Five Days in May

On May 2nd, I had an open booking in the middle of my day.  It was a gorgeous spring morning with light winds, temperatures in the high teens, clear blue skies and unlimited visibility.  I had already taken the Super Decathlon up to do Immelmann turns with a student and didn't have my next lesson - hammerheads - for a little more than two hours. 
With KXD tied up on the line, the Smith sat alone in the shade of the hangar.  I sat a few hundred feet away, watching, and chewing thoughtfully on a protein bar.
The Smith was imploring me to take us out for a quick rip.  There was no mistaking that.  You may think it isn't possible for a machine, in this case a collection of steel tubing, hand-planed wood and doped fabric, to give you a look - but, believe me, it is.  It's the same look a dog gives you when it simply must go for a walk this instant.  The Smith might as well have been sitting by the door, tail wagging, leash hanging from her jaws, whining softly.
With a sigh, I hop off the plywood box meant to house wing covers, engine blankets and tie-down ropes for a Cessna 150, and start walking towards the biplane.  It's a haphazard, circuitous root.  I stop to let the Cessna 170, that old flat 6 Continental clattering, roll by.  I casually wave to the pilot.  On the other side of the taxiway, I chat briefly with another aviator and, once the pleasantries and idle topic of the day are exhausted, promptly forget what the conversation was about.  With each step, my excitement builds.  The whining grows in volume and urgency.

The Smith in her corner of the hangar on May 2nd. (Author's collection)

A few minutes later, I've rolled the Smith out of her corner and into the bright sunlight.  I give her a thorough pre-flight inspection, lingering longer than usual in certain high importance areas.  I've noticed that I'm doing that with increased regularity and I'm fairly certain I know why.  Still, the anticipation prods me onward through a full circle of the bipe and her underside.  Everything is at it should be.
Not too long after, with the Lycoming growling in my ears, we're sprinting down the runway.  I've hardly touched the rudder pedals on this particular roll - save for periodic taps on the right pedal.  I've eased off on the forward stick so that the Smith adopts a slightly tail low attitude as we approach flying speed.  As I've planned, she calmly breaks ground of her own accord and we begin rising gently into the sky above Rockcliffe.
I haven't decided where we'll go or what we'll do.  I just felt like going up to have a look around, just for the fun of it.  The Smith and I consider the concrete carpet of Gatineau, the hills and the flat lands beyond as our destination but her little wings keep pulling us around onto an easterly heading.  Holding the leash, I let the biplane set the pace. 
We crawl along above the Ottawa River, chat a little with the flight service station at Gatineau, and keep pushing on to the east.  At Masson-Angers, we turn left to follow the Du Lievre River north past Beauchampville on the left bank and Buckingham on the right.
Beyond these small towns, the landscape settles into a narrow ribbon of puzzle-piece farmers fields centered on the river and flanked for miles by a sea of granite cloaked in green.  The river, once used move lumber downstream to the Ottawa, meanders north-north-west to the small town of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette.
There's something about this town.  We noticed it last season when we first flew out this way and loitered overhead for a little while.  We felt it again on our next visit but couldn't quite identify the allure.  It might be that the little town, known as Portland until the mid 1960s, is the only outpost for 15 or 20 miles in any direction.  It's beautiful but lonely up here and perhaps, this tiny speck of civilization soothes that feeling.  It might be how the town is nestled tightly around a set of crossroads nuzzled up to the river's eastern shore...or the way the sunlight glints off the steel grey roof of the church. 

A house destroyed the 1908 landslide in Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. (Collection Bastien)

 

The feeling is also one of inexplicable sadness.  It washed over us each time we orbited overhead, on days much like this one - when we had absolutely no reason to feel this way. 

After our second trip out here, the feeling persisted and I did some research.  Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette has many reasons to be sad.  More than a century ago, in the early morning hours of April 26th, a landslide swept down the western shore of the river - taking 3 houses with it and killing 6 people.  With the river blocked by mud and debris, huge blocks of ice were carried across the town, destroying a dozen houses and 25 other buildings.  In the end, 34 people were killed, roughly ten per cent of the town's population - many of them in their beds. 

