Aviate, Navigate, Communicate

Lessons from my father

It’s my dad’s birthday; he would have been 83 today if he hadn't died suddenly in his chair on a winter’s morning six years ago, reading a book, having just brought in a load of wood for the fire.

There were a lot of crises around us where and when I grew up, and I saw my dad approach and move through them with the same set jaw, controlled exhale, and firm forward movements every time. I had no idea then, when I was a child, what it cost him.

He was a bush pilot and an Episcopal priest. My earliest memories are of being in a single-engine Cessna somewhere over the Yukon Flats, leaning sleepily against the window, watching the shadow of the plane on the river, crossing over the endless oxbows and lakes that make the Flats seem to go on forever.

For the first few years of my life, I flew in small planes more than I rode anywhere in a car, and even though there were plane crashes all the time in Alaska, I was never afraid, not with my dad flying the plane. “Aviate, navigate, communicate” he would say. In that order.

Fly the plane, look around, talk to people: other pilots in the air; the tower, if there is one; anyone on the ground. Stay aloft, figure out where you are and which direction you’re going, and then reach out, so others know you’re out there.

Aviate, navigate, communicate.

The guy on the radio always sounded like the same one to me, whether we were in Anchorage, Alaska, Yakima, Washington, or Sioux City, Iowa: “garblegarblemishmashnumberletternumber” in a fast staccato growl, but Dad knew what he was listening for and his low, steady response settled whatever matter was at hand. We took a lot of long trips together, just the two of us, including flying all the way back across the U.S. to Alaska from the East Coast, so I got to sit up front, on the right, and study the instruments, the ground below us, and the horizon. And I studied him, too, the curve of the back of his head, the way he rested his fingers on the controls, barely touching them, it seemed.

It was rare for a bush pilot with as many thousands of hours as he had to never have had a crash, but he didn’t. He wasn’t just careful; he was also lucky. Plenty of good, careful bush pilots die in Alaska and elsewhere. He was cautious, though; he saw too much, I think; he knew how precarious life already was. Before he had his instrument rating, he flew low, under the clouds, following the river from village to village; that was as much risk as he was willing to take, even though he knew the land so well he didn’t need to see where he was going.

One of the recurring dreams I had in my twenties, when I was pretty lost to myself, was of calling my dad from somewhere dark, a city I didn’t know. I’d stayed awake, aloft, alive long enough to reach him, but I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know where I was going. He did, though; he would say “stay right there; I’m coming to get you.” And he would. (This dream may have had its roots in long bike trip I did on my own when I was almost 21. I wanted to ride from Massachusetts across Canada back to where my parents were living in North Dakota, but my knees wore out as I was coming down the (very hilly) North Shore of Lake Superior because I hadn’t understood the severity of the headwind I was riding into. The morning I woke up and couldn’t walk, crawling around on the ground to pack up my tent and sleeping bag, a guy at a gas station told me that it never changed direction, dashing my hopes that I would make it down far enough to take a hard right and at least ride to my parents’ cabin in Wolf Lake, Minnesota. Dad flew in and picked me up in Duluth).

Aviate, navigate, communicate. Or whatever you can manage. Stay up in the air as long as you can; try to understand where you are; reach out for help, because letting people know you’re there means letting them know they’re not alone, either.

My father’s archive: his caps, his bibles, his pilot’s log books

It’s Mother’s Day in Gabon; the young man who helps with our groceries wished me a “Happy Mother’s Day” in English, and then Abrahm, our flower guy, found us in the parking lot with a bouquet. He just brought MORE flowers and I feel like a queen. But the woman at the checkout at the Carrefour told Nate that she was having hard day, that she was sad, and in a country with an infant mortality rate as high as it is here, it’s not hard to understand why.

A lot of grocery items here have doubled in price since we were away on R&R; some store owners can’t get shipments in because they come through Dubai; people are apparently walking everywhere now instead of taking taxis because gas is so expensive that riding is unaffordable, and I wonder what my dad would have made of it all. He spent some time in Kigali and Kampala and he loved it there but the hard parts reminded him of the hard parts of Alaska, the impact of colonial trauma foremost, the machine he was a late extension of, trying to undo some of the damage but never quite sure if it was all just making it worse.

My dad wanted to be an old man, but he never really got to be. He was only 76 when he died, not old, not really, but mostly what he didn’t get was relief, I think, the chance to just let go. I don’t think he knew how and he didn’t live long enough to learn, which is why I’m still sad sometimes when I think about him. Mostly, though, I smile when I remember his twinkly grin, when I’d look to my left in whatever plane we were in, headset clamped to my ears, radio noise in the background. I was safe up in the air with him, wherever we were going, and I was happy.