God and Jetfire (48 page)

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 Jonathan'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.

*   *   *

We claim rooms and settle our suitcases into them. The family room is gigantic, with couches, a fireplace, and a big telescope stationed in the corner, and each of the second-floor bedrooms has windows overlooking it. There are speakers in each room, an intercom system Jonathan, Sarah, and Andrew experiment with excitedly as they run up and down the spiral staircase, slamming doors and yelling at one another across the living room void.

In the morning, we get up early and have breakfast outside on the terrace. My father asks Jonathan if he has any questions in preparation for his flight. I can see how excited my dad is, but the kids are just excited about being in a new place, with a big yard, and trout ponds, and a creek. It is easy to see how much he's suffering just from the exertion of getting up and smiling and speaking.

I should be grateful we are all assembled here, my mother and father, Paula and Erik and the three kids. But little things frustrate me: that my father can't speak loud enough to be heard, that everyone doesn't notice his struggle and so he settles into silence. That Paula and Erik are exhausted from the trip. That my mother is preoccupied with cooking and making sure people are fed instead of sitting down and talking. That my son is too afraid of river monsters to walk the creek the way I used to. That my sister isn't there because of her four kids and that they are always the excuse for everything. That my brother was supposed to be on his way hours ago and probably won't arrive until nightfall. That when he does finally arrive, he regrets not coming sooner, and he says that the bedroom windows overlooking the living room are the perfect launch site for a paper airplane contest, and I'll forever mourn the paper airplane contest we'll never have. That, remembering the astonishing moment I first saw the landscape of the moon through a telescope, I take the telescope outside with my son and find that the moon has already slipped behind the tall mountains that surround us.

As always, I am the only one who knows how precious this moment is. I am scrambling, an invisible facilitator, trying to connect my son directly to my father, erasing the mistake of me, the mistake of giving up my son. I am drawing everyone together to try to make them stick. And I should feel something restored, that my father and mother, though they don't say anything, are demonstrating it isn't over for them any more than it is over for me. Unmitigated disaster, averted. No, the unmitigated disaster is ongoing.

Everyone says that the weekend is turning out to be perfect, and that infuriates me. I am mourning all we've already lost and the inevitable disappearance of everything else. We pile into the cars and drive to the glider field. Big Lick is tangled among the other planes, and it's a geometry exercise my dad didn't anticipate to get it out of the hangar without damaging it. Kids run around, exhausting him, and people aren't listening to him, or can't hear him, as he directs them to lift that wing, or roll that plane back. Paula and my mother chat carelessly in the corner. I worry we won't get to fly. I'm mad that I'm the only one worried. But finally, we get the plane out, and our day of flying begins.

*   *   *

My dad kneels beside the body of the plane, genuflecting to physics, leaning in to speak to my son. I've helped Jonathan strap in, all five belts latched into the circular buckle.

“On takeoff, I won't be talking, I'll be real quiet,” he says to Jonathan. “I'm going to be totally focused on flying the plane. After we get up, we can chat a little bit.”

Jonathan takes the controls and pushes them left. “That's going to make you turn left,” my dad says. “What would you do if you wanted to go straight?” Jonathan slowly releases the stick back to center.

“Yeah. That's it. That's exactly it.” He turns to me. “You've got a smart kid here.” I think he thinks he may finally have a taker.

“What is all this?” my son asks.

“What is everything, okay. This is the dive brake. Pull that out, that gets you to go down faster. We'll use that during landing. This knob releases us from the towplane. This green knob, you don't need to worry about that, that's—that's called a trim.”

My son points to a dial.

“That's a thousand feet. We'll probably go up to almost three.”

“Is this the speed?” my son asks.

“That's the speed. Sixty knots, eighty knots. Hundred knots is one hundred fifteen miles an hour. We won't go that fast. Not intentionally, anyway. These two tell you how fast you're going up and down. Like when it says four, means you're going up four hundred feet a minute.”

My dad has developed the slow speaking rhythms I remember in my grandmother. The infinite patience and gravity of a storyteller. Every word a stone that sinks deep and certain to the bottom of the riverbed.

Neither one of them talks. The towplane is positioning itself; other pilots are making preparations around them. The other pilots refer to my son as my son and assume Erik is my husband. But then they realize he's Paula's son. They assume Paula is my sister. What is certain is that Jonathan is my father's grandson, because my father has referred to him that way. Probably as much for expedience as anything.

My dad and my son wait. At the end of a period of silence, he asks whether Jonathan has any other questions. It seems he doesn't, except it seems he should.

“Is this—?”

“—That's an air vent … That's closed, and that's open.”

“Do I want it closed or open?”

“You want it open.”

Some things my dad didn't explain because they have certain, stable answers.

Jonathan notices that there are pedals in the front, but not in the back.

“—Oh, I'll work the pedals. What I'll do, I'll use them to try to keep the yaw string straight. You don't need to—you can fly anywhere you want to just with the stick.” Some things it seemed my father just couldn't explain.