Two additional landslides, in 1900 and 1912, as well as a 1903 fire, ravaged this river town.

The scene of devastation after the 1908 Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette. (Collection Bastien)

And maybe that's what we feel, what makes the air heavy - that lingering echo of catastrophe, careening off the nearby hills, swirling around the town and rising gently into the sky above.

After a few more lazy spins around the village, we point our nose west and follow it through the hills to Poltimore, then south to Val-des-Monts before picking up a valley and taking it west to Wakefield. 
Here, we turn south again to follow the Gatineau River home.

At this point, I became aware of a faint headache.  It was after 1 in the afternoon and the sun was strong and high in the sky.  Sunlight leaked through the propeller's disk, bounced off the Smith's nose and into my eyes.  I hardly ever wore sunglasses when flying and I'd likely been squinting for most of the flight.  In order to take advantage of the warm air on my face, I'd left my goggles on my forehead and now the pressure points were burning and seemed to be centered on my temples.  All this conspired to force my mind from the business of flying to the urgency of landing.
The circuit is not our best.  We're pushed out long and wide by the busy Saturday afternoon circuit. The final approach features more power adjustment and speed chasing than I'd normally deem acceptable.  And yet, I pursue the approach.  I'm sore and flushed from the sun.  My head is pounding and my eyes itch.  I just want to put the little ship down.
We rush over the perimeter fence and into the flare.  I could bail out of the approach here but I don't.  Instead, I bring the power off, the plane settles onto the pavement and skips back into the air.  We slide sideways for a few feet and touch down a second time before galloping at once into air again.  I see the edge of the runway hovering into view as my hands and feet work to wrestle the biplane to the ground. 
An instant later, the little ship, tired of flight, sags to earth and the wheels chirp as I manage to finally horse the biplane into running straight. 
We roll clear of the runway at Bravo taxiway.  My mouth is dry and tastes of ash.  My heart beat is crashing around inside my cavernous head. 
I am an idiot.
The Smith's only reply is the admonishing rumble of the Lycoming at slow idle and the swishing sound of the prop. 
"A good approach is a good landing," I hear my Dad say, as clear as though he were standing next to me, leaning up against the cockpit rim and shouting advice into my ear.
He's right.  That was a lousy approach.  I had plenty of reasons and many chances to break off and set up again but I chose to press the approach and then tried to save the landing.  I broke every rule I incessantly hammered into the heads of my students.  In fact, and ironically, I'd echoed my Dad just this morning.
I tucked the Smith into the corner of the hangar, laid an apologetic hand on her cowl and went back to the Decathlon and hammerheads. 
The hammerhead is perhaps the most exciting and most difficult maneuver in the basic aerobatic repertoire.  It involves a brisk pull to the vertical - until the wing cleanly cuts the distant horizon in half.  One must lean on the right rudder to stay straight during the pull and, once the desired angle is achieved, slight forward pressure on the stick is required to keep the machine from slowly rotating onto her back.  At this point, it's a waiting game.  As the ship climbs the vertical line, gravity inevitably takes over and her heavenward progress slows and will eventually stop.  The slipstream tightens around the airframe and gives the pilot a buffet, a trembling of the stick similar to what's experienced during run-up when the machine is stationary with the engine at high power. This is the only real cue the aviator is afforded. At this point, some four to five seconds after the hitting the vertical line, the pilot must add left rudder to begin the pivot, right stick to hold the wing down and slight forward pressure to keep the cut even.  If executed properly, the aircraft pivots through 180 degrees and travels earthward again.
There's a lot going on in the hammerhead, most of it counterintuitive - and it all happens more or less at once.  In the novice, there's a terrific desire, fueled by borderline panic, to stuff everything into a corner and then get frustrated about the unpleasant result.  With experience, however, time slows down, the process crystallizes and the hammerhead grows into the sweet maneuver it really is.  Of course, time doesn't really slow.  The sand in the hourglass keeps flowing at the same rate but patience and experience make it much easier to count the grains.
"Patience is a virtue," my dad used to say.  He used to say it all the time.  He kept saying it after he'd passed. 
When my wife and I had settled on a venue for our wedding - a building that my dad had built, in fact - we were faced with only two available dates, one in May and one in October.  Given it was already March, I was pushing heavily for October.  Mel wanted May.  After some discussion, she relented.
"Patience is a virtue," she said. 
I wept.  My wife had met my father once, and only for a few minutes.  After I had calmed down enough to question her about the phrase, she admitted she never really used it and didn't know why she had at that particular moment. 
I did, however...and we were married in October.
Over the next week, I flew the Smith four more times.  For the first two flights, I flew only circuits - at first stop-and-go landings and then touch-and-goes.  I concentrated on the fundamentals of speed, energy management and power above all else.  Keeping her straight while blind out the front had become almost second nature.  I went around a few times - once because of traffic on the runway and twice because I just didn't like the approach.  On one or two occasions, I rolled out to a slow walking pace, taxied off and went back out again so that I could simulate full stop landings.  I sank myself into sharpening my skills in the most critical phases of flight, shoehorning the tutelage into short intervals made even shorter by the biplane's faster approach speed. 
The circuit flights were relatively short - no more than 25 or 30 minutes.  This kind of flying in the Smith was just as taxing as the time I'd spent in the Pitts - the only difference being I still had lessons to teach in the Super D.  The physical workload was significant but mentally, it was a marathon.  I'd emerge from the cockpit sweating from exertion but grinning in triumph.
The second pair of flights involved circuits bookending a short jaunt out of the airport's zone.  The goal here was to give me a break and an opportunity to just relax and fly the biplane.
With each flight, I became increasingly aware that I had been hurrying the airplane, forcing things to happen before they naturally should.  The May 2nd flight in the midday sun was a perfect example; I was tired, uncomfortable and anxious to land so that I could uncoil myself from the airplane, get some water, shade and rest.  The unplanned extension of the circuit exacerbated that impatience and I then punched through every warning sign in an effort to put the airplane down.
The Smith was teaching me to be patient again.  If I did things just so, she would reward me with a gentle touch down and a well-behaved roll out. 
It really was that simple.  Good things do come to those who wait.

