Aloft Read online

  Better yet you can pack it into an airliner, then unpack it somewhere new and fly it low. I have a Parisian friend named François Lagarde, a pioneer of this technique, who has flown his powered paraglider across Tunisia, Niger, Cameroon, Martinique, and Thailand. Even the most timid traditionalists would have to admit that thereby he has ‘visited’ those places. Other than making occasional adjustments to the wing, he has little to do in flight but to look around. Lagarde flies low, sometimes below the treetops, following footprints and trails, chasing rabbits. He maneuvers among giraffes and elephants and smells the dry dung and wet earth, the grasses, trees, and flowers. He waves to villagers and alights like a bird in those villages where people wave back. He flies in the United States and France as well, and he talks of China next. All this may seem like another exercise in European adventurism, but Lagarde is not a faddist. There are good reasons for his obsession. He is extroverted and social and unafraid, and he wants to experience the world in its full vitality. He knows that the view from above is frank and unobstructed. And he has learned that the very low view, when it is also very slow, is often also intimate.

  But he and I have different goals in flight. Although my writing now takes me to far-off places in the world, as a pilot I am still most interested in the view of the place I know best, which is this country here. And although I understand the interest of the slowest European flight and admire the education that sustains it, I am an American pilot with an American taste for waste, a nervous hunger for speed and power only half justified by the size of the continent. It is true that I would rather fly my own propeller airplane where I choose to go than fly someone else’s jet much faster where others choose to send me. But I won’t pretend that I always cherish the view.

  I have even used speed maliciously to blind my passengers. For several years I worked as an air-taxi pilot along the Mexican border of west Texas. It was a wild part of the world, infested with smugglers of drugs and guns, and potentially dangerous for any public for-hire pilot. I knew it when I moved there, and I was determined to stay out of trouble. When one evening a rancher from the Rio Grande offered me six months’ earnings to ‘repossess’ an airplane in Mexico and fly it low into the United States, I easily said no. The rancher was feeling me out; it was clear that the repossessed airplane would be loaded with dope. But I was hungry, and I did take some of the more ambiguous flights that an older pilot might have declined.

  I flew small single-pilot airplanes. The danger for me, as for ordinary taxi drivers, was bad neighborhoods and aggressive passengers. The threat came not from the big drug cartels but from random freelance operators who could cross the Rio Grande from Mexico with a small load of cocaine and, once having arrived in the unpoliceable no-man’s land along the U.S. side of the river, call for an air taxi to fly in and pick them up, then turn around and fly them north, far beyond the border defenses. We were a local flying service with frequent and legitimate flights to the Rio Grande, which made us the perfect target for such a scheme. As a pilot, it was of little help not to know the contents of the luggage. You could be convicted of smuggling nonetheless, and even without going to prison you could lose your right to fly, which for a pilot is nearly the same. Worse yet, a high-strung passenger could, upon arrival at a lonely landing strip, simply decide to silence you. It was a real possibility. The ghosts of murdered pilots haunt isolated runways all through the Southwest.

  I thought I could control the danger by bringing along a strong friend – a 250-pound Chicano named Tweeter who worked as a mechanic at the airport and who played the copilot, glowering beside me in the cockpit with his drooping mustache and his wrapped sunglasses, armed with a fire extinguisher and a baseball bat, hoping for trouble. The worst flights announced themselves beforehand by phone: a harried stranger on the river, wanting immediate service for no clear reason, forgetting to question the cost. I want to think that we never carried narcotics, though in truth I do not know. I did fly through troubled currents, and because of Tweeter I flew through them without fear.

  But once when he was not at the airport I got a suspicious call for a pickup at a remote runway on the border, and I had to decide whether to set off for the Rio Grande alone. The caller was a woman, a stranger who spoke with the flat nasal vowels of the Midwest. She said her husband was sick and needed to get to Odessa, an oil town 250 miles north on the interstate. I took a minute to scribble a few calculations of time and fuel. She understood my silence as reluctance.

  ‘Just hold on,’ she said, and she muffled the phone with her hand. Then she said, ‘He says we pay cash – dollars.’ Apparently she was used to following her husband’s lead.

  I gave her an estimate of the cost. I said, ‘It’s a standard rate, by the hour, the return trip too.’

  ‘Who’s the pilot?

  Are you the pilot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He says just get down here fast.’

  If the man was that sick, why didn’t he go to a doctor there? The call was all wrong. The woman’s urgency worried me – it sounded like panic. But I started the airplane anyway and taxied and took off, because I needed the work.

