The three of us were in a 1957 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska. The pilot was recounting the toll that the Vietnam War had taken on him, while, over in the right seat, my boyfriend, Karl, listened. Thanks to proximity, I was listening as well, though chances are they’d forgotten I was there. Outside, water sloshed against the pontoons, rocking the plane gently from side to side. No one had asked this man to tell his story in a long time, but Karl had asked, and so the pilot put the plane down on the lake, turned off the ignition, and began.
Karl and I were spending a week fishing at a fly-out lodge outside Iliamna, by which I mean nowhere near Iliamna but closer to Iliamna than to anywhere else. Each morning, we and the dozen or so other guests gathered up our neoprene waders and were divided into groups of three or four or five. Along with thermoses and sandwiches and tackle boxes and a guide, we were loaded into a string of warhorse floatplanes bobbing at the dock. The pilots who flew for the lodge struck me as men who would have had a hard time finding work elsewhere. After a flight of twenty or thirty minutes, we would land on a river or a lake, then pile out of the plane and into a small waiting boat. The plane would then taxi off while the guide and the boat took us even deeper into nowhere, the idea being that special fish congregated in secret locations far from civilization. But there was no civilization, and there were plentiful fish in the lake in front of the lodge. Taking a plane to a boat to find an obscure fishing spot seemed to be a bit of Alaskan theatre. After we reached whatever pebbly shoal the guide had in mind for the day, we arranged our flies and waded hip-deep into the freezing water to cast for trout. Despite the significant majesty of the place, wading around in a river for eight hours wasn’t my idea of a good time. Bears prevented me from wandering off. Rain prevented me from reading on the shore. Mosquitoes prevented everything else.
So when, on the fifth day, Karl suggested that we skip the fishing and pay extra to spend the day flying instead, I was in. Flying was what he’d come for, anyway: the early-morning flight out to the fish and the afternoon flight back to the lodge. Karl liked talking to the pilots—who put him in the right seat and let him wear the headset—and they liked talking to him, because he was a doctor, and free medical advice is hard to come by. Karl and I were less than a year into our relationship when we went to Alaska, and I didn’t yet fully understand the centrality of airplanes in his life. After Alaska, I got it.
When the talk of war was done, the pilot asked Karl if he’d ever flown a Beaver, if he’d had the experience of taking off from the water and landing on the water. Karl said no, he had not. Even though Karl had been flying since he was a boy, at forty-seven he still didn’t have his pilot’s license. He was honest about this—he was honest about everything, which should not be confused with being thoughtful about everything.
“You have to tip the nose up when you land,” the pilot said. “That’s the mistake people make. It’s hard to get the depth perception because of the glare, so you wind up hitting with the nose. Then you flip. You want to try?” He was so grateful to Karl, and this was the only gift he had to give. The day was bright with puffs of cloud and low winds. Karl and his new friend put on their headsets.
I was no stranger to the single-engine. My stepfather Mike had rented planes when I was growing up, and, with my mother, flew to some of the medical conferences where he gave lectures. Sometimes I was in the back with the luggage. My mother had taken enough flying lessons to know how to land, should she be called on to do so. When we moved to a farm outside Nashville, Mike bought a tiny red helicopter, which he flew for years.
After a demonstration—up, around, down again—the pilot turned over the controls. This was not Lake Michigan. Getting up to speed required circling, but you had to take off straight toward a fixed point on the horizon and into the wind. Karl took off toward the shore, and then we lifted off the lake, flew past the mountains, through the clouds, around the blue sky, back through the clouds and past the mountains, then nose up, plane down, smack into the lake. The pilot was right; it was hard to see it coming. I reminded myself to relax my jaw. The pilot offered Karl some pointers, some praise. There was a quick discussion of how the landing could be improved, and then we were off again, a tighter circle, greater speed, straight up, lake-mountain-cloud-blue-cloud-mountain-lake, the nose up as we came down. The jolt was harder this time—I felt it in my spine—but before I could fully register my relief we were up again: a carnival ride for which no one bothered to take the tickets.