Fluency

My full-time employment at the Rockcliffe Flying Club remained on my own terms.  I set myself up to work Wednesday through to Sunday in order to keep myself available for the higher trafficked weekends.  The aerobatic program competed annually with the petulant nature of April weather, with its undulating temperatures and sporadic rain showers that often came unannounced with the fury of a monsoon.  May usually brought stability in the weather and a more or less constant stream of returning and new aerobatic students.  In the short term, I planned to fill the gaping holes in my schedule with short jaunts in the Smith.

I had plenty of opportunity in the days following our first flight of 2015.  The Smith and I launched on the 16th, 17th and 18th with the goal of recapturing the modicum of comfort and skill we'd built during the previous season.

On the 16th, we went east instead of west - racing along the south shore of the Ottawa River and across the urban sprawl of Orleans spilling out of the nation's capital.  Once the ferry crossing at Cumberland disappeared under the left wing, we turned right to a heading of roughly south-east.  Here, Orleans breathed her last gasps of suburbanization and the expanse of field and forest reigned.  Here and there, a small town or hamlet crowded the intersection of two county roads that, remarkably, ran straight and true for miles until fading into the dull, grey blur of the horizon.

I picked up a rare winding asphalt road, crossed a small patch of fields, then a forest that had sprung a cell phone tower from its pine canopy.  Just beyond, was J.P. and Maria's farm with the cliché red barn and its incongruous slabs of solar panels.  I guided the Smith through a few left hand orbits until someone emerged from the house and stood in the dirt courtyard, shielding their eyes with one hand while waving with the other.  The Smith and I went around the patch a few more times before waggling our wings and sweeping southward to crisscross the countryside.

