like a big city. I was even guided to my parking spot by people with orange glow sticks in their hands, just like a big jet. It felt very grown up.

Back home I found a piece of paper stuck to the front door and signed by neighbor Ted that alerted us to another septic system crisis. And so we had another shitload carted away for hundreds of dollars and now we can flush again. When I grew up in Holland I never thought much about sewerage. It was something automatic that happened underground. Here, away from the town sewer lines, on the rocky shores of Lobster Cove, like it or not, we are frequently confronted with our own waste and its finicky disposal.

Sita wrote us enthusiastically about the events at the WEF. She (de)scribed a session about technology and development where all the high and mighty of the world of development and technology came together. We are talking top of the food chain. Sita’s WEF art made it into the ‘warped world of France’s most reviled/loved blogger’ (Sita’s words, not mine). You can see a few glimpses on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/v/iLwPXQZ77DY).

I started the first day of the New Year flying over Essex county, trying the new GPS. A snowstorm is coming our way but I was ahead of it. It was a glorious day, blue sky, everything covered in snow and unlimited views of Boston to the South and the New Hampshire mountains to the north.

At temperatures below freezing, it took a gas heater and Arne’s magic touch to get our plane started, after we scraped off a layer of ice from the wings. Flying with ice on your wings is not a good idea, as it alters the air flow around the wing and therefore affects lift.

My first night of the year was rather short. We celebrated the ending of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 with our dearest friends at Mary Scofield’s house in Beverly Farms, sitting around a huge fire and eating wonderful foods. The invitation said that we could wear whatever we wanted. I was tempted at first to go in my jammies but instead we decided to dress up; Axel in his rich old man outfit and I as his #1 girlfriend, the kind that ‘drapes’ around their man-du-jour, in a black glitter dress and somewhat matching jacket. Can you tell who’s the rich guy and who’s the temporary girl in this picture?

At 7PM I called my family in Holland where it was already 2008. I managed to get only one of my four siblings on the line. My little nephew sounded giddy from the excitement, the evening of cardgames and probably a little bit too much of champagne.

Yesterday was one of the few remaining workdays before I take off for Ghana on Friday. This is going to be one of those assignments where my ability to tolerate ambiguity and having several dangling loose ends will come in handy. There is a large cast of known and unknown people involved in it and contracts that are not yet signed. At least we were able to secure lodging for ourselves, through the helpful intervention of the US Agency of International Development staff in Accra. This is a good start. We also have our tickets and all the approvals we need on this side of the Atlantic. My young colleague Cabul Mehta will be my travelling partner. He will come along to help tie many of those dangling loose ends. I am very grateful for that.

Axel helped me clean up my office which had been serving as guestroom, internet admin room and Christmas/Sinterklaas wrapping station. I am anxious to get the bed out, and back upstairs where it belongs, and install the desk that we were given by Brenda and Don from the ASE in Cambridge. It will serve as a secondary desk, a horizontal surface to put the primary desk’s overflow on. And in times of domestic inspiration it will also serve as a place to put the sewing machine. The leftovers from Sita’s sewing project have already produced one baby quilt and there is plenty for more. Sita has claimed one (‘I bought the stuff’), even though there is no baby in sight. We all agree that it is better, at this time, to have a quilt and no baby than to have a baby and no quilt.

Sita and Jim took off for Western Massachusetts to ring in the New Year with their old friends out there. Tessa and Steve, and returning guest Roy headed out to Boston and returned long after we had gone to sleep. I am always happy when I look out of window in the morning and see all the cars that should be there parked in front of the house, without any new dents. I think they had a designated driver. We are pleased with such responsible behavior, especially on this first night when alcohol flows freely everywhere.

Five and a half months after we crashed I retraced my flight to Gardner and Turner’s Falls. With Arne by my side as a safety blanket, I was ready. We took off from Beverly airport to the West on Sunday afternoon.

I requested Flight Following, a service that is provided to pilots. It means that I am an identifiable (by tail number) blip on a traffic controller’s screen, amidst other blips. This way I am cleared through airspaces and warned when another plane gets too near. It also means, if there is much air traffic in the area that I am traversing, that there is a constant stream of radio messages back and forth between Boston Approach Control and pilots of all planes in the area, not just little ones like ours.

Amidst all this radio chatter I have to remain aware just in case my tail number is called. I also have to keep track of where I am going, fiddle with the new Garmin system that Arne and I only barely understand, hold my altitude and course direction, and check ground references, so I know where I am on the map. I remembered my first cross-county flights with my instructor Greg, in May 2006, when I wondered how I could ever master this overload of mental stimulation. Not having flown much over the past 5 months, it was a challenge again.

