The knack to flying, or, I’m on the jazz. Part the second.

After we landed, we got out and I really, really just wanted to sit down and duct tape myself to the earth, but sitting down in the middle of the desert is not generally considered a brilliant idea, so I just sort of squatted in the shade of the Citabria. It was a gorgeous day with perfect weather, all blue and hot, and I just kind of soaked it in for a while. Eventually my brain quit ridin’ spinners, and Victor went and took a little walk out into the empty and unpopulated expanse. (I reminded him to lock up before we went and immediately realized how silly that was.) I’d never been that deep in undeveloped area before, or so very far from other people. When I hike, I obviously stick to the trails, so I’m never far from civilization, as it were. And even when you’re on top of a mountain, you’re likely to get a plane go by, or have another hiker pop up on you out of the middle of freakin nowhere when all you’re trying to do is take your shirt off for while and not hurt anyone.

But now we were miles and miles from civilization. Even from a trail. The only plane around was sitting still on the ground. And I heard something I haven’t heard in years: silence. It was bliss.

As we walked back to the plane, I asked him more about flying. He told me how much he loved hiking, and especially hiking in places you can only get to by plane. He told me stories about flying solo into wilderness areas, places so remote and wild and untouched they still have dial-up. He just takes a pack, flies around until he sees a good spot to land, and then camps there until he’s ready to come home. I told him how genuinely impressed I was—I don’t know anybody who does that, or even could.

“Nah,” he said, leaning up against the plane. “S’not that hard. You just take a tent and a compass. Camp by a river or lake so you have water. Fish or hunt for food. Start a fire, no big deal. You break something [meaning a body part], you wrap it up. I carry this”—he pulled from his pocket what looked to me like a hydrospanner—”so if something’s wrong with the plane, I fix it. And I always carry a weapon, too, so if you run into a bear or snake, you jest shoot it.”

Then he took one testicle and used it to pound a stake into the ground while I sat on the other one like a beanbag chair.

Now, I’ve mentioned before my obsession with the A-Team. They shoot guns on that show. A lot. I confess it’s given me a bit of a secret affection for guns, as well as for driving cars off of conveniently placed ramps such that they flip upside down in the air and land on their roof, harming none of the people inside even though no one was wearing a seat belt. And this guy carries? I had to know more.

“You carry? I have to know more,” I said.

He leaned over the pilot’s seat, then stood back up again. “What do you want to know?” he said, pulling out a .45.

Upon viewing an actual gun right in front of my face that shoots ammunition bullets for the first time, ever, I had two immediate, strongly emotional and probably irrational reactions:

One: I really probably should have told someone my itinerary.
Two: My hatred and loathing for people who treat guns casually, enjoy frightening other people with them, or use them to shore up their shaky sense of their own manhood is soul-deep and eternal.

However, John “Hannibal” Smith, leader of the A-Team, favored the .45. He was so cool that when I was 15, I decided, having never held an actual physical gun in my hand, that my weapon of choice was also the .45. People laughed at me when I told them this, and rightfully so, because in high school I weighed less than the actual gun (once a strong breeze really did blow me over, although in fairness I was carrying a sousaphone at the time.). And even had I been competent with a gun, a .45 would have been a terrible, terrible choice for reasons you will see momentarily, if you don’t already.

(Howling Mad Murdock rarely carried a weapon, if you’re wondering. He primarily served as pilot and comic relief, only arming himself when he had to. Although he does fire a mean machine gun.)

Victor showed me how the different parts of the gun operate, how to turn on (and off) the safety, and explained a bit about the technical reasons why weapons work the way they do. (My takeaway: they shoot people very, very hard.)

“Now, of course, the .38 is somewhat different,” he said next, magically producing a second gun out of his lumbar region.

“You’ve been carrying this whole time?” I said. After I couldn’t be a military pilot anymore, I decided I wanted to be a spy instead. I would have been great.