I love this part of Ontario because it has remained largely unchanged since the days when we first took to the skies.  You could, as they did in aviation's infancy, take off or land from any of the fields spread around us - provided they were reasonably flat, devoid of ditches and you took care to avoid fences, trees or livestock.  Later, when the literal flying fields became aerodromes and then airports, the purpose-built installations at Rockcliffe and Pendleton were carved out of the wilderness or born from repurposed land.  Airplanes too became more specialized, more sophisticated - and they flew higher and faster behind engines of increasing power.  Still, they remained essentially the same - wings for lift, a tail for control and stability, a compartment to carry the aviator and an engine to provide thrust.

Rockcliffe's face had changed drastically over the years.  Her three runways had been whittled down to just the single strip - one being erased entirely while the other now serves as a taxiway.  Her expansive military hangars are gone, leaving only the faint footprint of their foundations and the occasional iron tie-down ring.  The song of the Merlin and the bass rumble of the old radials has long since faded only to be replaced by a chorus of small Lycomings and Continentals with the occasional refrain of a Kinner and Jacobs thrown in.  Purists decry this aging as the tearing down of national monuments while most are simply glad the old field exists at all.

Further east, and actually not far from where we are now, is the former RCAF Station Pendleton.  During the second world war, it hosted No. 10 Elementary Flight Training School (EFTS) where trainee pilots were given 50 hours on the Tiger Moth or the Finch.  The field remains largely as it did more than 75 years ago.  It retains its characteristic triangular arrangement of runways and most of the buildings from that era, however, the asphalt is in such bad shape that the tow planes and gliders mostly use the grass.

I can see the pale triangular smudge of Pendleton, neatly framed by the forest, hovering just over the nose.  It's well camouflaged and, if you're not purposely looking for it, easy to miss.  I quickly tune my radio to Pendleton's frequency and listen in.  Silence.  Well, outside of the blast of the slipstream and the growl of the engine.

My eyes strain to pick out any traffic loitering about the old airport.  No joy - and it's not surprising either.  It's lunchtime on a Thursday.  I'm very much alone in the sky's basement.  In fact, it's likely that I'm the only pilot flying around these parts.  At least the only pilot not getting paid to fly.

I smile in spite of myself.  I suppose this is one of the perks of being more or less unemployed.

About ten minutes later, still smiling over my how great misfortune led to me frolicking in the skies while everyone else worked, I am crossing the field at Rockcliffe and about to join the circuit.  There's only one airplane in the circuit, a rental flight in one of the club's Cessna 172s, and I've been listening to him plod around the pattern for the last several minutes as I flew inbound.  As I'm about to make my overhead call, he comes up on the frequency to say he's turning base.

This is good news.  As Andrew Boyd taught me during my apprenticeship in the Pitts, "flying these things is easy, it's fitting into the circuit and landing that's hard."  With that in mind, I fly a circuit similar to the one flown by the ride-hopping WACO.  It consists of a descending, U-shaped base to final at 85 miles per hour and carrying 1700 RPM until the flare.  In the Pitts, I flew a similar profile to a slant final, before making that final adjustment to line up with the runway as I crossed the threshold.  I can see well enough straight ahead over the nose in the Smith to render the slant final unnecessary.

The whole thing, from the end of downwind to touchdown takes about 25 seconds.

Still, given the 172 is on base for a touch and go and I'm overhead, this should work out nicely.

The only issue is that the 172 isn't where I expect it to be.

After squinting hard at what I would expect to be the terrain above which one normally flies a base leg, I catch a glimpse of the white trainer turning final somewhere past Beacon Hill.  The accompanying radio call confirms it.

My groan is instantly swept away by the wind, leaving only a despondent rumble in my chest.  I power back and trim for 70 miles per hour, which is the slowest speed I care to cruise at.  This is 10 miles per hour faster than the Smith's stalling speed and only slightly faster than the 172 final approach speed.