The voice of the controller on the radio was not very clear. I could not always understand him. I would look at Arne in the hope he would bail me out. Sometimes he did, sometimes he did not. I should be able to handle this on my own, but it was nice to have an interpreter sitting next to me.

We got to Gardner Airport in about 45 minutes and landed on the same runway (36) that I last touched down on, at about the same time in the afternoon on that fateful Saturday in July. The landing was easy, and a good one. I had plenty of runway left. Arne suggested, as he always does, that I do a few more landings. I taxied back to the beginning of the runway. It was then, on take-off that I had this reaction in my gut that is hard to translate into words (another one of these biochemical reactions). We lifted off in a straight line where on July 14^th the plane veered off to the right into the trees and where my memory stopped. We saw the pond, now covered with ice and snow. I had to swallow deep realizing that the center of the pond was not that far from the boggy edge where we ended up. For a brief moment I had one of those would-have-should-have-could-have thoughts and a few words started to slip out before I caught myself. I did not finish the sentence and was able to let it go.

We landed two more times, once more using runway 36 and then with a slight tailwind on 18. Since I had wanted to retrace the entire flight, not just the landing and take off from Gardner, I continued to Turner’s Falls, some 20 miles further West. For awhile we couldn’t find it and I was glad that we had two pairs of eyes on the look out. Our GPS told us we had just flown over it and still we couldn’t see it. Arne suggested I do a 360 and then we spotted the airfield off our left wing. This place, where we had had our picnic on that sunny Saturday in July did not look as attractive in winter; a desolate and forgotten little airfield on the Eastern shore of the Connecticut River.

Since there was hardly any wind we could land from either side. I picked runway 34 and noticed that if I were to come in too high and too fast we’d land in the Connecticut River. The thought made me tense up a bit as I was a little too high on final approach. But I am getting better at losing altitude quickly and made another good landing. We turned around at the end of the runway and took off Eastwards, back to Beverly; mission accomplished.

The flight back was beautiful. Flying into dusk in winter is spectacular. This is the attraction of flying and this is what is drawing me back into the pilot seat. As the lights turned on in buildings on the ground a Christmas landscape emerged, with Boston sparkling in the far distance. By the time we landed at Beverly it was nearly dark. This was another challenge as I had not landed at night since early December 2006.

All in all I had flown for nearly two and a half hours. Arne was quite pleased with my performance. And so was I. It was another milestone on my journey of recovery. Over the past month I have flown 6.2 hours, made 35 landings, a few of them on some very short runways and one at night; I have gone up solo in the traffic pattern at Beverly and now I completed my first long cross county trip. On New Year’s Day Mike will take me up for more instruction on the Garmin over the practice area. I will be flying over my sleeping friends in Ipswich, Essex, Newbury and Newburyport a little after 8 AM on the first day of the New Year. It seems like a good start of this first New Year’s Day in my second life.

I still wake up every morning with two useless arms: numb hands and a painful right upper arm. The upper arm problem, according to the nurse practitioner and my physical therapist, is a rotator cuff tendinitis, the one that doesn’t want to go away. I am getting used to it and know that the hand numbness goes away as soon as I get up. The radiating pain in my upper arm tends to linger, decreasing in intensity but often staying with me until noontime. After that it only hurts when I make certain movements.

My walking is steadily improving although this is not very visible when I get out of bed. The last couple of days I have been walking much like normal people. It is only slightly uncomfortable, as opposed to painful just one week ago.

Nevertheless, we both started our day yesterday rather stiff, after the stand-up party of Friday night. So this is how each day begins: lunge exercise in bed to stretch the Psoas muscle, 25 squats next to the bed, a slow and awkward descent down the stairs, and 20 minutes worth of various shoulder, Trap, Quad and neck exercises in the shower. Then I am limber again. Towards the evening stiffness, soreness and tiredness return, one affecting the other. The next morning everything starts over again.

Arne had planned for us to fly to Gardner and retrace my flight, including that fateful last landing on runway 36, but the weather was too marginal. We decided to postpone this important outing until the weather was right. Instead I received a quick lesson from Mike, one of the plane co-owners, about the newly installed Garmin system and radio and then went flying by myself to practice touch-and-gos. It was my first solo flight since July. Except for a little snow and ice here and there on the taxiways, the conditions were excellent. I completed 10 perfect landings, with a confidence that surprised me.

While I was flying Axel got us re-connected to the world. As it turned out his friendly Bangalore helper had actually messed things up. Axel was furious, having wasted many hours on following bad advice. He negotiated some deal with the long distance phone service; the competition is so intense that anything appears to be negotiable. He then went for a long walk to calm down and be thinking more forgiving thoughts about our Bangalore friend. After doing his stretches he walked into town – it’s good to have an objective. It was dark when he left

Sita, Jim and Tessa went to Newbury to pick up our 18 pound turkey (imagine two large newborn babies) at Tendercrop Farms. These are honest turkeys, not produced by the nutritional-industrial complex that starts processing the poor animals from the moment they hatch. Tessa is going to wrap our bird in bacon for our Christmas dinner. She claims it is great, but we wonder about all the fat. It certainly is one way to get our weight back up.

