#rv-7a

A muddy hiking boot fell on my foot when I opened the trunk of the car. Our gear smelled of decaying leaves and mud and rain. My other hiking boot was caked with mud, and stuffed under our blue, nylon laundry bag. Our wadded up rain ponchos lay on top of the rumpled day-pack. A shopping bag with a puzzle I’d bought for my granddaughter at the Smoky Mountain National Park gift shop was stuffed to one side. I opened our small cooler to find stale remnants of turkey and cheese sandwiches.

Roy dipped his finger in the fuel tank, rubbed it around the fuel caps rubber seal, and pressed it back on the tank. “Would you like help packing the plane?”

And then, it started to rain. Or perhaps I started to cry. Maybe both. Cold wet drops rolled down my face. I picked up my hiking boot and pitched it back in the trunk.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t have to be organized,” I said. “it just has to fit.”

He shrugged and turned back to pre-flight inspection. He was smart to stand clear of the badger hole.

I turned to sorting and organizing. Each thing I put my hands on triggered a memory: My soft, fleece blanket that I wrapped around my legs while sat on the front porch of our cabin in a cane-back rocker, drinking coffee and listening to the creek spilling over stones. The walking stick I leaned on as I clambered over slippery rocks and roots, up the side of a mountain, and down again. My rain poncho, dripping with spray from a waterfall where I’d stood gaping, opened mouthed, under a brilliant kaleidoscope of trees.

I put my face in my hands. I wanted to stay, to call the Smoky Mountains home. But that wasn’t the choice we’d made. It was less than a year since we sold our house and set out to be voyagers, and here I was, ready to bag the plan and set up housekeeping. I stuffed our gear in the baggage compartment and retreated to the FBO to make lunch.

Roy walked in and a cold rush of air followed him.

I handed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “We’re going to have to file,” I said. Clouds were breathing back and forth past a radio tower on a hillside across the runway.

He nodded. “Already done.”

“It’s going to be cold and wet up there.”

He nodded again.

I am terrified of flying in the clouds. All I had to say was I’m not comfortable with this, and we’d stay. But that would only delay the inevitable. It would be ripping the bandaid off slowly. Clouds or no, I needed leave. Or I’d never want to leave. I needed to get in the plane.

Two peanut butter sandwiches later, Roy and I were shoulder to shoulder in the plane. Our gear in the baggage space behind us still smelled of mud and wet socks.

I rolled the ear-buds of my CQ1 headset between my fingers, slid them in my ears, then pulled my red knit hat on. I said words of gratitude for a headset that allowed me the simple comfort of keeping my head warm.

I reached over to enter our flight plan on the Avidyne. My job is entering our route information and radio frequency. Roys’ job is flying the plane.

Roy pushed my hand away. “It’s a victor airway. I’ll show you later.”

While we were in the Smokies I’d promised to study our new Avidyne Flight Management System, and learn how to enter different types of flight plans. Instead, I’d filled my journal with the meanderings of my brain, gob-smacked by entire mountain-sides changing colors, and the sounds of my footsteps on Appalachian trails, and my fascination with the way my breath floated into the mist.

I turned away and pretended to study the light slanting through clouds and reflecting off the glass towers of downtown Knoxville.

“Knoxville Approach, Experimental 174RT. We’d like to active our flight plan.”

Nothing. No answer. Roy turned knobs on the radio.

“Knoxville Approach, Experimental 174RT.”

Still nothing. Still no answer.

I wrapped my hands around my sheepskin shoulder straps. My shoulders tensed. We were ready to blast off, but we couldn’t reach mission control. I heard a faint voice in my headset. I looked at Roy. “Did you hear that?”

He shook his head.

I heard it again, with our call sign. “You don’t hear that?”

He shook his head again and picked up his iPhone.

I could hear his side of the conversation with Air Traffic Control. I read our instructions as he wrote them down on his knee-pad.

Pretty impressive, I thought, that I could hear ATC with my new CQ headset, even if the transmission was faint.

Moments later we were airborne. The Smoky Mountains were off our wing, then blurred by misty clouds, then out of sight. The band-aid was off.

