Recollections

 I’m self-publishing this collection of essays, my best work to date.

Sample Chapter:

A Theory of Flights: Recollections

Author’s Note

This is about a span of my life, people, love, some questions, and the cascading of choices, the pages drawn from a few free, indulgent years, the events and their characters, for me, like pebbles dropped along a meandering path that would have otherwise been lost in the maze of memory.

 

 ~*~

 

Chapter 1

To Fly

 

The night is warm. The curvy amber road whips past us. The Wrangler’s top down, we roll in a violent cocoon of air, the hang glider strapped to the rack like a mighty lance. Tearing through midnight, we are electric. The world cast in shadows. No past, no future. A bursting, expansive sensation in our chests. They say darkness is for the broken. No one in his right mind lays claim to this. But we feel young, momentarily eternal. We move outside their windows.

We are sneaking into the mountains. At the turn of dawn, I shall give myself wings—my first solo. Charlie isn’t a flyer, he just comes for the show. He is laughing, one arm thrown to the sky, the other careless on the wheel. He says, Let’s take some tango lessons. Let’s do some salsa. Feet on the dash, I surf a hand in the slipstream, taking in summer by the lung-full, teething the wind. Let’s find some girls and get married, he howls. I laugh; I love it when Charlie is full of shit. His wife left him for a younger, richer man. She wanted someone without the mountaintop eyes. We are almost whole again. Charlie shouts over the stereo: Remember? There was that girl, the art history major?—Yeah, I remember her, the hot brunette. Sweet, wasn’t she?—Oh, yes, she could vaporize a friggin lake. I am nodding: Yeah, man. Air whooshing around us, the hang glider bag flapping. Harharhar, Charlie does his redneck laugh, grabbing his crotch: Yeah, yeah, I remember her, right here in my pants! What was her name? I ask him. A moment of silence, we look at each other. Damn, has it been that long? Charlie shrugs: She was fine though, wasn’t she? The best, I agree even though she was never mine. I’m still wondering what a dazzling girl, a respectable girl like that was doing a one-niter with him. Where is she now? We don’t dwell on her long. The CD spins onto another song, winching us along with the night. Up, up, we roar, past blocky apartments, neat rows of duplexes, manicured three-bed-two-baths, these silent sponges of decades.

We crest the foothills, take a dirt turnoff, four-wheel around a series of switch-backs, and crunch to a stop at a patch of gravel where we used to bring girls to show off the city like it was ours. Real estate speculators have bought the land, the whole series of sensuous swells that tumble all the way down to the valley. NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere. Charlie stomps thigh deep into the yellowing grass to piss on the placards. Kicks some over. Zigzagging back and forth across the sweep of the headlights, huffing and grunting, he ruts with his rage like an animal in the weed. A yelp. His head vanishes with a thud. I hear the crickets, then Charlie cussing, out there flat on his back.

We sit on the warm hood. He hugs his ribs, the cigarette between his fingers looking like a fuse lit in his torso. He takes a belly drag that burns up an inch, then stubs it on the bumper, muttering: This crap is gonna kill me. His attempt at the normal life brought the habit from a pack a week to a pack a day. Before the nicotine, the marriage and the technical career, Charlie was a gambler, a surfer, a climber, a self-taught soloist. Now, thirty-four, childless, and divorced, he is finding his way back to the mountain and the sea, looking for the paradise of his youth. Eating noodles and living out of his car was happiness for him. His twenties had been spent this way.

“We’re having a mid-life crisis, Charlie?”

“That’s a trap in your forties.”

“Most people make it past eighty?”

He tilts this head, clicks his tongue, and grins. “Will you?”

Charlie had never expected to live this long. I’d heard him talk about the earth humming in resonance with a person. He’d climbed in Europe, in Peru, Argentina, names of mountains so alien I’d forgotten. He’d surfed the entire West Coast from British Colombia to San Diego, and the length of Baja. In Charlie’s view, he has simply strayed. As if he hasn’t meant to go to school, get the job, the wife. Life has never been a debate for him. Heroism is barroom banter. Duty is a choice. His favorite quote: He who holds life lightly, holds it firmly.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks with a half-grin.

“If I can run off that cliff tomorrow …” There is an ocean of darkness between here and the city lights.

“And everything changes?”

You need a point to start anew, don’t you? How much will does it takes to alter the inertia of decades? I don’t know, but I suspect that some answers cannot be given like gifts. They must be discovered, they must be earned.

I’m not going to argue with Charlie: “If you say so.”

“Just wanna know you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

“Yeah, yeah. Shut up, Charlie.”

“Hey, just messing with you. If you gotta do it, you gotta do it.” He smiles and pounds me on the shoulder. That’s what I like about Charlie; he has natural empathy for madness.