Axel dialed home for a ride back. A round trip with snow and ice and in the dark turned out to be a little bit too much of a challenge. He was in good spirits when he returned holding two videos for our evening entertainment. Jim left to have dinner at his mom’s, leaving the the four of us like old times. We had Indonesian chicken satay, a great vehicle for peanut sauce, and veggie rolls to balance things out. After dinner I read out loud the part about turkey sex in Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book that Edith had given us in August. It is a treatise on eating locally, called Vegetable, Mineral, Miracle. That’s how I learned that the nutritional-industrial complex has so completely intervened in the raising of turkeys that they lost their ability to reproduce naturally. Barbara describes how she tries to teach her turkeys the art of loving (and reproducing) on their own. It is a hilarious account that is at the same time very sad and disturbing. We don’t think the turkey we bought will have experienced good sex, but we hope it has at least tasted the outdoors before we cover it with bacon; this comes from another pitiful creature without knowledge of the facts of life.

The pirate movie Axel brought home was awful. He ended up watching it alone after the girls had been picked up by friends to see other friends. I only watched a few minutes and then withdrew to my office to continue the work of catching up. I wished I had been more forceful in making entertainment choices for the evening. We had the ‘Stap Op’ game waiting in the wings. It is an old Dutch game that requires bicycling certain distances, faster with a headwind, and slower when faced with obstacles such as flat tires and waiting at train crossings. It’s a clever variation on Uno with great pictures that the girls colored in years ago as a gift to me; they made it resemble the set of cards I played with when I was young. I was so touched.

This morning I am crippled, in places that did not hurt before. This business with exercises feels like adjusting the temperature of water when the lag time is considerable; I never seem to get it quite right. It takes all my concentration, and a lot of biting my lips, not to limp.

Today is a full day of recovery related alphabet soup: OT and PT, for Axel, followed by EMG; I have EMDR then PT. If this was Scrabble we could make some good words out of all these letters.

Yesterday was not the rest day that Sundays are supposed to be. I biked the 30 minutes to Quaker Meeting in the morning and then back. On my return I met Axel on his way to Newbury to buy the ingredients for an entirely local meal at Tendercrop Farms, including pork raised and slaughtered within 100 miles. The driving part of course takes some of the environmental correctness out of the equation, but biking there in his current state would not be feasible.

In the afternoon I went flying again. Arne steered me to Plum Island airport for practice landings. The runway is the shortest I have ever landed on, 1800 feet, which us about 1200 feet shorter than the runway at Gardner airport. Landing on such a short strip is tricky because if you don’t have your speed and altitude set up right on final approach you can get into real trouble as you run out of driveway. I know too well what that means. I did not break out into a cold sweat, it’s more like a hot flash, and Arne obligingly lowered the cabin temperature as I mustered all my attention and skill to do this right. And I did. Just to make sure it was not simply good luck I did it again.

And then Arne upped the ante and asked me to land on the same strip from the other direction, with a slight tailwind. The difference, even with a four knot wind is spectacular. On my first try I thought I was doing well and could make it. But when the tailwind produced its effect (less drag) I realized what happened on that fateful day in July. But this time I was prepared and executed a perfect go around and landed without a hitch on second try. The sensation of rushing towards a hard stop at the end of the runway was a little more intense than I cared for. It activated a memory that I would rather forget. Flying back to Beverly, I found landing on the 5000 feet runway easy. I think I’ll refrain from landing on such very short runways if I can help it.

With about 20 excellent landings under my belt since I started flying again Arne deems me fit to fly on my own again and I feel confident to do so. A phone call to the FAA today will tell me what else I need to do to be fully reinstated as a private pilot.

In the evening my Belgian colleague Edith and her husband Rutger came for dinner. Not only was it a local meal (including the beer and wine), it was also prepared by us all. Axel got a good dose of Flemish/Dutch as we covered in rapid succession the state of the world, American politics and a whole host of current and historical topics in our native tongue. Jim, making a brief appearance, also got to show off some of his Dutch vocabulary.

I was so sure I had imprinted my intense dreams into my memory as I emerged from deep sleep. It was that extra 20 minutes of being neither awake nor asleep that messed everything up. The delicate fabric of the dream(s) disintegrated. The only thing I can remember is that they had something to do with agency and victim hood. These are the mysterious ways in which my mind comes to my rescue as I am struggling to articulate the session I want to do at next year’s Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference (OBTC) at Babson. Clearly, it will have something to do with agency and victimhood. Our very own recent experience about these two concepts will be the icing on the cake. I will get a proposal out today.

