Sitting
in the Seat
mill job. It's different. It's so different that I could talk about it
till the world looked level and never make you understand what it's like. So I'll just try to give you a rough idea of
what it meant to follow such a trade.
I use the terminology "sitting in the seat",
because the pilots that I knew spoke of it that way.
In speaking of his plans, a crop-duster pilot might say,
"Naw, I can't go tomorrow. I've got
to sit in the seat." Or if he saw a
strange ag-plane parked on the ramp, he might turn to a friend and ask,
"Who's sitting in that thing?"
After lunch he'd likely say, "Well, boys, I guess it's time for me
to go sit in the seat."
I've had old friends call me late at night from far-flung
places looking for a job. "Y'all
got any empty seats down in that part of the country," they'd ask? So I use the phrase, "sitting in the
seat", because it was part of the lore of the trade as I came to know it.
I can think of very few reasons
to recommend this profession to a young man, and many arguments against
it. There is the chronic lack of money,
the worn-out old airplanes, the worn-out old trucks, the way you live, the
places that you live, the bad food, the long hours, the way you smell at the
end of the day. And of course, there is
the danger. There’s just no sound reason
for a sane man to enter into this trade.
Unless, of course, he has a love for flight that will
never be satisfied in any other way.
The only way to learn to fly a
crop-duster is to strap one on. And that's what I did. I learned to strap down hard in that thing. Heavy web lap-belt cinched tight across my
pelvis. Narrow shoulder straps pulled
tight across my shoulders. The complete
harness soaked with yesterday's sweat, soon to be displaced by the sweat of the
morning, to be replaced by the sweat of the afternoon.
My shoulders became callused to the constant sawing of
those straps across my collarbones. My
torso became accustomed to being lashed to the structure of the machine. My head, arms, and legs were free to be in
constant motion.
And when I strapped myself into that life, I knew that I
was seeking something more than a revenue-producing job. I was seeking something more than my need to
fully experience life, or the craving for physical challenge and mental
stimulation.
I was seeking something
more. Something I could not define, some
vague yearning that drifted out beyond my understanding. I was seeking myself,
my identity. I was seeking a glance
inside my soul. I was longing for something that I once thought could be found
in books, in classrooms, in intellectual discussions with other seekers.
But I willfully abandoned all
those conventional avenues into personal insight. I chose instead to return to the earth, to
confront myself face-to-face as a primitive man would confront the glowing eyes
beyond the safety of his campfire.
And my search was not
unsuccessful. But the things I learned
were not at all what I had hoped to learn.
For what I learned was that I was seeking answers I was incapable of
understanding, to questions I could not even imagine. I learned that my noble quest was in truth
quite childish. I learned that I only
imagined that I was worthy of sitting at a table with the Almighty and engaging
in a lofty exchange of views.
I learned that I was
pretentiously seeking insights into the core meaning of man's presence upon
this earth, when in fact I barely possessed the intellectual and moral
capability of successfully making it through a routine day of my insignificant
life.
I learned that the tools for
life had been provided. I learned that
the important questions were really quite simple, and that the most common, the
most ordinary answers were the best.
And if these things are true, I
might have discovered them in any number of different occupations. But as it were, I came to believe these
things while strapped into a series of beat-up old airplanes in a place called
South Texas.
I came to love the heat. Heat boiling out of my bones. South Texas in July, in August, in
September. One hundred degrees by
mid-morning, and by noon the wind would begin to blow. Great irregular waves of
rolling air. Thermals growing from the
surface of the fields and vaulting thousands of feet into the sky. Wind gusts driving around hills and mesquite
thickets, rolling down gullies and launching upward over limestone and
prickly pear. Shears of scalding air mixing from every
direction and twisting into tight, frantic little tornadoes of hot sucking air,
cornhusks, dust, grass, and heat.
I came to love the misery of it all. I came to glory in my rawhide body writhing
within that narrow cockpit, soaked in its own private ocean of dust, salt, and
sweat. I came to love the tight
steel-tube cage in which I daily went about my business. I came to love the shaking-screaming-heaving
of that madman machine.
I came to love the gallons and gallons of water poured
down my throat, and the way that same water flooded out across the surface of
my skin. I came to love the fluid
movements of the hinges and sockets of my frame.
I learned to load the hopper to the brim with organic
phosphate poison, and roll down those miserable short dirt runways. I learned to let it roll to the very last
ragged edge of flat dirt, and to lift her gently into the air. I learned to ease her across the broken
ground, tires brushing the weeds, to lift her over the bob-wire fences, to
float her into a gentle turn still riding on a boiling cushion of hot air
compressed against the surface of the earth.
I learned to balance her carefully in the turn, knowing I
could never climb over a tree rushing at the nose. I learned to carry that fragile craft within
my fingertips, to lift her across the rocks, and brush, and scrub oak. To suspend her between the power of my mind
and the tingling of my fingers, until finally I could feel the power of the air
began to build beneath my wings.