And so we come to every biplane pilot's rub. Two wings means double the lift but also double the drag.  These things can't glide worth a damn.  Rockcliffe affords little when it comes to off-airport landing sites so once you're in the pattern, the preference is to stay close enough to the field that you can make it should the engine quit.  The trouble is, you can't fly slow enough to avoid being pushed way out by a slower airplane flying a wider circuit.  The end result is that we end up wallowing around the pattern, holding our altitude until final and then increasing speed to 85 miles per hour for the approach.

It isn't dangerous or difficult, really - just backwards.

The end result is, by the time we're crossing the perimeter fence, we're a little faster than we should be.  I know I can carry a lighter power setting into the round out and bleed off the excess by being patient in the flare. 

I let the cushion of air beneath us flatten a shade earlier than I'd aimed for and the little ship skips back into the air.  It's an unpleasant feeling - hanging a few feet above the asphalt with the power at idle and the scenery rushing past in a frenetic blur.  I know we're floating more than a meter above the runway - I can feel it in my seat and in how the wings feel heavy.  I won't break it if I drop the Smith from this height but it will be a wild ride down the runway. 

This is the Smith talking to me.  Like any language, it fades with disuse.  After 5 months away, I'm only just starting to remember some of the words.

Instinctively, the left hand moves forward and the engine responds.  The wings, light again and invigorated by thrust, stop the Smith from settling.  With the lightest of pressure from my right wrist, we rise into the sky again and set up for another go.

Breaking 700 total time and 25 in the Smith on 18 April 2015.  I'm holding a sign displaying the numbers.  (Author's Collection)

On the 17th, we flew north-west to the drag strip at Luskville with the intention of racing against cars but there weren't any.  On the 18th, we flew a short patrol up the Gatineau River to Wakefield.  When we returned to Rockcliffe, I'd surpassed 700 hours total time and 25 in the Smith.
My time in the Smith represented 3.5 per cent of my total flying time over 13 years.  When I reflected on the simple mathematics, it dawned on me that the meaningfulness and impact of that time, barely a day, had quietly defined my flying life.

A religious experience

As the summer grew older our collective confidence increased.  While not yet relaxed, I was certainly more comfortable flying my new mount.  The Smith, while not yet completely trusting of her new jockey, allowed herself more, and longer moments of carefree aerial play.  I consider myself a grounded dreamer; completely aware of the gravity of my craft while allowing myself to believe that airplanes, while built as machines, possess a certain human aura.
I privately refer to it as a soul.  Like-minded aviators will understand my meaning.  The more secular reader may not.
When I was a young reporter, I was sent to cover the public opening of a local billionaire pilot's impressive stable of vintage airplanes.  One of my interviews was with the chief pilot and, when I asked him the absolutely asinine question of "what's it like to fly these things?" he said:
"At the risk of sounding cliche, Jonathan, it's a religious experience."
I loved the clip but did I really understand?  Was he being dramatic?
At the time, I had only just started dabbling in tailwheel flying and had less than an hour of aerobatics.  The bulk of my sparse time was in bovine Cessna products and slightly more refined Piper Cherokees.  I loved flying more than anything but, no, I don't think I understood.
I do now.
And so, as my ease grew, so too did the Smith's.  I swear that, as I slackened my grip on the stick, I could feel the tension melt out of her and fall away through the summer heat.  Her wings bit into the thin air with such a ferocity that I felt she was happy to be up here again, bobbing around in her natural element.  The propeller took greedy gulps of new air, driving us forward with each pass of its blades.  The flying wires hummed and whistled a tune in harmony with the Lycoming's bass track. The balance had been restored.  All was right with the world.
This continued as long as I kept things as they should be.
If I lingered too long while orbiting a small town and perhaps allowed the ball to wander as much as a millimeter...or if I touched down with too much speed and skipped back into the air, I could feel her bristle.  I had betrayed myself - given the Smith just enough to recall that it was no longer Al's hand guiding her but mine.
We began again, anew, each time.