I wasn’t prone to airsickness or seasickness, but the combination of air and water in rapid succession was something new. I turned away from the window to contemplate the floor, stamped metal rusted at the edges, like a service elevator in a hospital. I stared at it while Karl took off, turned above the lake, then dropped back down onto the surface. Repetition was the key to learning. The only thing on hand to throw up in were the pilot’s waders, which seemed better (better?) than throwing up on the stamped-metal floor. I held down my breakfast through sheer force of will. I was angry at both men—especially the one I was sharing a bed with back at the lodge—for not caring about how seriously unpleasant this might be for someone who did not live to fly. But, despite the rage and the nausea pulsing in the back of my throat, I wasn’t afraid. Considering that about half of all small-craft accidents occur during either takeoff or landing; considering that taking off and landing was all we were doing; considering that the plane was rusted and the pilot had struggled with the aftereffects of Agent Orange and my boyfriend had never landed a plane on water before; considering that this lake was somewhere far from Iliamna and no one knew we were there in the first place; considering that if the plane flipped, as it had been established these planes could do, I would probably not be able to swim through the freezing water in my sack of neoprene (which I had stupidly worn against the cold), and that, if I did make it to the shore, my chances of surviving whatever came next were probably zero—I should have been afraid.
But Karl and I were together, and he was the person slamming the plane onto the lake, so I was not.
“Karl flies?” people ask me. “Have you ever flown with him?”
I fly with him all the time, and when we’re together in the plane I’m never concerned, not about black clouds or lightning, not about turbulence that could knock the fillings from your teeth. The times I’m afraid are the times when I’m not in the plane, and by “afraid” I mean an emotion closer to terror. Take, for example (there are so many examples), the time Karl flew a Cessna to Kingston, Ontario, to look at a boat, and on the way home had to land on an airstrip somewhere in Ohio because the weather was so bad. The tiny airport office was locked, and he stood under the wing of the plane to call and let me know he’d be late. He called again two hours later, from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to say that he had landed a second time because the transponder was out, which meant that the plane couldn’t be tracked. The weather was still bad.
“Stay there,” I said. “I’ll drive up and get you.” Bowling Green was an hour away by car.
He said no. He said, “Let’s wait and see.” Maybe he could fix it, or find someone to fix it. It was nine o’clock, and the weather was bad, but the flight was so short.
Two hours later, there was still no call, and still no answer when I tried his cell phone. Around midnight, the clock and I had a conversation. I told the clock that I wanted to wait fifteen minutes before my new life began, the life in which Karl had been killed in a plane crash. I requested fifteen more minutes in this world—which I was quickly coming to see as the past—before figuring out whom to call, whom to wake up. You’ll remember this feeling when the phone rings, I told myself. You’ll remember how scared you were when he calls to tell you he’s fine. And it was true. As many times as I’ve been in exactly this situation, I never forget it, and it never fails to shock me, the flood of adrenaline that does not serve for fight or flight but drowns me. At twelve-thirty, I shifted my perspective again, from wondering what it would be like if he were dead to understanding that he was dead, and I decided that I could wait another fifteen minutes. He would be dead forever, so what difference did it make if I gave myself a little more time? I still had no idea what I was supposed to do.
After I had extended the final cutoff two more times, he walked in the door. That’s how these stories always end, of course, except for the one time when they don’t. I saw the headlights against the garage door and went outside in the rain to meet him with my love and my rage and my sick relief. I wanted to kill him because he had not been killed. I wanted to step into his open jacket and stay there for the rest of my life, for the rest of his life. How had he not called?
“I did call. I called you from Kentucky.”
“But you never told me you’d left Kentucky.”
“It took a long time to get the transponder fixed.”
“Then why didn’t you call to say you’d landed?”
