Learning to Fly

When I was little we lived in southern California, Chula Vista, just south of San Diego. We lived in a ranch style house in a new development along with many other newly affluent middle class. My father was an aeronautical engineer working for Rhor Aircraft. He owned a white 1964 Chevy Corvair Monza, before Ralph Nader made it a crusade to stomp the thing out of existence in order to keep us all safe at any speed. What a crock of shit. I don’t need any goddamn crackpot lawyer setting the ground rules for safety for me. But that’s another story.

We would drive the thing across the border to Tijuana Mexico at least once a month to get haircuts at the old fashioned barber shop that smelled of brilliantine and talcum powder. I’d wait for my turn looking at cheap Mexican crime magazines complete with gory photos, trying to understand the language on the pages, understanding a few words here and there before the barber with the Yosemite-Sam moustache would beckon me up into the red naugahyde covered board that lifted me high enough for the barber to shear off whatever hair I had down to the number 4 or 6 blade length. The whole experience took the better part of a Saturday morning and was one I dreaded, and is probably the reason I no longer cut my hair.

My best friend Steve Warren lived across the gully and we’d made the fields and ditch our domain. On the west side, we dug subterranean forts beneath the old abandoned melon fields that Mr. Iwashita once cultivated, covering them over with discarded two by fours, burlap bags and dirt, leaving a shelf at one end where we’d make a fire over which we’d cook cans of pork and beans, pretending to be warriors. During one particularly dry Santa Ana day, around the time that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedys’ head off a spark from our fire caught the adjacent dry vines and grass on fire. We tried to put it out, Steve and I frantically beating it with an old mildewed piece of carpet we kept inside our lair for creature comfort, stomping and pounding. Steve ran over to their property and turned on a long water hose, but it was too short, and the water just dribbled out of the end anyhow, there was no pressure, as the flames quickly spread across the field resulting in the Chula Vista fire departments response, and a general neighborhood scene. That was the end of our fort days, and our network of hideouts were filled in, never to be used again.

We were good at causing the trouble that only ten year olds can.

Seems like we were always setting things on fire. Fireworks were illegal there in southern California, but we seemed to manage to procure them, usually from Steve’s older brother. We’d pop black cats and lady fingers over by the bamboo stand that grew along the eastern margin of the gully, taking refuge in the drain pipe, where Steve had stashed some old copies of his dads Playboy magazines. I saw my first breasts on the waterlogged pages of those Playboys, wondering what it would be like to actually touch, smell, taste those wonderful appendages on a real life woman. Just the thought made me dizzy with lust.

Sometimes we’d accidentally set this domain on fire, but we always managed to quell it before it got out of control, but not before it left a tell tale smoke column. One day the smoke signal caught the attention of a cop passing by, who immediately investigated and caught us in the drain pipe, loaded us into the back seat of his patrol car and drove us to our houses, which caused another neighborhood uproar, all of the middle class housewives seeing the commotion, coming out into their yards to gawk as the blue clad cop marched us up to our respective parent unit much to our humiliation and their embarrassment.

Damn was I in trouble.

I spent the next several weeks on restriction, but that was OK because I had a balsa wood flying model of a world war one SPAD airplane that I needed to build anyway.

During those years I was a lonely only child, and I spent a great deal of time at the public library there in Chula Vista reading everything from ancient Egyptian history to the history of flight. My hero’s were the early aviators, people like Octave Chanute, Otto Lillienthal, Samual Langely and the Wright Brothers. I dreamed of flying.

Deciding to do just that, I designed rudimentary gliders after the designs of these early pioneers harvesting bamboo from the gully where we once popped fireworks, cutting it into sections with my dads coping saws, bending wing ribs and covering my big flying models with my mothers good linens, starching them to stretch them tight over their gossamer frameworks. Some of the designs flew, some didn’t. Some were wild designs, like the one I attached to my bicycle pedaling wildly down the nearby hill at Sierra Way, crashing before any sort of airborne takeoff could be achieved, smashing the wing and myself in the process much to the amusement of any onlookers.

I was the oddity of the neighborhood, and the other kids mostly thought I was completely stupid, crazy or both. They took to calling me Peter Pan, taunting me every time they saw me, so I began to conduct my experiments in secret in the gully on the hill that ended at the ditch where the bamboo grew. My friend Steve Warren remained faithful, often acting as my assistant, steadying the wing as I’d charge down the slope, trying to get the glider to lift it and myself into the air.

One day we succeeded, but I had no way to control the thing, and apparently the center of gravity was way out of whack, and the thing lifted me up, up into the air, nosing sharply upward in a profound stall, and like Icarus, I plunged back downward, except instead of crashing into the sea, I slammed into the hard ground, severely spraining both ankles, and splintering the glider into a pile of bamboo shards, twisted cloth and wire rigging. Steve was seriously worried as I lay there screaming and writhing, clutching at my swollen ankles which were beginning to take on a life all their own. I finally managed to hobble home, hiding my injuries from my parents and every one else, despite the pain, filled with wonder and awe that I’d actually flown aboard a contraption of my own design and manufacture.

It wasn’t long afterward that some of the older neighborhood kids caught me behind the oleanders separating our house from the neighbors, pinned me to the ground and proceeded to endow me with a “pink belly”, slapping and pounding my bare stomach as I lay there screaming, crying, taunting “Peter Pan, Peter Pan”, in a cruel manner that only children know. When it was over, I composed myself and went home, not mentioning that either, just figuring it was my fate for being different.

But, I never built another glider after that, and it wasn’t long before my father was out of work as the aviation boom of the sixties came to an end, and we moved from southern California.

I gave up my childhood fascination with flying things for many years, until much later when I became an aircraft mechanic, specializing in what else? Structural repairs and airframe fabrication.