The Smith and her home after a summer afternoon flight.  (Author's Collection)

This education, however, is nothing short of a love affair.
These summer days came in two variants.  The first, warm and clear under violent blue skies, prodded you into turning your face heavenward to be caressed by the outstretched hands of the golden sun.  You wore the second like a heavy, wet mantle.  These days cloaked all the world in sheets of silken mist and made the most familiar landmarks seem alien.  On such days, heavy with sweat and steam, one viewed the world as if passing through curtains hung one upon the next.
On these days, I stayed close to the field to practice take-offs and landings.  I very rarely stayed up for more than three or four circuits as the workload was high and, by virtue of the Smith's speed and gliding ability, wedged into unmercifully short periods of time.  Each one of these flights progressed in the same manner: my first landing was always tentative, the second was always a marked improvement of the first, the third was perhaps the best of them all and the fourth was so humbling it persuaded me to call it a day.  I always emerged from the Smith's cockpit soaked in sweat - as much from exertion as from the heat.

The Smith's cockpit.  (Author's Collection)

On those warm, clear days, I would pick a direction and endeavor to discover what lay on the far side of the nearest horizon.  Given our lack of a transponder, a southerly heading was ill-advised, illegal and surely upsetting to the man (or woman) moving glowing green blips around a screen deep inside the bowels of a basement bunker.  Still, that left us with the three remaining cardinal directions of North, East and West.
One one such foray east, somewhere past Orleans but not quite yet upon Rockland, a brief conversation with a good friend and aerobatic student, crept into my mind.  He'd mentioned he owned a farm house across from a large field where, years ago, he'd landed an Aeronca Champ.  I hadn't seen much of him this season owing to the fact that he'd spent the bulk of his time installing solar panels on the roof of his barn.  A thought seized me: didn't he say his place was around here somewhere?
I looked over the side and, much to my amazement, there was a large barn just under my left main wheel.  The barn's roof was covered in solar panels.  I swung my head out the other side and, with the bipe bobbing beneath me, spied a large field that was certainly suitable to land a little taildragger.
Could it be?
Had I stumbled upon this very place by accident?  And why did my memory of the conversation choose to reintroduce itself at this very moment where, high above these patchwork fields and surrounded by such beauty, I had plenty of cause of think of anything else?
As if to answer my query, my friend's red van came crawling down the long, winding, gravel lane towards the barn and farmhouse.  I swung the airplane around into a tight orbit.  Yes, it must be him - there's no denying it!  What luck!
I roll the Smith out of the turn, draw the throttle back and shed a few hundred feet as I swing around again for another pass.  The van is still now but half masked in shadow from the barn.  I am sure I can see a tiny figure far below, standing just to the side of the red van.  I imagine he's shading his eyes against the August sun, gazing up at this little airplane and its movements that seem far too precise to be chance alone.
I waggle my wings, claw into a wingover and return for another pass - again waggling my wings in greeting.  There can be no mistaking my intent.  I only hope it truly is my friend standing next to that van in the shade of the barn.
When I return to Rockcliffe and dig my phone out of my jacket, my hunch is validated by a series of enthusiastic text messages, each more flattering than the last.

The Smith, at altitude, against a beautiful blue sky.  (Picture courtesy: Charles Clark)