I learned to crack back the throttle with the oil
temperature gauge bumping against the red line, and to let her fall through the
turn for the first pass across a field.
I learned to hold her gently, to feel her slowly come alive with every
gallon of spray that flowed through the 44 nozzles behind the trailing edge of
the wing.
I learned to feel her come alive as the weight bled off,
feel her rise and soar and become a creature of flight. I learned to fold into my mind the patterns
of wires and fields and tree lines. I
learned to keep her low, tires kissing against the cotton leaves, and to brace
against the wild, turbulent air. I
learned to accept the tension of the harness as it bound my frame against the
sudden violent gusts, the great walls of broken wind rolling across the broken
land of South Texas.
I learned to move the stick with soft and savage thrusts,
to slam the rudder pedals from lock to violent lock. I learned to control through mind and muscle
the steel tendons leading from the flight controls to the living wings of that
aircraft.
I learned to slip her slick as glass between the wire
fences and the power lines stretched taunt above. I could sneak her through that slit in the
wink of an eye, raise the nose above the advancing tree line, and slam her over
hard into a vertically-banked turn.
I learned the violent, fragile art of executing those
turns. I could pull the turn hard and
tight for the precise few seconds, slam her over into a vertically-banked turn
in the opposite direction, and pull the stick hard back into my lap until the
g-forces tried to pull the skin right off my face. I could hold the weight of the aircraft in
the palm of my hand and caress the wing foil along the feathered edges of a
stall. I came to know precisely where
those feathered edges lay, and where they slipped into the ragged pits where
flight could no longer be sustained. And
I learned to slip along that broken edge like a squirrel flying through the
tender branches of the trees.
I came to know exactly how to
hold a heavy airplane, how long to hold the nose before allowing it to slice
down thought the horizon. I became a
master of the art of playing the wind drift through the turns. I learned to know the airspeed of the
aircraft by the weight of the stick in the palm of my hand, and the sound of
the wind flowing past the cockpit. And
even as the stick grew slack, and the flow of air over the wing began to break,
and roll, and shutter at the stall, I could still deftly nurse a few more
degrees of turn from that reluctant aircraft.
And as she grew light, and came
alive in ways that, even today, still brings a burst of joy into my mind, I
learned to set her free. I learned to set her free, to vault into the summer
sky, to soar into fantastic pivots, to plunge back again and slip against the
surface of the earth.
I could fly that airplane through the thick and
thins. I could take her down into a
thicket of live oak trees, oil field pump jacks, high-line wires, and
irrigation ditches without batting an eye.
And I could weave her into and over and under and around all that maze
like a snake gliding through the grass.
I knew exactly when to bring
the nose into the turn, when to break the dive, when to slam her flat and duck
beneath the wires. I knew how to ride
her as the airspeed built beneath her wings, how to hold her with the airspeed
being bartered for a few more feet of sky beneath my nose, how to drop her back
into a field, and to catch her in my fingers.
I learned to ride her over the wires, under the
wires. Down among the trees, down with
the weeds, and brush, and bob-wire fences. Hour after hour after hour. Turn after turn after turn. Throwing the flight controls from lock to
lock. Fifteen loads a day, 20, 30. Every
take-off in defiance of the science of aeronautical engineering. Every turn a sparring match with the laws of
physics. Every pass across a field an
opportunity for disaster.
I learned to go back every day. To live, think, fly on the absolute
edge. Until the banality of this routine
seemed perfectly normal. I might catch
myself one hot summer day, dozing off in a 30-second turn, and think nothing of
it.
I learned to relax.
Not to flinch. I learned to make
every heaving of the arms and legs count.
Perfect coordination ceased to be a matter of esthetics. Perfect coordination became an absolute of
aircraft performance. My body came to
move the controls with little instruction from my conscious mind.
Up, around, under, over, the aircraft soared. Wing tips brushed past objects at the
correct, precise, few inches. The tires
slipped over the leaves and grazed across the fences. My mind wandered off to other scenes, my
thoughts drifting a million miles away.
Some body/mind thing took over. As I daydreamed another part of my mind
computed fantastic intervals, rates-of-closure, distances, angles, speeds. My arms and legs moved without my being aware
of that movement. My eyes recorded a
thousand tiny details beyond my knowing.
The stick and rudder-pedals meshed in patterns as timeless as the
stars.
And the aircraft moved as with
a mind of its own. Diving into fields
and out over the trees, soaring into vertical banks, shuttering at a
stall. Diving back against the contour
of the earth, reaching again into the sky, seeking the pivot, the fall, the
rotation of the wings along the imaginary parabola that twisted deftly beneath
the high-line wires.
I came to love the violence of the air, the rush of the
earth a few feet below my seat. I came
to love the certain knowledge that my fate rested upon my actions of the next
few critical seconds. And I came to love
the way those next few critical seconds linked together, and together, and
together, endlessly into the hours of every heat-soaked, sweat-drenched day.
I learned how to sit in the seat. And I loved every minute of it.
********
previous chapter chapter index next chapter