“It was too late.” In the house, he went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He was dead tired but not dead. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”
He might as well have said, “I thought you were sleeping, because I have no idea who you are, or who any normal person is.”
I stayed awake for what was left of the night to watch him, just to make sure he was really there, and in the morning I asked whom I was supposed to call. Whom do I call after midnight to try to find you?
Karl sat with the question for a while before answering. For the first time, he seemed to grasp my sadness: past, present, future. “They’ll call you,” he said.
“Who will call me?”
“There’s something called the E.L.T., the emergency locator transmitter. If the E.L.T. is activated, then someone will call you. You’re my emergency contact.”
“How is it activated?”
“Either manually or on impact.”
I hadn’t considered that scenario, the one in which the phone finally rings and it isn’t him.
Maybe this story starts with Lindbergh, who flew to Paris when Karl’s father, Frank, was ten. Frank was one of a whole country of children, an entire world of children, who could now look up and imagine themselves in the sky. Frank became an oral surgeon. He married Jo, and they had three children, Karl, Nancy, and Michael. Frank started taking flying lessons in a Tri-Pacer, with Karl in the back seat. A few weeks after Michael was born, Frank bought his first plane, a 1946 Ercoupe. He asked the family’s minister to come to the house after dinner, when Karl and Nancy were in bed. Jo was in her pajamas, the new baby in her lap. The minister sat on the couch between them while Frank told his wife that he’d bought a plane.
The Ercoupe was big enough for two small people. Frank let Karl fly it when they were together because the plane was so easy—tricycle landing, no rudder pedals, and it steered like a car. Not only had Frank bought a plane without telling his wife; he let their eight-year-old son fly it.
Meridian, Mississippi, where Karl grew up, has its own page in aviation history. In 1935, the Key brothers, Fred and Al, who had developed a method of aerial refuelling in which they connected to a second plane midair, set the world record for endurance flying by circling the town in a Curtiss Robin for twenty-seven days without landing. The flight was a stunt to save their local airfield, and it worked: the airfield, later named Key Field, wasn’t closed. After the Second World War, Fred and Al opened Key Brothers Flying Service. When Karl was ten, Fred gave him a job after school sweeping out hangars, cleaning spark plugs, and, eventually, driving the fuel truck out to gas up the planes. He was always hanging around the airfield anyway. When someone needed a ride to New Orleans to pick up a plane, Karl would go along with Fred to fly co-pilot on the way home.
“Co-pilot?” I asked. “And you were what, twelve?” Tales grow tall in Mississippi, a by-product of the humidity and heat. Was it possible that a twelve-year-old was flying planes? I have learned to ask the same questions multiple times.
“All you had to do was keep the altitude steady. Most of the planes only went eighty-five or ninety miles an hour.” The joke was that “I.F.R.” didn’t stand for “instrument flight rules” but for “I fly railroads.” Karl said that if he flew over the track for the Southerner it would take him straight back to Meridian.
This gave Fred Key a chance to eat his sandwich.
Around the time when Karl started flying right seat with Fred Key, he rode his bike to the airfield early one summer Saturday morning. There was a Piper Super Cub near the hangar that hadn’t been there the day before. The Cubs were all the same; the people around Key Field used to say you could get it in yellow or you couldn’t get it. But this Cub was white with red stripes, which should have been a tipoff. Super Cubs didn’t have ignition keys. All that was required to start one was the turn of a switch and the push of a button. Karl left his bike in the grass alongside the runway, untied the wings and the tail, pulled off the chocks. The cockpit smelled new. He turned the switch and pushed the button. He had never soloed before, and this seemed like the day to do it.
“It wasn’t like I was flying to Mexico,” Karl said, after I pointed out that this had been a stupendously bad idea. “I taxied out, took off, made one turn around the pattern. The whole thing took ten minutes, and I probably wasn’t more than six hundred feet off the ground. It would have been fine, except that the engine quit.”
The engine quit?
“I had to land it in the field. I came down maybe twenty feet short of the runway.”
