While searching through the vault of old GRACK! columns, I came across this one from May, 2006. It has to do with memories of things I’m proud of and why there haven’t been more of them. Some of you probably remember it, but I have a lot of new readers, and the purpose of the Digital Potlatch is to get it all out there again, so here you go! — as always, republished here with the same photos that illustrated the original.
The second part of this column, which you’ll have to click through to read, gets into some deep psychology as well as laying out something that’s very important to me that I still haven’t done! This summer, I hope to correct that.
And of course, you need to play the raven call first. It’s a GRACK! thing…
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Not Coming Home for Supper
That’s what it all comes down to now, y’know?
For some of us, it’s personal: if you hardly ever got hugged for free, if the roads in front of you were ranked in order of someone else’s fears. I grew up inexperienced in following my heart and didn’t realize that one could build a life that way. The few times I accidentally managed it as a boy stand out like glowing beacons in the briny deep. Summon them closer and they appear, dragging long strands of seaweed as they rise.
When I was 11 years old, we lived in Germany at Rhein-Main Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt in a large apartment complex previously used for housing Luftwaffe officers’ families during the war. It was quite a pleasant place, better than what most stateside people could expect to find in the spring of ‘57. The three-story buildings were staggered at an angle in a giant zig-zag pattern, so that they created sheltered open space for parks and playgrounds. Each apartment had a balcony that looked down onto grass and trees. There were carports underneath the first floor units and rooms for maids (!) in the basement. I even had my own bedroom for a time.
I built model airplanes then, mostly solid wood or plastic ones, but every now and then I risked an example that could fly. My father had taught me how to “dope” tissue paper on a balsa wood frame, and I’d built a large-scale Lockheed F-90, a beautiful jet fighter of those days. The model was designed to fly with a rubber band driven prop, but I was offended by the idea of installing a propellor on a “jet” and fashioned a tapered solid balsa nose cone to replace the drilled one supplied with the kit. This meant I couldn’t fly it, even though I always wanted to. But I was proud of my craftsmanship, and I loved how light and aerodynamic the model felt in my hands.
Around the same time, I’d found an ad for a miniature solid-fuel rocket engine called the “Jetex 50” in a model airplane magazine and became obsessed with using it on the F-90. It cost all of $1.50 and came with half a dozen fuel pellets. The device, maybe half the size of a flashlight battery, was made to be mounted on lightweight gliders designed to take advantage of the thrust provided. I couldn’t really see how to make it work with what I had, but by now there was no stopping me: they didn’t sell such items at the PX, so I ordered my little rocket motor from the States. I’m sure it took forever to save up for it and even longer for it to arrive. [Note: This may be in error, see here.]
The Jetex consisted of a metal cylinder with one rounded end and a tapered, cone-shaped cap that screwed on at the other. According to the directions, what you did was place the solid-fuel pellet inside, thread a length of fuse wire through the opening in the tapered cap, coil the wire in a spiral, so it rested against the flat end of the pellet, and screw the whole assembly back together. Lighting the fuse wire caused the pellet to ignite, assuming you’d coiled it properly, and after a few seconds there would come a hissing noise and white smoke spewing from the nozzle for ten or 15 seconds. This sounded a fine thing to my 11-year-old sensibilities, but placing the motor on my model seemed impossible.
After mounting the Jetex on a piece of wood to test it and discovering how weak the actual thrust was, I figured the F-90 was too heavy anyway. A few days later I dropped the F-90 and broke off part of the tail. As I was reaching for the glue to make repairs, it hit me: I wouldn’t fix the model but dismantle it, and use the parts to make a rocket-powered flying wing…
And that’s exactly what I did. I took the balsa-and-tissue-paper sweptback wings, glued them together at what I supposed was the right dihedral, fashioned vertical stabilzers for the wingtips, and carved a rounded pod-shaped nose for balance. I mounted the Jetex on the top surface of the wing and excitedly took my new creation outside for testing, but the first few tries were flops: the little motor wasn’t quite positioned right and repeatedly drove the flying wing straight into the grass. Each time this happened, it meant I’d used another fuel pellet, so now I only had a couple left. I took the Jetex off the wing, moved it farther back, reglued it, and successfully glide-tested the new configuration in my room.
The next morning I went out into an open grassy space between the buildings. There wasn’t a soul around. Carefully I wound the fuse wire into a perfect spiral and loaded the Jetex. I lit the fuse, waited for ignition, and let go: incredibly, beautifully, my custom-built flying wing hissed off and up into the sky! It climbed perfectly in a straight line, turned gently in the breeze, and circled even higher. I couldn’t believe how well it flew. When the Jetex quit, the plane slowly and majestically descended, gliding safely to the ground. It had been a magnificent flight, witnessed only by myself. Even then, I knew this was something special: taking pieces from a model plane, building another aircraft spontaneously from scratch, attaching a solid-fuel rocket motor, and having the darned thing actually fly! Not only fly, but fly higher and better than anything I’d ever built before.
My memory of the day my flying wing circled to the sky is clear and filled with private joy. Yet at the time, there wasn’t any way to share this singular accomplishment. My father was an Air Force pilot, but it was as if he didn’t get it. He had to care, because he was a pilot, but seemed more concerned that I’d taken apart a perfectly good F-90. I went to bed thinking he just didn’t believe me.
Twenty-some years later I’d settled down in Maryland, the land of my parents’ birth, where I used to launch my sailing kayak or a leaky wooden boat to go exploring on the Chester River. My favorite part of almost every outing was landing on a strip of deserted shoreline somewhere, even if only for a minute. When the tide first went out, the quiet beaches were clean and unmarked. At those times when I put my foot out on the sand, I left the only print that half a day had ever seen. There was something mysterious and rejuvenating about the process, walking barefoot on a spit of rippled sand. I often thought I’d like to take a private camping trip along the river or the bay, find a little tide-washed piece of beach and build a campfire, wrap up in a sleeping bag, and spend the night there all alone. I pictured it frequently in my mind, how I’d wake up with the dawn and shove off early in the morning when the mist hung low above the water. The thing is, though, I never did it. In 24 years of living on the Eastern Shore, I did a lot of crazy, wonderful things, but I never camped out on the river or the bay.
And now we’re in New Mexico. The mountains are high and wild, but there are trails, and some of them take days to hike. It’s been nearly seven years, however, and I haven’t spent a night out in the high country, on my own or otherwise. Every day for 60 years I’ve mixed sand into my sugar and had to spit out my dessert. My father’s dead, my mother’s old, my wife has shouldered 30 years of frowns, and I have had enough.
I know a place where I can go and wrap my body in a blanket when the sun drops, far below. I want to hear a cold wind whistle in the spruces and see my soul reflected in a dream. I’ll come down in the morning, maybe, have myself some breakfast and a bath.
No supper that night, though, and nothing for the bears.
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