Insignificance

In the terminal building of the Sudbury Airport, my father sits hunched over a telephone on a small desk.  With the handset cradled in his shoulder and a pencil poised over a scrap of paper, he listens to the dial tone.  A yellowed thumbnail grinds away at the splintering edge of the desk.  Eyes flit nervously from the blank paper to the windows overlooking a quiet tarmac and the unsettled soupy haze of an unhappy sky.
A few mumbled words, a pause, and then the right hand begins to work furiously - scratching what, to the inexperienced eye, is gibberish...a mess of letters, numbers and symbols.  The paper begins to rumple as it is caught between the pencil's tip and the writer's dragging palm.
All the while, the thumb continues its meaningless mission.
A mumbled thanks, the handset is replaced, notes are consulted and crammed into the pocket of a pair of dirty jeans.
Outside, a blue and white Piper Warrior waits quietly. 
Ugly, swirling clouds begin to peek over the western horizon.

"Don't do it," the voice shatters the silence hanging thick in the terminal building.  Mid-stride, dad stops, and looks over his shoulder at a man Ernest Gann would have described as "an old pelican."  He's sitting in a vinyl chair; twinkling eyes and unruly eyebrows working over the lip of a tattered newspaper.

"It isn't worth going," he reiterates. 

"I'll have a look," my dad replies...but the uncertainty and doubt is swelling in the pit of his stomach.  He makes for the door.

"Suit yourself," the old pelican replies softly.  Eyes and eyebrows disappear behind newsprint once again.

15 minutes later, dad is cocooned in the lonely sanctuary of C-GGDI's cockpit.  Having just climbed out of Sudbury, he's taken a heading roughly south.  It'll be 50 miles or so before he hits the northern shore of Georgian Bay then another 80 miles over the water to Wiarton.  He's considered taking the long way around by skirting the eastern shore of the bay but the weather would be on top of him by then...and his tiny craft wouldn't stand a chance.  He left Collingwood for Kapuskasing the afternoon before - stopping to drop off men and gear in Sudbury and Timmins - nearly 4 hours in the air.  Today, another 2 hour run from Kapuskasing to Timmins and then Sudbury.  Now, Wiarton beckons from across the bay.

Under the wings, the harsh coniferous wilderness of northern Ontario is broken by whitecaps whipped wild by the whirling wind.  Georgian Bay stretches out beyond the nose and crystalline arc of the propeller.  On either side, clouds billow and broil...building into ugly, cancerous masses choking the horizon. 

Rain begins to speckle the windshield.  The wind picks up.  The whitecaps below get whiter.

Fear in an airplane is a lonely and unforgiving thing.  It is cold.  You shiver and sweat all at once.  The numbing drone of the engine is no longer a comfort...but rather a constant reminder of your isolation and insignificance.  Every decision made up until this point becomes both monumental and meaningless.  One makes any number of deals and bargains, swears allegiance or fealty to any number of lords...good or otherwise. Fear whispers in your ear, breathes on the back of your neck, promises salvation in exchange for surrender.  It is quiet. And desperate.  And sickening.

The horizon melts away.  Everything is a uniformly damp blue.  There is no up, nor down.  He may be in cloud, he may not.  It doesn't matter. It becomes painfully evident that the bottom is falling out.

Less than 300 hours are set down in his logbook.  Another 5, perhaps 10 miles on this unwise course and he'll become the textbook example of a statistic.

My dad lowers his eyes and looks hard at the instruments.  His shoulders draw inward as if to steel himself against the onslaught of Fear and Fate.  I'm sure he heard Murray Sinton's voice, or Alan Coulson's, Biff Hamilton's...perhaps the more recent Ken Richardson's.

"I was scared," he told me 30 years later.  "Really scared. I should have listened to the old man and never tried it."

"What did you do?"

"What I'd been taught," he answered.  "Make a 180 degree, rate-one turn and get the hell out of there."

30 awful minutes later, GDI touches down at Sudbury airport with an unsettled bounce.  My dad walks through the rain, slowly...as if to wash away Fear's shroud.

Inside the terminal, the old pelican hasn't moved.  The newspaper is lowered and the crow's feet reaching out from the corners of his twinkling eyes crease and spread.

"Good to see you again, young fella," he says with an unseen smile.

"Welcome back."