"You should come out and see our place!"  I'm finishing up at work, gathering my things to sneak off to the airport and steal away for a half hour in the Smith.  My colleague recently bought a lovely home in Chelsea on the shores of the Gatineau River.
"Sure," I answer, pulling out a chart.  "Show me where you are."
An hour later, the Smith and I are launching into the early evening sky above the old air force base at Rockcliffe.  We make a slight turn to the north and settle in for the climb to 1700 feet.
The Gatineau, at least today, is a Prussian blue - a wide slash through the southern extremities of the great Canadian Shield.  On either side, verdant flanks of the Gatineau Hills plunge sharply into the river's shores.  The Smith and I drone up this valley, careful to always stay within gliding distance of a field should the engine commit treason.  These fields, of which there are few in this valley, act as islands of salvation and the Smith and I alter our heading so as to hop from one to the next.
The float plane base at Chelsea crawls by.  My eyes search for my target: a dock jutting out into the river and adorned with two bright red kayaks.  I make a few passes over the dock and the house but fail to rouse any response from below.  Intent on making the most of this flight, I continue up the valley to the north - first to Chelsea and then Wakefield.
Wakefield holds a special place in my heart.  There's a fresh water spring, just outside of town, where my parents took my sister and I, nearly every weekend, to fetch water.  I remember the clang the metal trap door made when my dad threw it open and how the sound echoed down the cavernous mouth of the spring.  I remember the ferocity with which the water sprang forth and how cold it felt when my dad, with one arm wrapped around my waist, allowed me to lean forward into the void to collect some water.  I recall the drives, long and winding before the highway was built, and how we passed a number of gas stations with those old fashioned pumps.
More than two decades later, my wife and I honeymooned at the Wakefield Mill - where we ate our fill of steak frites, cheered on our football team in front of a crackling fire and spent an unforgivable sum on red wine and single malt scotch.  In the morning, with the sound of the river gasping through stands of old pines, we walked down to the village and along the old railway tracks, jumping from rotting tie to tie.  Every once in a while, my ears picked up the familiar, throaty hum of an aero engine and I would turn my face skyward and squint, searching.
Looking down now, eyes soft behind my goggles, I wonder if anyone down there is searching for me, drawn by the sound of my engine.
My eyes catch the iconic covered bridge at Wakefield.  Built in 1915 and destroyed by fire in 1984 before being rebuilt more than a decade later, it is one of the region's most photographed landmarks. From my vantage point, it appears as little more than a collection of crimson matchsticks dissecting the midnight blue slab that is the Gatineau River.
I elect to return southbound along the river and call again at my colleague's home.  After a few orbits, a figure walks down the dock towards the kayaks and stops by the river's edge.  I waggle my wings and I'm certain he's waving his arms in reply.  Another pass, another friendly dip of the wings and I rattle off for home.
The westerly flights are long, lazy tours.  They involve shooting a narrow alley between the Ottawa VOR and the communications tower crowning the ski hill at Camp Fortune before turning north west and skirting the Gatineau Hills escarpment.  These flights often include calling on the drag strip at Luskville and the now abandoned fly-in community at Pontiac before climbing and crossing the river into Ontario.  Here, eyes sharpened by the increase in general traffic, the Smith and I would ply the skies over Dunrobin Road from Constance Bay to Constance Lake before turning east for home.
For me, this is familiar territory as I've spent more than ten years flying in these parts.  However, in the Smith, I feel as though I'm viewing this landscape for the first time.  I'm always impressed by the beauty and simplicity in how the quilt of fields are stitched together. When the sun is high in the sky, the greens, browns and golds shimmer with intensity.  As the sun dips and the angle grows steeper, the field's deepen in color and seem to melt into an emerald sea with golden crests and cold, gray troughs.  The Ottawa river, snaking away to the west beyond Arnprior, reflects the sun as silver flashes off slashes of wet concrete.  The sky, hitherto such an emphatic blue, fades into a thin, endless slate.
There is a chill in the air.  A glance at the fuel gauge by my left knee convinces me to turn tail and flee for home.  Ten minutes later, back-lit by the setting sun, my wheels kiss pavement and the reverie ends for now.

Landing runway 09 at Rockcliffe after a late afternoon flight.  (Photo Courtesy Peter Szperling)

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the great aviator and author, once wrote: "and now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye."
These are lofty words, yes, but so very simple.
From atop my perch, balanced on the wind, I have seen and understood the magnificence of our world.  If one, regardless of their leanings or persuasions, cannot see God in so much beauty then they are truly blind.