We were 2,000 feet above Lopez Island, making 155 knots in our silver magic carpet. The occasion was our first flight in two months. Our RV-7A had been sitting on the tie-down’s at Orcas EastSound airport, while we’d been off on our sailboat, exploring the Canadian Gulf Islands. Two months is an eternity for us in aviation years.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “It’s been fun sailing, but I’ve missed this.” It was true. I’d missed the sun was shining in the canopy and reflecting off the silver wing, watching ships left foamy wakes on the wide water of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, the feeling of the tilt of the wings as we turned downwind. “This is the perfect way to go out to breakfast,” I said.

The windsock was an orange cone at a slight angle to the runway at at Jefferson County. A cross-wind landing. I always squirm during cross-wind landings.

The gear touched down. I relaxed. Off the taxiway, past brown grass, colored flags waved in front of the Spruce Goose cafe.

There was a loud popping noise. Our plane made a wobbly, back and forth motion as we sped, then slowed, then wove is S-curves as we turned off on to a taxiway.

Roy cursed. He never curses. “Arrg. A Flat!” He banged his fists onto his knees.

The plane slowed to a stop. We climbed out and pushed the plane onto the grass. Flags were flying in front of the Spruce Goose Cafe. To the right of the restaurant there was a large hangar displaying the sign Biplane Rides. To the left was a maintenance shop and the Air Museum. Past that a row of neat hangars.

“It’s just a flat,” I said. Sure, we weren't up there, at the Spruce Goose, like the people already there, sitting at a table on the deck, sipping coffee, or eating Eggs Benedict, but things that could be much worse.

“I know,” he replied. “It’s just another thing. And here we are again, away from home, away from my hangar, and tools and…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“There’s got to be someone with some tools…” This wasn’t our first rodeo, I thought. This isn’t the first time we’ve been at some far away airport with some issue. Somehow, it always works out.

And then magically, as if I waved a wand, two fellas drove up in a pick up truck. “A flat?” They asked.

Jim was tall, with brown eyes that belied a sense of humor and salt and pepper curls that spilled around his face. Warren was shorter with close-cropped brown hair. They both wore jeans and flannel shirts. “I’m building a 6-A and I think I have a spare tube,” Warren said. They were part of our tribe, do-er’s and builders.

After a few trips back and forth to his airplane hangar, Warren provided not only a tube but a jack to lift the wing of the plane to get the errant wheel off. Roy opened the tool box we carry. With his small, electric drill to un-do the wheel pants, snips to remove safety wire, and the flat was fixed… as if by magic.

I squinted against the reflection off the wing as Roy and I pushed the plane to transient parking. Jim and Warren walked ahead of us. They’d agreed to join us for lunch.

“You two again?” The waitress greeted Jim and Warren with a smile and a wink. She was twenty-something and cute with a bob-style haircut.

“I’m a bit of a fixture,” around here, Jim said. Couples who’d driven in front town, or pilots, usually two fellas each wearing jackets, filled the restaurant. Warm, brown tables with comfortable, solid brown chairs.

“I’ll just have coffee,” Warren said. The waitress handed Roy and I menus. “I know what you want,” she said to Jim. She danced off to fill coffee mugs at another table.

“I’ve been coming here since they opened,” Jim explained. “My brother and I flew out of here when it was a grass strip.” He looked at me from under bushy eyebrows. “My brother doesn’t fly anymore.”

I studied the trail and selected my footing between trees and around fist-sized, square rocks, and tree-roots, like gnarled arms poking out of the ground and muddy puddles. “Or the Appalachia Muddy Trail,” I said. 

I laughed with him, but inside I was thinking of what we’d do if one of us were injured. The road was somewhere down the steep slope to our left, past dense trees and underbrush. If we needed to go for help it was either that, or running, stumbling and sliding two or more miles to the trail head. Neither was a great option.