  It was a summer afternoon, with clouds building over the jagged west Texas peaks and a dust plume rising from a cattle truck moving down a dry dirt road. My destination was the runway outside of Presidio, the last town in the United States, and the hottest. The route led south across a grassland basin divided by barbed wire into vast pastures, some cropped close by cattle to the color of dirt, others more luxuriant and nonetheless brown. Isolated ranch houses huddled with sheds under cottonwood trees. I had once loved that landscape self-indulgently, for the purity and beauty of its wide open space, and for its comforting diminution of my own existence – the scale it gave to my worries and ambitions and the reminder it offered me that these concerns mattered less than I tended to believe. Such was the appeal of the wilderness to me – something I no longer feel, the appeal of a surrender. But I was learning a new way of seeing the landscape now, which was more acute in its acknowledgment of the human presence there and of my own involvement. Flight forced this on me. The enormity and emptiness of the place suggested no longer its virgin splendor but rather its human history – from the first tentative routes along the dry creeks, to the assertive overlay of the transcontinental railroad, to the birth and now death of the small towns.

  Despite their beauty, the ranches were dying, too. Evidence lay not only in the decay of the old buildings, some recently abandoned, but also in the blossoming of flamboyant new estates. The estates were built by rich outsiders who made their money elsewhere and cared more about the esthetic of the land than about its productivity. I thought this was probably a good thing, since there was little risk of subdivision here, and land once wrested from the grasp of authentic ranching did seem to return to a deeper state of grace. Preservation, too, is part of the human landscape.

  But it was the international boundary that occupied me today – a trace on a map, a dirty little river where two unequal neighbors met, an artificial and dangerous and unfair and necessary line. The river glinted at the bottom of a deep geological rift. I came at it from the side, crossing the rift’s mountainous lip and descending steeply. The grassland soon succumbed to the desert, nature’s equalizer, so that along the river, by narrow scenic standards, both sides of the border looked about the same.

  The narrowness of the view is a problem particular to the ground. Few tourists ever went to Presidio, but those who did often got the impression that the border there hardly existed. Residents, too, because they freely forded the river, could share that illusion. But from the air the view always widens. Forget the revelations of a shared humanity that astronauts are told to talk about. Such revelations are pitched to placate the opponents of rocket ships and their budgets. The astronauts simply fly too high to see. What the ordinary aerial view shows is quite the opposite of a unified world. Beyond wind and water, it is human history that now sculpts the earth.

>   In flight you could never have mistaken the Rio Grande for just a river. With the exception of tiny Presidio and its satellite settlements, the U.S. side had been abandoned on private as well as public lands to the preservation of a new wilderness. Mexico by comparison made no excuses for its humanity. Big tough Ojinaga spread its dirty streets over the hills and extended a network of rutted roads to fifty miles of river villages – a band of hardscrabble civilization fastened tightly to the Texan underbelly. Somewhere below, a highway sign mentioned 500-year-old fields, but there was little real farming left. The border people got by as border people do, by smuggling. A few smugglers became rich and built big houses in fortified compounds, but most people merely survived. They let their churches and villages fall into ruin. And this, too, was obvious from the air.

  The Presidio International Airport had a single sloping runway just off the highway. It was called ‘international’ because it also had an outside pay phone from which, if you flew in from Mexico, you could in principle call on Customs to come up from the river for the entry formalities. This happened maybe twice a year. Presidio was probably the quietest international airport in the United States.

  Mine was the only airplane there that afternoon. I shut it down in the sun beside a wrecked trailer in which for a while a missionary pilot had lived while proselytizing the river people. He had told me he was a soldier in the army of the Lord. After only a half-year he had retreated, leaving the trailer with broken windows to collect the desert air.

  The sun lay low. My passengers came from the trailer’s shadow and hobbled toward the airplane holding each other and carrying a satchel. The woman was tall and bony and wore her jeans too tight; her husband was taller, and muscular, but walked hunched over, so that his hair fell forward in greasy strands across his face. His clothes were soiled with dirt. He stumbled, and the woman held him up. They pushed into the airplane without a word and sprawled onto the back seats.

  I said, ‘Wait a minute.’

  The woman snapped, ‘Just get us out of here!’

  ‘I want to know what’s the matter with him.’

  ‘He got a bug in Mexico.’

  But his face was bruised, and his eyes were strange, both furtive and aggressive. I figured that he had been beaten and that he was drugged, maybe against his will. He glared at me and mumbled something I could not make out. The woman draped her arm across his chest, pushing him gently against the seat. She touched her head to his and murmured soothingly into his ear. This seemed not to work.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ I asked.

  ‘Sneakers and a T-shirt.’

  ‘I’d like to see.’

  She handed me the satchel grudgingly. ‘There’s a gun, too, but it’s safe, so go ahead and check it.’

  It was a 9mm pistol. I dropped the clip, checked the chamber, zipped the gun into the bag, and put the bag up front beside me.

  The man said, ‘He’s a bitch.’

  The woman didn’t care. She wanted to get away from the border. She gentled the man back into his seat again.