Yesterday Arne and I went flying again. It was quite windy and gusty, exactly the weather we had ordered. After last week’s flawless calm weather landing I needed practice in some more challenging conditions, such as winds gusting from 14 to 20 knots and much turbulence as low as 600 feet. I was happy that Arne was sitting next to me. His presence is like a safety blanket; he never had to put his hands on the controls. Flying with Arne is different than flying with my previous fligth instructor Greg who is about Tessa’s age. Greg is a formidable instructor, at the beginning of his pilot career. I learned much from him. While I was recovering he left Beverly and is flying in uniform now, from his base in St. Louis. Arne graciously offered to get me back to my former skills and confidence. Arne is on the other side of his flight career. Arne chatters a lot which is both fun and distracting. Ths is a good thing as it forces me to concentrate right through the talking, a skill that comes in handy when I will be flying again with friends and family (those hardy souls who want and dare to share my excitement of flying).

I did about 8 landings. It was very hard work and immeasurably satisfying. Axel had been watching the little planes go up and down in the stormy weather. I was relieved to hear that, instead of worry and fear, he had felt the exhilaraton that he thought the pilots of those little planes must have been feeling. He completely understood the excitement of doing something difficult and succeeding because of skill (not luck). I can only compare this feeling to my experience in my twenties of skiing flawlessly down a difficult slope or racing a perfect race in my rowing years. Or, more recently, completing a workshop or event and knowing that it came out exactly as intended. This is part of the attraction of flying: putting all the skills and years of practice together and producing a safe landing! The other part is the ability to enjoy the beauty of our lands from above.

In the evening we showed up at the party with the same people and at the same place where we had been expected on July 14. We messed up that party big time: as soon as the hospital call came in everyone started frantically searching for Sita’s cell phone number (a reminder for all of us to travel with contact information in our pockets or purses). But this time the party unfolded more or less as planned and no one was missing. A wonderful dinner was followed by a raucous game of pictionary in which the male team was pitted against the female team. The women won easily and the men protested. We may look like old people but we behaved pretty much like the little people at the other end of the life cycle, except when we descended the steep chairs. It was a pitiful procession that had something to do with joints.

Axel got up before me this morning. This is very rare and happens only when he has to catch an early flight to some faraway place or on my birthday. It is that day today. Five months ago I would not have considered this a special birthday (56). But now I do. It is a birthday that nearly never happened.

Axel set up the birthday girl’s breakfast place with a collection of stuffed animals and one of the remaining flowers from our garden, a lonely snapdragon. The lucky one that escaped while the other ones outside had to endure the sleet and the icy rain from the snowstorm that never quite materialized.

Yesterday I biked my way to Quaker Meeting, one half hour each way. It was bitter cold but I was prepared with my long johns and other warm clothing. I enjoyed the ride tremendously. There is so much to see along the way. This part of the world is beautiful in any season. When I came back Axel and Ted were preparing for the winter storm that was heading our way from out West: raking leaves, putting the duckboards out, one last mowing and making room for the snowplow to put the excess snow. Inside the house everything was warm and cosy. We were ready for the storm. We finished the sub-continent meal that we had had with Alison the night before. Slightly aged, it tasted even better.

I took the car to go to my 2 o’clock flight lesson but stranded on route 128 with the temperature gauge indicating that something was terribly wrong with the car. I called Arne from the flight school that I was stuck and had to cancel my lesson. He must have picked up the utter disappointment in my voice. Less than an hour later, after AAA had towed me to a garage, Arne picked me up from the garage and drove me to the flight center. The thought occurred to me that some forces in the Universe were conspiring against me flying again, with too much wind on Saturday and now this car trouble. But counterforces were also conspiring and the plane was still available one hour after my scheduled flying time. And so we took off, or rather, I took off with Arne by my side, just in case.

It was a perfect day to practice my landings as there was no wind at all. The windsock was hanging limply on its pole. I stayed in the traffic pattern and practiced touch-and-go’s. I did seven or eight landings. Arne never had to take the controls and I never broke out in a cold sweat. The landings were perfect or close to perfect. It was wonderful and exciting to fly again. It was also beautiful to fly over Essex County on a late and crystal clear winter afternoon.

Arne brought me back home where I found Axel and Woody sitting by a roaring fire drinking smoky tea and scheming on my birthday present. I found it this morning at breakfast: Spitfire Women of World War II. The book is about the Women’s Air Transport Auxiliaries, a group of women who ferried planes to Britain during the war. Woody’s mom was one of them, and an important flying inspiration and cheerleader to me. The book had just come out and Woody had some in stock. As it happened, I just finished Harry Potter and was looking for a new book to read.