That morning we studied the map of the Smokey Mountain National Park and found a place where the Appalachia Trail crossed the highway three miles before famous Clingmans Dome, the highest point in the Park. The trail looked like it ran along the road, so it couldn’t be too hard, we thought. And the views will be spectacular. We’ll take our time, we told ourselves, and a picnic lunch. Sure it was forty degrees and rainy. We’re north-westerners. We can handle it.

The trail was easy at first. Then it turned away from the road and rose steadily up the ridge-line. The silence was deafening. The wind blew a constant, rustling woosh in the tree tops. Our breath came in wet puffs of mist and drops of water splashed on us from the dense canopy above. We were immersed in trees. We were completely alone.

I started humming a tune.

Roy looked at me over his shoulder. “You’re humming,” he said.

“Yes, I am.” I replied.

My mind flashed to the two of us, in the plane, with the mountains below us, or the desolate New Mexico desert. It’s only the two of us then, alone, with the hum of the engine. I’m always studying the charts and the terrain, and thinking of alternates. Roy’s already thought of them. Roy is always calm and alert. I’m the nervous Nellie. In the plane, I crochet to calm my nerves. When I’m hiking, I hum. It’s a habit I learned years ago in the Sierra Nevada’s, hiking with my children in bear country.

“Consider it risk mitigation,” I said. “Want to sing with me?” He shook his head.

An enormous fungus growing on the side of a tree caught my eye. I reached up and tugged on Roy’s sleeve. “Look at that.”

In the plane I remind myself to look up, to read the instruments, to notice the terrain, rivers, farms, houses. Don’t forget to notice, I tell myself.

The sun was clocking its way to the horizon when we found a log suitable for sitting. We ate turkey sandwiches and said ‘Hello’ to the first people we’d seen all day – a group of fit looking young men carrying huge backpacks. Their hiking boots looked well up to the task of ‘just out for a few days on the trail’.

“Time to head back,” Roy said as he packed our supplies back in our small blue cooler.

“My legs don’t want to get up.” I pulled myself up anyway. Three and a half miles to get here. Three and a half miles back. We’d hiked steadily uphill along the ridge, so how could it be that the trail was uphill going back? My ankles twisted on rocks and my boots squished in wet mud. The light was fading. “Keep going,” I said aloud. “The alternative is sleeping out here in the woods, and that’s not acceptable.”

Roy tugged on my sleeve and pulled me back a step. He pointed at a break in the trees. The wide, folds of the Smokey Mountains spread out in front of us in a blanket of red and gold. It’s why we came here, in our little plane, across country, over mountains and deserts, where the plan B’s are not always obvious. To hike the Appalachia Trail, and to witness the glory of the change of seasons.

“Don’t forget to notice the awesome beauty,” Roy said. He wrapped his arm across my shoulders and we just stood there for a while. 

I turned to Roy and shrugged. “It’s almost lunchtime. Let’s take our picnic lunch over there and figure out what we’ll do next.” The FBO was a neat white building with a covered picnic table out front.

“May as well,” the manager agreed. “I’m Bob,” he said, and reached out his hand to help me with the lunch cooler.

Bob and another fellow joined us at the picnic table. “Where ya’ll from?” Bob asked.

“From Oregon,” Roy said. “Outside Portland.”

Bob said that he’d been to the Pacific Northwest. Spent some time in Alaska. Roy and I noshed on left over ribs, cornbread and pickles while we listened to his story:

Once you go to Alaska, you just fall in love. I went there for a summer in my early twenties and I stayed for thirteen years. Back then, you could literally pick fish outta the water. One day I saw this sign on a bulletin board that read ‘Free - Subsistence Fish Net’. I was curious and willing to try anything, so I looked the guy up. He showed me this net that looked like nuth’in but a big ‘ol knotty ball of rope. But it was free and the guy said he’d take me out and show me how to use it. First, I had to get my Subsistence Fishing license, so I went down to the office to do that. The gal behind the counter handed me a form that listed different types of fish, so I put ‘2 salmon’ and handed her back the form. She pushed it back and said, “We only deal in 100’s”. I thought that sounds like a lot of fish but I filled it in anyway.

