Aerial Strivings

Whole Earth,  Fall, 1999  

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ADRIEL HEISEY CUSTOM-CONSTRUCTS AN AIRCRAFT, FLIES, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TELLS THE TALE OF HIS MACHINE-BORNE SPIRIT IN THE SKY

I was eleven. I began making little rockets out of paperboard tubes and balsa, and launching them from the north pasture where there was plenty of room for stray trajectories. My family would gather around to watch, awkwardly off task from the pressing farm work, and I would oblige them with ceremonious countdowns. Despite their punchy little solid-fuel motors, my creations never got high enough to even touch the clouds. But wadded into their noses with the recovery chute was a prized and weightless payload that went up on every launch: my zeal to fly.

After the light-hearted flights of those little aerial minstrels, my first hang glider felt like a sled. The difference, of course, was that this oversized kite would carry my whole body, not just wisps of hope. I built it at fourteen, believing I was old enough to lift and carry, run and aim, launch and land without losing my cool. Joined to the bamboo poles and polyethylene sheeting of my homemade glider, I thought my spirit might at last have real wind in its sails. Never mind that I had never seen a hang glider fly, that I knew no one who flew one, and that I had no idea how to steer once airborne. The sheer exhilaration of flight would surely bestow on me all the know-how I would need.

Disappointment hit like artillery in a greenhouse. With each hurtling run down the hill behind the barn, nothing flying but shredded clover, everything seemed wrong: The hill wasn't steep enough, the wind wasn't strong enough, the glider wasn't light enough, I wasn't fast enough. I was having a brusque personal encounter with the hegemony of physics over desire, and it was a good thing. What I learned in those fervent days is with me still: Air is thin. The human body is heavy. To get the body airborne, everything must be just right. This should never be underestimated.

Fourteen years later, I piloted a sleek executive airplane across the country from Arizona. During my layover at National Airport in Washington, I drove north to visit my folks on the sprawling Pennsylvania farm where I grew up. Out in the barn my glider still hung like a dessicated bat from the rafters, where my father and I had hoisted it years earlier for ... well, neither of us discards things casually. Then the barn caught fire. I was away the day of the big blaze, and came home to find a smoldering heap where the cavernous museum of my youth once stood. I was adrift, cut free from the long chain of my own material culture. I flew back to Arizona even more pensive in the cockpit than usual. What had become of my early dreams?

The sky is big--big like the ocean, like the highest mountains. It doesn't take kindly to dilettantes. If you want to engage it, to know it, the sky can ask you to take your hubris, lay it on the altar, and plunge a knife through its heart--just to see if you're serious.

I was serious. I wanted to be at home in the sky. I wanted confidence and ease with its moods. I wanted to know all its secrets. So halfway through college I cleared aside all my other little ambitions. I would be a pilot. Not as a hobby, a distraction, or a furtive love affair--I would be an initiate into the aerial mysteries.

One night shortly before my commercial pilot flight test, I got up at two in the morning and drove alone to the airport. Corn pollen sweetened the air as I wound along the empty Lancaster County roads. I reached my arm out the window of my old Mustang, fingering handfuls of thick, damp wind as lightning bugs winked and crickets trilled. I was going to go up and wring myself out. Strapped in the Cessna, I climbed a mile above the earth. The air was quiet and black as space. For two hours I worked through my paces: flight at minimum controllable airspeed, 720 [degrees] steep turns, power-off stalls, full-power stalls, accelerated stalls, chandelles, lazy eights, spins, gliding spirals to touchdown, short- and soft-field takeoffs and landings, no-light landings, no-flap landings, best rate climbs, best angle climbs. Everything I could think of, I did. There was no horizon, no weather, no traffic, no flight instructor, no air traffic controller, no witness. The airplane talked to me about itself, as if it was glad to have a willing listener. I forged a bond that night that seemed to scribe new codes in my DNA. I could feel the sky through the machine.

The Seduction of Ascendancy

As a working pilot, I parlayed my livelihood into a rotating residency aloft, and the sky began to reveal itself to me. I instructed, ferried night cargo, spotted for crop-dusters, traced laser-straight grids for photo mapping, tracked radio-collared bears, flew ailing souls as well as those recently departed, swept office-holders and office-seekers on whirlwind tours, and stationed legions of troops on the front lines of business. Other people's purposes kept me airborne, but the lessons were all mine.