  An admonition in the language of a commandant is often posted at airports: ‘Maintain thine airspeed, lest the earth rise up and smite thee.’ In straight English, something similar should be said about landscapes as well. With these two frantic people the border – with all its lurking menace, its incipient violence – had reached for me and laid claim to my involvement. I had become a local character, and it did not occur to me to refuse the flight.

  Nonetheless I was angry about it, worried not about contraband or a violent end at the airport in Odessa, but about the threatening attitude of the man in the back seat, and his apparent unpredictability. If from a distance now it seems obvious that the danger lay mostly in my mind, at the time the situation was less clear. Various possibilities arose – that the man could lose his temper and attack me in flight, that either he or she was a pilot and could take over, that partway to Odessa they might put a second gun to my head and force me to some remote runway where they could pull the trigger. I did not know who these people were or how their deal had gone bad, but I sensed they were dangerous to me, and without Tweeter there to protect me I instinctively took the offensive.

  After lifting off from the runway at Presidio, I leveled the airplane at fencepost height, so low that we were flying down inside the scenery, where the slightest distraction would drive us into the ground. It was a rough ride. For 200 miles I kept us there, without explanation, a short throw from oblivion. It was an act of self-defense but also, I admit, of aggression. These people had menaced me, and here in the air I could reciprocate. The landscape was my ally because I often flew it low when I was alone and I knew every rocky point and power line along the way. Now I could wield it like a weapon and assault my passengers with the airplane’s speed. I gambled that even if they were pilots they would not dare to grab the controls or try to resist me. And indeed they did not, but submitted to the landscape’s punishment, clutched together on the back seats in a beleaguered embrace. They were strangers to the aerial view – I saw that, and did not relent. Who knows what confusion passed before their eyes. After we landed in Odessa they shoved cash into my hands and fled without waiting for change. I flew home low, too, for the simple thrill of my escape.

  I still enjoy the escape of low and fast flight, and sometimes go out into the desert to chase at head height along dirt roads, banking vertically to make the turns, pulling up to keep the wingtips from dragging. But it is the richness of the genuine aerial view, something both higher and slower, that I keep returning to. I realize now that the aerial view has formed me, and that I have carried it with me from the cockpit to my more recent work of wandering and writing and reporting about the world. And it is odd how even on the ground, weeks from any airplane, the aerial view seems still to fit. It carries with it the possibility of genuinely free movement, and allows just the right amount of participation with the landscape – neither as distant as an old-fashioned vista nor as entrapping as a permanent involvement.

  2

  The Turn

  For most of human history evidence suggested that the sky constituted a forbidden realm and that if God had meant people to go there He would, for instance, have made them lighter than air. As late as 1670 – by which time it was known that air is a gas and has weight – a Jesuit monk named Francesco Lana who came up with an idea for a balloon had to abandon its development for just such philosophical reasons. Soon afterward, during Europe’s conversion to rational belief, the strictest religious doubts faded, but questions of safety remained. Over the centuries a number of determined travelers had equipped themselves with birdlike wings, stiffened coats, and various air paddles, and from high towers they had bravely jumped to their deaths. It was observed that shipwrecked sailors can tread water in the ocean, cling to flotsam, and swim to the shore – but that shipwrecked ‘aeronauts’ must fall from the sky.

  This became a practical concern after two French brothers named Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier seized upon the uplifting effect of hot air. They began launching experimental unmanned balloons near Avignon in 1783. As usual in the flying business, they soon had competition. After hearing of their success, a physicist named Charles accelerated his own experiments with lighter-than-air hydrogen, and on August 27, 1783, amid much fanfare, he released an unmanned gas balloon from the center of Paris. The balloon climbed into the clouds, drifted fifteen miles downwind, and landed near the village of Gonesse – where the terrified villagers bravely attacked and shredded the monster with sickles and pitchforks.

  The destruction of their competitor’s balloon came as good news to the Montgolfiers. Three weeks later, following a royal banquet at Versailles, the Montgolfiers launched another hot-air balloon, again unmanned, to which however they had attached a cage carrying a rooster, a sheep, and a duck. Why these particular animals, no one knows, but the general idea was to check the effects of high altitude on living creatures. The Montgolfiers predicted that the balloon would c
limb to 12,000 feet and float there for twenty minutes – and that the animals would encounter there the same atmospheric conditions they would have found in the mountains at similar altitudes. In fact, the balloon reached only 1,700 feet and after a brief flight landed about a mile away. Still, the flight was thought to have been a success because all three animals had survived – though the sheep had kicked the rooster’s wing. Maybe because he was more used to the aerial view, the duck had simply sat.

  The Montgolfiers now set to work on a larger balloon for the first manned flight. Since they were engineers and theoreticians, and did not propose to make the flight themselves, they had to find a pilot. King Louis XVI offered to lend them a prisoner for the ride – a hapless volunteer who no doubt otherwise faced a more certain death at the king’s hands. Had the Montgolfiers accepted, the first person to escape from the earth’s surface would have been a convicted criminal.