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For Puff’s dreaming state, I accepted the gift.
I slid down into Jenn’s cockpit, next day, Dan in the copilot’s seat, and after ten months on the ground, I started Jenn’s engine, taxied her down the ramp into the water. Wheels up as she floated, we taxied slowly while the engine warmed. Wheels up, boost pump on, flaps down, trim set. A few seconds for an engine run-up. Jenn was ready when I was.
“OK, Dan?”
“She’s your airplane,” he said. “Any time.”
Throttle wide open, in seconds Jenn was on the step, feathers of spray flying like summer snowflakes behind her. We were flying.
Ten months on the ground, a mind of fallen memories, worried once if I could ever walk again, fly again, here was the ground falling away beneath us, worries falling, too.
For all my concern, flying was home, same as ever it has been.
It wasn’t as if flying is a difficult skill, or that flyers love the challenge of the thousand tests it charms from them.
Pilots like the tests of instrument flying, aerobatic flying, soaring flying, seaplane flying, multi-engine flying, business flying, cross-country flying, airlines, formation flying, racing, homebuilts, antiques, ultralights, warplanes. Beyond each of those brings the sense that we are one in the art, touching the beauty of flight.
For all my worries, flying was home, same as ever it had been. I tried a few water landings, simple as always. A few landings on grassy runways, each one familiar. If anything, flying had become easier than it had been, months ago.
In a few weeks, I took my flying test, an hour of talk, an hour of flying. I was legal again, after the test, to fly by myself.
Why did I think it could have been difficult? The worlds we love, are they ever difficult?
Chapter 14
What would our lives be like without tests, odds against us, adventure, risk?
A few days later, word from Jim Ratte, the rebuilder. It had been eleven weeks, Puff’s body had been in his shop. All her wreckage had been lifted away, the broken silhouette, the shattered windshield, bent metal and fabric and fiberglass, the engine taken off for overhaul. Switches and wires had been replaced, looms of circuits had been tested, radios repaired. Puff’s gift of wings from Jennifer had been finished, painted, installed.
One day after her body had been rebuilt, Puff blinked again, her engine breathing, ready to fly! She had no memory of what had happened.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I saw her in a half-dream, sparkling new, her bow resting on the lakeshore sand. It was pure delight, to touch her again. No words, joy.
“She’s a pretty soul, little Puff.” Shimoda sat on the sand, watching the sunlights of the airplane.
“Do machines have souls, Don?” I knew she did, I had talked with her all our flying hours.
“Everything that reflects beauty, of course she has a soul.”
“She’s metal and fiberglass.”
He smiled. “You’re blood and bones.”
“Are you?”
He laughed. “I’m a thought-form, remember? Everything else you invented. We invented.”
“You have a soul, Donald, a spirit to express perfect Life, perfect Love. Puff didn’t?”
“Spirit overlies body,” he said. “Spirit heals all things.”
“Heals death.”
“Not required. Death is a different face of life. You saw…it’s love, shifting from one lifetime to another.”
He was right. Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear’s gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.
“And Puff?”