A smell of hay, the ground parched, not a raindrop in months. I pop us fat Negra Modellos from the cooler. The beer slithers down our throats like dark nectar. I love the night fragrance of dry grass—almost like fresh bread. Sighs. Soon, the meadows will be gone forever, replaced with rectangular castles of million-dollar stucco. Entire mountain ranges are being snatched up lot by bite-size lot. The sky has lost its velvet. A thin haze, the color of peanut brittle, hardens above the carpet of lights. Cities are lit up, all that wealth flaming the heaven. Bright enough to look for dropped change.

In high school, we used to sit around talking big about how we’d score someday and we’d build a mansion together, right on this hill, tennis courts, hoops, a pool, Jacuzzi, a game room with billiards, foosball, and the best audio systems. The old song was playing: Do you really want to live forever? Forever, forever young. There was one everlasting summer when I came up here with a girl I was crazy about. Ran my old VW to the middle of the meadow, the grass as high as the door handle, cranked down the windows, rolled back the moonroof. Burgers and wine coolers, we’d crash in the reclined seats, telling jokes, making out, talking silly all night, the constellations grinning over us. Kisses I’d still die for. She’s married now. So are most my friends, children on the way. My buddy Rick actually mortgaged his waking hours for one of these mansions, although he failed to fill it with the toys we had once lusted after. He claims to have acquired pragmatism. Rick hasn’t taken a vacation since college.

The years evaporate, taxed away under the pressure of study and work and security. Suddenly, I see I’m standing at the halfway mark, my best hours done. It’s a fact I can taste in the foulness between my teeth. Youth behind, the body has turned the corner to middle age. From here life could be easy, managed in piecemeal with instructions and payment timetables. Is there another path? Can I abandon one for another, discard it like an old garment? How to spend the remainder of the time allotted me?

For a long time, I have listened with no small amount of envy to the geezers yakking about the good old days, when there was no hang gliding school, of a time when they ran down seaside dunes with homemade kites, planted their faces in sand, snapped a few collarbones. They waxed fondly of the endless summers camping out on the beach, pining for wind, free and impervious to the dues of life. Each flight was an experiment, trials and errors. They were the rare breeds, and their rank dwindled, attrition to injuries and aerial deaths or, simply but surely, age. Their wings were built from kits, or worse plans, and repaired with parts from local hardware stores. Words like thermal, ridge lift, soaring, turbulence, and wind shear passed from pilot to pilot like mystery or lore—the vocabulary of their microcosm yet to be constructed. Yes, there are invisible columns of air that will suck you up into the clouds many times faster than the fastest elevator. Pilots have fallen from the sky, frozen like bees caught in a hailstorm. Fatal mistakes, invaluable lessons: the lot of explorers. What I would give to know how those old guys must have felt when they first stood at the precipice with their wings, so very alone—young then, full of their immortality—and contemplated leaping into the unknown.

I have always wanted to fly since I was a boy, but acrophobia, circumstances, my own tawdry efforts, and plain cowardice have conspired to keep me from making any headway. Like so many valued things, the promises we made to our future selves, they slipped away without a struggle, snagged along the steep banks of the years. Some things cannot be controlled, say, death or the collapse of love, while others, I would like to believe, even the far-fetched fancies are within reach. If I can not simply step into a new life, one that is wildly different and more satisfying than the one I inhabit, then, at least, I want a year or two, unchained from all the others, unfettered by accumulated inhibitions, a time to ask irrelevant questions, to give into impulses, to attempt the ridiculous.

Last summer, I took tandem lessons on a hang glider towed aloft by an ultralight—one of those tourist setups where you take off and land on wheels, with an instructor riding your back the whole time. I ran out of money before he deemed me competent to solo. Then life interceded: Stephanie and I broke up—the girl I thought was my soulmate, the girl I wanted to marry. She had slept with a whole slew of guys, two of them our mutual friends. I tried forgiveness, I tried forgetfulness. I tried to be the better man, but my heart had turned black. Nothing seemed important anymore. I never got into the flight harness as I had intended. I wandered around the country for a few months, made some money, squandered it all away, and, finally, having forgotten even the rudimentary of flight, I began to think about flying again. A week ago, I bought a tattered old glider and an even more ancient harness. I could have done the smart thing and taken classes, but that would have marred the romance. So for days, I ran the glider down a gentle, fifty-foot hill to practice the launching and landing techniques I had read in the training manual.

The seed was planted a long time ago with a John Heiney poster I bought in college. It was a wing-shot, the camera mounted on the leading edge, pointing at the pilot. Several thousand feet above some barren mountain range, stark brown escarpments strewn with creamy patches of snow and a black lake. Behind, nothing but blue sky. He was fully suited, helmeted. The goggles and the oxygen mask covered his face. He could have been anyone, he could have been heading to the moon. All these years, I have imagined freedom like that, on gossamer wings.

 

~*~

You can pre-order this book and receive it in March 2012 by pledging to my Kickstarter project or wait till late 2012 when I can put it on Amazon & iBookstore.

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