Over time, you come to know the seminal stories of the person you live with. I knew this story, and, when I pressed hard against it, Karl came up with every detail he could remember: It was muddy. He pushed the plane back to where it had been. It wasn’t heavy; there was a handle on the side, and he leaned against the fuselage to direct it. It was still early, and there was no one else at the airfield. He washed the plane and tied it down, replaced the chocks, then rode his bicycle home to tell his father what he’d done. It was Mr. Tony’s plane, and Frank sent Karl to Mr. Tony to apologize. Mr. Tony listened, and then asked Karl if he’d switched the gas tank when the engine quit. No horror, no recrimination, just “Did you switch the gas tank?” The Piper Cub had a single tank, but this was a Super Cub. Mr. Tony’s Super Cub had two tanks, and you had to switch them over manually. Sixty years after the fact, Karl pulled up diagrams of a Piper Cub and a Super Cub on his phone to show me where the tanks were placed. I didn’t care where the tanks were placed.
“What were you thinking?” I asked him.
“About what?”
“About taking a plane, about flying by yourself, about the engine quitting. What did you think when the engine quit?”
“Those planes can glide a long way.”
We stared at each other—one person who flew planes, one person who believed that there was an emotional narrative to flying planes. The two lines did not intersect. “You weren’t scared?”
Karl thought about it. “It was a long time ago.”
“I know.”
“Well, then, not that I remember.”
After Karl borrowed Mr. Tony’s plane, his father let him solo in the Ercoupe, maybe so that he would get over any bad associations he had about soloing, or maybe because the kid had already proved that he could do it in someone else’s plane, so why not?
I wondered what I’d say were I pressed to remember how I felt the first time I drove a car by myself, or the first time a car I was driving ran out of gas. If there were actual feelings associated with those events, I had no access to them, because it was just a car.
Which was how Karl felt about planes.
Karl went to college on a scholarship. Frank sold the Ercoupe and bought a Luscombe Silvaire. Years later, he sold the Luscombe and bought a Cessna 150. After he died, of head and neck cancer, in 1988, the family sold the Cessna 150. Frank’s Ercoupe crashed in 2008, killing the pilot. Karl got his first pilot’s logbook when he was twelve. By the time he went to college, he had logged almost two hundred hours. He hadn’t realized that the hours didn’t count because he hadn’t taken a flight physical, but he didn’t mind. The logbook made him feel like a real pilot. In the next twenty years, during which he got a B.A. and a master’s degree in philosophy and theology, went to medical school, got married, and had two children, he never flew a plane. In 1984, Karl and his family were living in Nashville, and he and his next-door neighbor bought a 1971 Beechcraft Baron. The neighbor used the plane during the week, to go to business meetings, and Karl used it on weekends, to go back to Mississippi. They hired the same pilot, and Karl started flying right seat again. After they sold that plane, he bought a part interest in a Cessna 421. He later sold that plane to a friend of his, who ran out of fuel and crashed it in a cornfield in Indiana on Thanksgiving. “He crashed it upside down,” Karl told me. “Everyone lived.”
“How did he crash it upside down?”
“Well, the weather was terrible, and one of the engines went out, so the plane would have been listing to begin with.”
When Karl and I met, in 1994, he was divorced and had a 1976 Beechcraft Bonanza, a model commonly referred to as “the doctor killer” because the plane was so streamlined that it was hard to control. “Doctors have enough money to buy them,” Karl said. “But they aren’t good enough pilots to fly them.” Thanks to the Key Brothers Flying Service, Karl was a good enough pilot. The Bonanza he bought had been on the cover of American Bonanza Society Magazine, he’d been told. He loved that plane, then loved it less, then sold it. Later, he bought a 1962 Piper Comanche (loved, loved less, sold), followed by a 1982 Beechcraft Sundowner, and then a 1959 Cessna 175—each one a gorgeous piece of junk. They were the kinds of planes that compelled other pilots to stride across the tarmac and offer their congratulations. The planes Karl had were the planes that other men wanted. They would have been real bargains, too, except that the Comanche needed a whole new engine. The 175 needed a new propeller. The Bonanza needed new gas tanks, which meant that the wings had to be taken apart. The new gas tanks and the wing-panel removal and replacement cost as much as he’d paid for the plane. Then it also needed a new engine.