“I leave the .45 in the plane so I have it when I’m out camping or flying around like this,” he explained. “The .38 I carry on me just because you never know what fool stunt some asshole is going to try and pull on you.”

Clearly this man and I have had very different life experiences.

He offered me the .45. “Do you want to shoot it?”

I hesitated. “Is that…legal?” Which phrase, incidentally, I am forevermore unable to think of without hearing the quasi-racist accent of Viceroy Nute Gunray in my head. Thanks, George Lucas.

Victor just laughed. I suppose a guy who thinks air traffic control is overbearing would not have a problem with me shooting his gun in the middle of the desert. He explained the right way to handle a gun (“always assume it’s loaded” and “don’t point it at anything you don’t want to shoot” I already knew, but “keep your finger outside the trigger guard until just before you shoot” I did not). He told me he was going to shoot it once so I wouldn’t be startled by how loud it was. (He always carries firearm-grade earplugs on him, but I just used wadded-up paper towels for hearing protection. Not recommended, if you’re curious.) He took aim at a small rise of dirt about ten feet in front of us and fired at the ground.

And it’s a good thing that, like Han Solo, he did shoot first, because holy fucking shit guns are loud.

When it was my turn, I discovered two things immediately:

Guns are heavy.

And also kind of scary.

I pointed at the same hill he had. He corrected my stance, then talked me through how to aim and fire.

“Aim for that kai-ote crap,” he said. Then, “It’s got a hell of a kick, so be ready.”

I frowned. “I’m not going to get knocked on my ass, am I?”

“You’ll be fine,” he answered, moving to stand immediately behind me.

Now, I knew about the kick. I had watched him while he was shooting, and sure enough his arm was gently pushed slightly upward when he fired. So I was ready for the kick. Ha ha.

Basically it’s like gravity reversed itself, except localized on my right arm, so the gun rocketed straight up toward the sky as though trying to escape the earth’s atmosphere. Also I screamed.

He laughed. “Good. Try again.”

Mortified, I did try a couple more times. I wouldn’t say I got much better, but I did shoot the hell out of that kai-ote crap. I still find guns pretty intimidating in real life, though, so now on my list is taking a gun safety course and learning something about guns so a) I’m not scared of them anymore and can shoot safely, accurately, and confidently, and b) I can wave it around and impress people. No, wait, sorry, just A.

Getting back in the plane and taking off were actually much better the second time. I was really starting to feel a lot more relaxed after seeing what the little plane was capable of. And then as we climbed back into the sky, Victor grinned at me over his shoulder and said, “Here’s something you’ll like.”

“WHAT’S THAT?” I inquired casually.

“You’ll see.”

He pushed the plane into a dive, pointing us basically right at the goddamn ground, and I did my best not to scream. I really was feeling fine about his control over the plane; it was just my stomach that was unconvinced. He aimed at the highway, lined up with it, and touched down on the damn thing, so we were driving (flying? ish?) a plane on the friggin highway.

“Bet that’s something you’ve never done,” he said cheerfully.

“You would win that bet,” I answered. “Um, is that…” Goddammit. “…legal?”

“Of course!”

Have you ever gone 125 down a highway? In a plane? It really is pretty cool. I was enjoying it despite the really uncomfortable stick I was sitting on.

“But, just, like, in emergency situations, right?”

“Pilot’s discretion.”

I did not believe him. But damn, it was fun.

“Here’s something else you’ll love. We’re going scud running.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

I actually hadn’t, and had to mentally replay the exchange a couple of times to recreate the phonemes in my head. But it only took a moment to see for myself what it was: he lifted a bare five feet off the ground and started skimming along across the open desert. Feet. Five of them. I watched the desert flash by at 125 per, so close that if I had opened the door, I could have leaned down and touched the ground. And undoubtedly lost a hand, but it would have been so worth it.

“This is AMAZING!” I said. I leaned close to the window. At 125 mph and that low, it felt like hovering instead of flying. It didn’t seem real; it seemed like we must have been tricking gravity in some way. It felt exactly like what I always thought being in a landspeeder must feel like, and I started looking for womp rats to shoot. I did a lot of whooping and hollering out of pure joy.