The next day I drove to the fella’s house that had the net. We rolled it out of the shed and muscled it up into the bed of his truck, and drove out to this rocky beach that was down this steep hill. The guy showed me how to stick one in at the beach with rebar, then unroll it perpendicular to the beach, anchor the other end with rebar, then anchor the bottom with cinder blocks. We did all this while the tide was out. The guy said when the tide comes in, the floats on the top of the net would lift it up and the fish will swim right in. He patted me on the shoulder and said “Good Luck”, and drove off.

So I sat up there on the bluff and waited while the tide rolled in. Sure enough, the net lifted up when the water came in, and soon the net was roiling and boiling with fish. I ran back to town and got my buddy who had a little boat. I can tell you it was a mess getting those fish outta that net, and I understand now why these nets have big ‘ol holes in them, because pretty soon you’re just cutting away to get those fish out because they swim in and get their gills caught. My buddy and I spent all that day hauling fish up that hill and into his truck, and I missed work that day and the next two days while we hauled fish up the hill.

This fish processing place that gave us some space and we spent the next three days cleaning and freezer bagging fish. I gave a third to the food bank, a third to friends and I shipped a big Styrofoam box to my Mom and my buddy and I split the rest. When we were done with all that, I went back to the bulletin board and tacked up a sign that said ‘Free - Subsistence Fish Net’.

Roy and I laughed and smiled, and I said “Amazing. Thanks for sharing that story.”

Bob’s friend said, “Where’d you folks say you want to go?”

“Gassville,” I said, wrapping up the remains of our lunch. “I want to see where my Grandparents are laid to rest. In the Baptist Cemetery.”

“I know where that is,” he nodded, “I’ll give you folks a ride.”

After a dunk in the ocean, I ordered a vodka tonic, and gave in to being a tourist.

The next morning Roy and I squiggled in to a van with our RV fliers group for a tour of the island. Our first stop was the Nutmeg factory. We paid our admission fee and stood in a polite semi-circle while our disinterested guide gave us a route speech on nutmeg’s journey from flower, to nut, to apple pie. It took less than minutes for me to tune this out. I inhaled the rich scent of spice, and studied the people at work. My brain re-played the soundtrack of my own voice at work, complaining that my chair was not ergonomically correct, or that coffee was now 25 cents a cup instead of 10.

It was raining when we walked under the arch of the remains of the aqueduct at the chocolate plantation. Our guide disappeared under a tree, and to her surprise we followed her. She plucked a cocoa pod off the tree and broke it open. I tried to follow her explanation of how pods are selected at just the right time to ferment the fruit to turn it in to chocolate, but I was captivated by her lovely auburn braids, the lilting accent of her voice, the humid smell of earth and decaying leaves, and how all of our varied colors melded with the collage of yellows, and greens and browns of the cocoa tree.

She captured us in a spell of luscious cocoa fruit and we followed her like obedient school children to the production plant. She stopped and turned to us, her fingers held to her lips. She pointed to a tree. “Shhhhh,” she said. “I’ve been watching it grow for two weeks. Don’t tell the workers here. They’ll chase it away.”

The water wheel that runs the cane grinder was built in 1785, our guide explained. A young boy jogged up beside me. I smiled at him. “Is that your Mom?” He shook his head. “No,” he smiled back at me. “I work here.”

The child of one of the workers, my brain insisted. When we cannot make sense of something, our minds are happy to fill in the blanks with information that better fits our paradigm.

Our tour guide explained the fermentation and distillation process. She was bright, articulate, enthusiastic, and again, my attention was drawn away. I watched the men working around the fermentation vats. Had they worked here since they were boys? Will the boy next to me with his bright smile become the tired man sleeping in the portico? My mind bent under pressure.

Two days later, I woke myself up snorting. “Oh, no,” I nudged Roy with my elbow. “I can’t breathe.” My sinuses were completely clogged. “There’s no way I’m going scuba diving today.” I raised up on one elbow and looked at him. He opened an eye. “Are you disappointed?” I asked. He shook his head. “No, it’s fine. We’ll find something else to do and it’ll be great.”