Half of these planes Karl owned without having a license. He could fly by himself or he could fly with a passenger so long as he had an instructor along. It meant that, for the first ten years of our relationship, there was someone else in the plane whenever I was with him, but Karl was always the one flying. He flew alone all the time, mostly to Meridian to see his mother. He would say that he put off getting his license because he didn’t have enough time to study for the written exam, but in fact he studied for it ceaselessly. He put off getting his license because he wanted to be sure he’d get a perfect score. He got his license (missing only one question) in 2004, the year before we married. After that, it was just the two of us in the plane. He took more courses. He got his unusual-attitudes certification, which teaches pilots what to do if they inadvertently get upside down, how to come out of spins, how to think fast. He got his tail-wheel endorsement, which meant that he could fly a tail-wheel plane. When I am in the plane with Karl, I read, I study the clouds, I sleep an untroubled sleep, my head against the window.
Karl could go for years without a plane. These intervals usually came after something had happened. Once, the governor on the propeller went out, making it difficult to control the propeller speed; another time, the landing gear wouldn’t come up. He would tell me about each incident weeks after the fact, a confession of a close call that I had missed entirely. Then he’d sell the plane, as if to punish it. “I’m done flying,” he’d tell me. “I did it, and I’m glad, but it’s out of my system now.” Then he would take to bed with a copy of Trade-A-Plane to see what was for sale.
During one plane-less stretch, before we were married, Karl arrived at my house for dinner, and when I met him at the door and kissed him I stepped back. I had never encountered anything as cold as his face. “How cold is it out there?” I asked. I thought of a line from the Thornton Wilder play “The Skin of Our Teeth”: “It’s simply freezing; the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks!” It was December. I remember, because it was the day after my birthday—Karl had waited until after my birthday to tell me he’d bought a motorcycle.
I understood that he wasn’t interested in baking bread, that there would be no Scrabble or yoga in our future as a couple, but couldn’t there be a hobby in which death was not a likely outcome? I told him I was going to start smoking again.
“What?”
“You asked me to quit, and I quit. I’m starting again.”
He left after that—no dinner—and rode home. He lived three blocks away. While trying to get the garage-door opener out of his pocket, he slipped on the ice and the bike fell on top of him. He was able to dig out his cell phone and call his son for help. The next day, he sold the motorcycle to the executive director of the clinic for half of what he’d paid for it two days before. Eventually, the director who had purchased Karl’s bike cut the price again and sold it to someone else, at the behest of his wife.
Eventually, Karl was going to die. Eventually, we were all going to die. I understood this, but I wanted him to give me the luxury of forgetting it. I wanted not to have to contemplate his loss so vividly while he was still here. I would take a plane over a motorcycle any day, maybe because planes were what I was used to and because Karl had cut his permanent teeth in an airplane. Boats seemed safer than planes, until they didn’t. In 2003, Karl was part of a sixteen-person team that raced an eighty-foot yacht from Rhode Island to Germany. When the boat sailed away, I stood on the dock in Newport and cried, with good reason. In the two weeks that they were gone, they were hit by eighty-foot waves in eighty-knot winds. There was an electrical fire on the boat. At one point, a rogue wave smashed into the hull, and Karl, standing at the helm and tied to a line, was knocked against the cockpit. For three days, he couldn’t stand. For six months after coming home, he had a hematoma on his hip that looked as though someone had worked a grapefruit under his skin.
He decided he wanted to fly again. He bought the Sundowner and then got rid of it. Two years later, he bought the Cessna 175, then got rid of that. He said it was time to stop flying. He was done with planes.
