All In The Family
Lane gives a ride in her airplane and gets much, much more in return.
By Lane Wallace
March 2002
A man
approached me in the Flying tent at the EAA's AirVenture
airshow last summer and thanked me for, as he put it, "working
a miracle in my life." He explained that his wife, who in 20
years of marriage had never been willing to go flying with him,
had finally agreed to go after reading some of my columns.
"That's
nothing," I remember thinking as I listened to his tale.
"You want to know a real miracle? I finally took my mother
flying with me last week."
Flying,
you see, does not exactly run in my family. My father is not a
pilot. His father wasn't a pilot. None of my uncles, great uncles
or any of the other men in the family were pilots. There were
some pretty impressive ladies in the clan—my father's grandmother
had a college degree (in 1880) and supported her family raising
rabbits, and my mother's mom worked herself through Smith College
in defiance of her father—and went on to get a master's degree—before
women even got the right to vote. My mother had a career in politics
and has run an environmental organization trying to clean up the
Bronx for the past 19 years. But none of them ever went near small
airplanes.
When
we were kids, my sister Gail always said she wanted to be a pilot—as
well as a fireman, a baseball player, an adventurer and an astronaut,
of course—but she ended up traveling the world and teaching
Spanish, instead. My computer whiz brother David in Silicon Valley
can kick my proverbial tail end in any computerized flight game
but, as far as I can tell, never showed any inclination to try
out the real McCoy. And even today, the only friends I have who
are interested in aviation are pilots I've met since I got my
license.
When
I learned to fly, I started hearing other people reminisce about
going to the airport with their parents when they were young;
of wearing their dad's old bomber jackets; of taking the controls
when they were too little to see over the instrument panel; of
knowing they wanted to fly before they could drive. They're interesting
stories, but I've always listened to them with the bemused curiosity
of a foreigner hearing tales of a strange land she's never seen.
My
flying has always been much more of a solo endeavor for me, in
more ways than one. When I soloed and then passed my private check
ride, there was nobody in my world to share the achievements with
me. So I just took myself out to dinner to celebrate and noted
the events with simple postscripts to my sister, who was in the
Peace Corps in Africa at the time.
My
flying has been so separate from my family, in fact, that my parents
didn't even know I was a pilot for the first eight years I had
my license. I'm not kidding. I didn't purposely hide the fact
from them—they knew I spent every weekend at the airport,
and that I'd changed careers to become an aviation writer—but
for eight years, it seemed that the subject always got mysteriously
changed whenever I tried to edge them closer to an idea of what
I was doing with all that airport time.
Looking
back on it, I can't believe that my dad never pursued the question,
even if my mother never did. Looking back on it, he says that
he can't, either. But the bottom line is, it wasn't until my first
book was published and my mom read the "About the Author"
section in the back that my parents discovered that their youngest
daughter was a pilot.
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