“We’re by my spread now, so we’re going to go check out what the boys are doing,” he said after I finally stopped bouncing up and down in glee. I mentioned earlier that he has a dairy farm, with 8000 head and 40 employees. I forget the acreage, but damn. I mean, I grew up in a rural area and we had 5 acres, a fact that impresses people who have lived in the city their whole lives, hyuck hyuck. But 5 acres is nothing to rural folk. If it takes you any less than a half hour to come in from the fields for lunch, you ain’t got shit.

He gave me an aerial tour of his dairy and his crops, then spotted some guys working out in a field on what I’m going to call a combine because I don’t know the names of any other farm equipment.

He chuckled. “Watch this. We’re going to play chicken with them.”

Before I could ask what he meant, he pushed the Citabria into a dive again, then pointed it straight at the guy sitting on top of the combine. Full collision course at top speed. I knew it was a game, and he wouldn’t actually kill anyone, but as we got closer and closer and faster and closer and I could actually see the color of the guy’s eyes (brown), I had to bite my tongue to keep from screaming at him what a fantastic horrible hilarious terrifying thing he was doing.

We swooped so close overhead that the guy actually ducked to get out of the way. They sure as hell live it up on the farm. I gave a shaky laugh as we pulled back up into the sky, ready to agree how fun that was and not at all a questionable use of aircraft. That’s when Victor said: “Now we’ll get him from the other side.” So we pulled around and did it again. It looked something like this, except instead of open desert there was a working farm, and Carey Grant is actually a combine.

But we’d been out for a couple hours and it was time to head on back to the airport where my car was. He kept low so he could show me all the different farms nearby: cotton and alfalfa and lumbago and dropsy. The day was warm but not too, but still the cabin was beginning to heat up after being in the sun. Heat is unfortunately one of the things that makes me most vulnerable to motion sickness, and since we were back to bumpity-bumpity-bump, I fell right back down the rabbit hole. I tried telling myself I was almost done and this was no time to quit, and quitters never win and cheaters never prosper, but I could tell I was losing the battle. I pushed up my sleeves and fanned myself, but it was just a matter of time before I went down hard. I took out the airsick bag, explained to Victor I was taking off my headset, and resigned myself to the price of biology. Then he did something I didn’t expect: he opened the window.

Seriously, you can do that? You can just open the window when you’re flying an airplane? As the air flooded around me, I began to re-compos my mentis, and the horrible weight of impending vomitus began to lift. Still, I was experiencing the extreme cognitive dissonance that occurs when you crack a window at 1000 feet. I put the headset back on, better in body but deeply confused in mind.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t realize you were feeling so poorly. That better?”

“Much,” I wheezed.

The good news: I didn’t throw up. But just barely. A dirty victory, perhaps, but a victory nonetheless. After we landed and taxied (and yes, he pushed the plane back into the hangar, because I was too weak and pathetic by that point), I told him how much I appreciated him taking me out so I could cross something off my list.

“Happy to do it,” he said. “So what else you gonna do? Skydiving?”

I swear, everyone asks me that.

“Yeah,” I said. I keep saying that and eventually I’ll believe it. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?”

“Nah,” he said. “People who jump out of perfectly good airplanes are fucking nuts. No way would I do that shit.”

So there you go. The guy who thinks it’s normal to turn a plane upside down and buzz his own employees thinks skydiving is way out of bounds. My personal motto is: Everybody’s crazy. I really think that’s true. We each have something crazy about us, and yet we all manage to more or less get by anyway. I find that to be something absolutely charming and wonderful and endearing about the human race.

And I’m crazy, too. Let’s not even start listing all the ways. But this whole Year of Fear thing is my craziest idea to date, and I think it’s beautiful that other people are willing to share their crazy with me so I can try it. So far it’s been fun, though. And I think the next nine months will be just as fun. Here’s to crazy.

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