I like to tell people that Karl would be the perfect person to be stranded with on a desert island: he tells a good story, can fly a plane and sail a boat, and could take out my appendix if he had to. He could entertain me, save my life, get me off the island. What could be better than that? I wanted him to be the brave and adventuresome person he was. He worked so hard at a job that was often relentless and depressing, and, if this was his pleasure, who was I to say it should be otherwise?
I tried not to say it.
The years went on. Karl bought an old lobster boat. He got it cheap because it was impossible to steer. He’d go out after work and take it a mile down the river and a mile back. He liked the quiet. He said he wished that there could be one more plane.
Karl’s mother, Jo, was still in Meridian, still in the same house that she and Frank had moved to when Karl was a baby in her arms. We drove down to Mississippi to see her three or four times a year. I enjoyed the five-hour drive, but Karl didn’t. “If I had a plane,” he said, “I’d go to see my mother once a week for lunch.”
Jo was eighty-seven when we started having this conversation. Karl was sixty-one. He felt as though the time for another plane had passed, and then he felt as though there was still a chance. He would say that he was finally free of his desire, and then that desire would come over him again, like a sort of malarial fever. He showed me pictures of the planes he wanted, including a homebuilt plane called a STOL CH750, which looked like a sixth-grade art project writ large. Over time, I learned to offer no resistance. “Pretty,” I would say, when he showed me the picture. I didn’t want to be the reason he didn’t have a plane, the reason he was gripped by fits of misery specific to a man who wants to be in the sky and is stuck on the ground. At some point, I’d had a revelation: it would be better for him to die in a plane than to keep talking about whether or not to get a plane. This isn’t exactly a joke. At his worst, Karl was like a sad parakeet sitting on a swing in a cage year after year. It was unnatural.
When I told him to get another plane, he said the matter deserved more thought. He gave it a few more years. His choices narrowed, then shifted. He reorganized his priorities.
While Karl pondered his options, I thought about what could and could not be controlled. In flying, three factors obtain: the skill of the pilot, the reliability of the equipment, and the X factor—the lightning, the flock of starlings sucked into the engine. Because Karl’s skills as a pilot were impeccable, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about birds, that left the plane as the one thing I could control.
“A Cirrus,” I said. “But not a used Cirrus. A new Cirrus. A Cirrus right off the showroom floor.” The Cirrus lacked the guy factor, but it was one of the safest and most reliable planes on the market—the Toyota Corolla of aviation.
Karl was genuinely horrified by my suggestion. He was tormented by the expense of his hobby to begin with. (Though, as hobbies go, there are many that are costlier, deadlier, and a hundred per cent illegal. Find the good and praise it.) He believed that planes should always be bought on the cheap, and that hunting for deals was an essential part of the mission statement. But, after years of conversation and analysis, test flights and looking at pictures on his iPad, I had finally achieved clarity.
He shook his head. “Too much money.”
“I don’t care if we have to sell the house. I’m not going to enjoy having extra money if you’re killed in a cheap plane.”
He was the pilot and I was the plane and the birds were the birds and this was our marriage. It was the best we could do.
Karl was seventy when we bought the Cirrus. The plane had fixed landing gear. Karl told me that it was prohibitively expensive for pilots over seventy to be insured for planes with retractable landing gear, because pilots over seventy didn’t always remember to put the landing gear down. The Cirrus came with a training course and an impressive maintenance package. It came with a parachute—not individual parachutes for the pilot and the passenger but a single, supersized one for the plane itself. Karl talked me through this. If something were to happen, I should pull the throttle back to idle. “Turn the ignition off if you think about it,” he said. “But chances are you won’t have to worry about that. If you’re deploying the parachute, the engine is presumably dead.”
I looked at him. “The engine isn’t dead. You’re dead. If I’m the one doing this, it’s because you’re no longer flying the plane.” There it was again, the inevitable future I was forever hedging against.
