The 90°F June sun is beating down on me, and beads of sweat are running down the sides of my face as I strain to pull my Cheetah back up the taxiway. What was I thinking, buying an airplane that was so flippin' heavy? I stop for a break, wiping the sweat out of my eyes and scanning the 500 feet of tarmac remaining to my tie-down. Maybe if I pull the plane behind me. I turn around, grasp the handle of the tow bar with both hands behind my back, and bend to the task.
"You are so lucky I like you," I mutter to the plane as I resume my plodding up the taxiway, hair askew and sweat dripping onto the tarmac.
It is not one of our better or more romantic moments. But then, long-term relationships are never just about romance and fun. They are, as Joseph Campbell once said, the ordeal and grace of participating in another's life. And that principle applies, even when it comes to airplanes.
I have heard any number of pilots describe their airplanes as mistresses. But the purchase of an airplane has always seemed to me more akin to an awkward, arranged marriage than a simple and straightforward love affair. We look at an ad in the paper, compare it against our list of priorities and desires, and then, after only the briefest of how-do-you-dos and inspections, sign a heart-stoppingly expensive contract binding us to what is still a virtually unknown entity. I still remember bringing the Cheetah home, seven years ago, and then standing there, staring at this stranger in my hangar and feeling my blood go hot and cold all at the same time, wondering what on earth I'd just done.
That was a lot of hours ago. And it was only through the course of those hours that I slowly began to acquire an understanding of all the unique strengths, flaws, quirks and characteristics that make up the particular personality of the airplane I promised to love, fly, maintain and cherish when I signed on the dotted line, all those years ago.
Seven years isn't forever, of course. But even in that moderate span of time, my relationship with the Cheetah has seen all kinds of seasons and phases. There was the honeymoon phase, right after I bought her, when I flew her every other day with a mix of excitement and trepidation, knowing how little I knew her, but buoyed by the exuberance of the new worlds of experience and days of adventure that I now had the opportunity to explore. She was the center of my attention then, the thing around which the rest of my life had to revolve. I even moved up to northern California to give us a better place to play than the crowded, smoggy, and overly-developed landscape of Los Angeles.
The rest of my life was also a pretty rocky and uncertain landscape back then, and there were any number of lonely times when the Cheetah offered my best or only solace. She'd take me to a place where the troubles of the ground dropped away beneath us and I'd remember again the beauty of life and the possibilities and wonder that dawned with every new day.
I often think, in fact, that my attachment to the Cheetah is stronger because so many of my hours with her have been by myself. We didn't have the distraction of a whole family in the airplane with us. So my thoughts on many of those long flights were shared silently, and only with her. And the wonders she showed me were for my eyes alone.
If I could have painted the landscape of my life according to my best desires, I would have drawn it differently. But there are gifts to be found on any path, if you look hard enough or with an open enough heart. And the truth is, the intimacy I have with my airplane would probably be different if all those flights and adventures had taken place with other people on board.
Over the course of those hours, the Cheetah and I also accumulated a whole heap of varied experiences and moments that still fill the air whenever I walk up to her on an airport ramp. There's the morning we flew low over a perfect summer countryside in south Texas, the chilly preflight before departing New York after 9/11, a magical flight at 300 feet down the Florida Keys, a terrifying loss of horizon over the North Carolina mountains, the burritos and tumbleweeds in Pecos, Texas, the whales in the Sea of Cortez, the quaint island of Mackinac, Michigan, the intimidating stretches of the Great Canadian Shield, bopping over to a friend's private runway for a perfect springtime barbecue, struggling to trouble-shoot a stuck engine valve in the midst of the Rocky Mountains … hundreds of memories, too many to list or count.
Some of those times were magical, some were nerve-wracking, and others were simply there-droning along on hot, hazy afternoons, watching waypoints and cloud shadows pass by underneath the wings. And yet, looked at together, they construct the sum of our relationship, in all its layers and complexity and accumulation of moments known and shared.
But if life teaches anything, it's the eternal principle of change. No relationship stays constant, unless it or its participants are nine-tenths stagnant or dead.
The good news is, I now have more friends around to fly with, and many more opportunities in my life, both in the air and on the ground. I'm happier, but I'm busier, and I often spend more time on the road than I do at home.
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