I rolled out of bed and picked up the phone. “Hey, Cookie, are you going hiking to the waterfall today? Have room for two more?”

It was unlikely there would be sharks at the waterfalls. I reminisced on the previous day as I packed our things for hiking. I was so excited to go scuba diving. I’d sat on the rolling dive boat, strapped in to my gear, squeezed in between Roy and another fellow and listened to our dive master give us the briefing. “We’re going down the ledge to a sunken boat, and on the reef past that, we’ll hunt for Lionfish, and we will probably see some Reef Sharks.”

I turned to Roy. “What? Sharks? That’s crazy. I’m not diving with Sharks.”

“I’ve been diving with shark’s lots. It’ll be fine.”

“No,” I shook my head. “Sharks are not fine.”

I saw them off in the distance. Maybe they’ll stay over there, I thought. Then I watched the dive master stab a lion fish with a long, yellow pole and feed it to the sharks. It was like feeding the geese at the park. Since Roy said he’d dove with sharks many times. I didn’t think he’d mind if I crawled over his tank and put him between the sharks and me.

Finding my mermaid self at the underwater sculpture garden was much more my speed.

Our taxi driver sent his sons with us as tour guides for our hike to the falls. They pointed out brilliant pink feathered cashew blossoms. The Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, played in my head as blossoms exploded in a cacophony of color around us. Fruit hung in luscious plenty - bananas, mango, guava, cocoa. 

Nutmeg with its outer skin of mace

Cookie holding cloves

Cashews!

I chatted with the younger of our guides. In a soft, shy voice he told me he is half way through high-school. He loves art, and will go to college to study art. He plays in a band with his brother.

“I have a daughter a little older than you,” I said, “And she loves art too. And I live in a rain-forest, but it’s very different than this.” In so many ways… this is the goal, to stumble over the fence, to breathe in the spice, to step under the tree, to fall in to the water, to see that we are all so very different and so much the same.

We shucked off our disguises of responsible adults and joined our young guides for a swim

We found clear air 359 miles to the south, east of Palmdale, California. Still, there was snow on the mountains near Mojave. I was glad I’d worn a hoodie. The outside temperature was MINUS 5 degrees.

In Tucson, Arizona, Roy had the opportunity to practice a true cross-wind landing, in a 25 knot breeze, with a fully loaded plane. Who knew a plane could land sideways? It felt like our entire final approach was made at a 45 degree angle. My physics brain kicked in to gear, picturing the various force vectors, staving off the terror of what my alligator brain knows to be unnatural.

Why Tucson, you ask? To visit our dear friend Alan Hardy, of course.

Thunderstorms were predicted to roll across Texas, and we had a date to be in Florida, so we beat tracks. Our flight path took us across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. At 11,500 feet, I could see miles of endless beauty and desolation. I felt like an incredibly small blip on the timeline of humanity that has passed over this part of the earth. We skirted the restricted areas of 51, where there are strange looking buildings, and a surveillance blimp, and no roads leading in or out.

We made a short stop in Comanche City, Texas to fill the plane and empty the people. Toto, we are not in Portland, Oregon any more.

Our arrival to New Orleans took us over Lake Pontchartrain. “Wow,” I exclaim, then remember that it’s focus-on-landing-quiet-time in the cockpit.

“What?” Roy gave me a quick sideways glance. Then, looking over the lake, he said, “Wow, look at that bridge. It goes on forever.”

“Yes, that whow.” (The Pontchartrain Causeway, at 24 miles long, is the longest bridge over water in the world.) We had a clear view of the glassy towers of New Orleans as we glided down the slide to final. The entire city is cradled between the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico and the sea of Lake Pontchartrain. It felt like we were going to fly right over the city in to the Gulf of Mexico.

It was hot and sticky on the ground. I was tired and I had to pee. And still, I felt like jumping out of the plane and doing a happy dance. I took off my headset and kissed the amazing man sitting next to me. “Hey, Roy.”

“Hey, Sandy.”

“We’ve flown our magic carpet all the way to New Orleans.”