“O.K.,” he said. “That makes sense. So reach around and turn the key, then pull down the red handle above your head. It takes about forty pounds of force so pull hard, both hands.” He mimed how the pulling should go, a C curve and then straight. “Then the parachute opens, and you’ll just waft down. It works best if you’re above four hundred feet, so don’t spend too much time making up your mind.”
I would not picture the trip down after the parachute had opened, or calculate what it meant for our chances. I didn’t want to know.
By the time Karl got the Cirrus, his mother was ninety-seven, though ninety-seven in Meridian is about eighty-four everywhere else. Women just seem to last longer in Mississippi. I packed lunch in a large box and a cooler and loaded it into the hold. Karl was so happy to be flying again, and I was happy because we were together in the plane. I understood that I had no influence on the safety of the flight, but I was with him, and when I was with him I didn’t worry about it. If something happened, it would happen to both of us. I looked down at the green quilt of the South, all those small plots of land stitched tight, the snaking rivers and lines of trees, the beautiful earth as seen from a clear sky.
We landed at Key Field, where Karl had learned to fly. Karl’s brother-in-law, Steve, picked us up and drove us out to the lake, where we met Karl’s mother and brother and sister, and ate our lunch at a picnic table. Three hours later, we were back at the airport. It seemed like the best use of a plane I could imagine.
Steve waited to watch us take off. There were two runways, and ours was the only plane departing. As with everything else in Meridian, it wasn’t hard to imagine that what I was looking at was pretty much what Karl had been looking at sixty years before. In that way, the plane was a time machine that took us back to the past, to his past. We buckled up and waved to Steve. Karl did his flight check. I put on my headphones, the music-listening kind instead of the flight kind, and tapped on Philip Glass. Taxiing down the runway, I was thinking about how it had all worked out so well. After so much deliberation and perseveration, the right choice had been made, and, in our own strange way, we had made it together. As the wheels lifted off the tarmac, my door opened. I hadn’t latched the door.
The pilot’s headset does not communicate with noise-cancelling headphones playing piano music. With my right hand I used everything I had to hold the door closed, and with my left hand I was hitting Karl in the chest and frantically pointing down, down. We were ten feet off the ground, twenty feet. It goes very fast—planes, life. I tried to communicate with all available urgency and no words that he should PUT THE PLANE DOWN NOW. And he did. With very little runway left, he landed. He did not go into the field beyond the pavement. He stopped. He took off his headset.
“I didn’t latch the door!” I cried.
Karl was beaming. For him, this was not a story about my mistake. It was a story about his ability to rectify my mistake. “They taught us how to do that in the safety course. We had to practice this exact thing, how to land right after you’ve taken off.” Flight school! He had shown up, paid attention, simulated the emergency again and again until his response was ingrained.
We were parked at the end of the runway. We were parked at the very place that Karl had been unable to reach when he’d lifted the Super Cub as a boy.
“It would have been me that killed us,” I said. “It would have been me, and no one would have known.”
“You wouldn’t have killed us.”
“I could barely hold the door closed.”
“That was my fault,” he said. “I should have checked it before we took off.”
“I should at least be able to close my own door.” I imagined the door flying off, the plane tipping forward, nose down.
“I would have just circled around and landed.”
He would have figured it out on the fly. He would have landed the plane with the door open, closed the door, and taken off again. He would have done it without acrimony or blame. Later, when we were safely back in Nashville, in the car heading home from the airport, he tried to explain Bernoulli’s principle as it relates to air pressure, as a means of explaining why the door was trying to open, instead of being pushed closed. I understood none of it. What I understood was that there was no keeping anyone safe—one person remembers to tip the nose up for the landing, while the other person forgets to latch the door, and, in the end, it probably won’t be the nose tip or the door. It will be something infinitely more mundane. It will be life and time, the things that come for us all.
Which doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to keep myself from saying, Careful, call me, come right back. I will always be reaching for his hand. ♦
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