Tag: aviation

The Aviator Next Door: A Cross Border Love Story

I am a Canadian woman married to an American man. I landed in central Florida nearly eleven years ago at the behest of an irresistible adventure and romantic whim that became very real, very fast. We met online and married three weeks later. This is – for everyone who has asked the question – what I was thinking.

That he wasn’t an axe murderer was an auspicious beginning. I did a level of due diligence. I found him quoted in the New York Times as a Pan Am pilot talking about a plane shot down in Russian airspace. What he essentially said is that is what happens when a plane drifts into forbidden airspace. No sentimental or political analysis. Just the facts.

I would come to experience this as a seasoned pilot’s worldview. A+B = C. Little room for gray. Best attitude for a pilot navigating the core physics and philosophy of flight. Planes go up and planes come down. To do so safely, there are inflexible rules and checklists to follow. I would come to learn most pilots are similarly oriented.

In a clerk’s office in Kissimmee, Florida, our adventure took flight as we said our “I do’s.”It is fair to say our marriage was a stick of TNT in the iceberg of my life. I was single, solvent and settled in my Canadian life. All of a sudden, this guy meets and mirrors every adventurous notion I had ever had. He was fun, he was handsome and having been a pilot, I was pretty sure he had an innate sense of discipline and responsibility. No one had died on his watch.

As the months and years evolved with my American husband, the depths of the man I married slowly surfaced. He loves poetry. Rudyard Kipling. Robert S Service. Yeats. Robert Frost. He enrolled in art school in Italy where he lived for twenty-five years. There he discovered a talent for painting he had set aside during his working life. He became an expert interpreter of Renoir, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Picasso, Gerome and others. It was entirely engrossing to watch him at an easel, as he moved through the stages of creating a cartoon, transferring it to canvas and sketching out the form of the image before oils touched the surface.

Among many things we had in common, he loved to travel. Mind you, I always disembarked at the gate while he was the one who parked at the gate. Still, it turned out we had travelled to many of the same worldwide destinations. New York. Paris. Rome. New Delhi. Buenos Aires. Hong Kong.

You might think a love of travel would be obvious being a pilot and all. But not necessarily. Many pilots, he told me, were happy to start their work day in the morning as long as they got home for supper that night.

We share a favorite story about those hours long “getting to know you” phone calls back in the beginning. When he learned how many international destinations I had travelled to, he said with an eye roll: “This conversation might go a lot quicker if you just tell me where you HAVEN’T been.”

He once described landing in Hong Kong, one of the more challenging in the world at the time. He recalled the approach step-by-step as if living it while speaking. Every considered bank, every turn of the wheel, interplayed with the nuanced movements of the throttle and ailerons to line up the massive jet perfectly with the lights of the landing strip. In his recall, he was describing a kind of magic which, thinking about it, flying still sort of is.

We both love to eat. He waxed on about asado meals he had in Rio and Buenos Aires. Slabs of steak to order were brandished on swords carried by uniformed waiters. At a restaurant in New Delhi, they made chapatis in a deep round oven in view of the diners. He talked about meals prepared by guides on an African safari. I compared different meals on a horseback trek across the Andes prepared by Argentinian and Chilean gauchos.

We took a road trip to Newfoundland where I had gone to high school and still had many friends. It was outside our norm to eat fried cod we had just jigged that afternoon. There was something indescribable about bringing the man I loved back to my old childhood haunts. Something of a full circle moment contrasting the instability of my young life with the steadiness I found in the old pilot I loved.

I am grateful for the time and grace granted to me and my husband. Our marriage has not been without struggles and drama interlaced with many sweet spots. The years have done what years inevitably do. Today our focus is making the most of the time left to us. It has been an incomparable life we would never have experienced if we hadn’t met. It is boundaried but that was the deal we signed up for. Looking back, I wouldn’t have changed a thing except I might have grown up a little faster.

From that unconventional beginning, I sit here today on our farm thousands of miles from my home and native land on Canada Day. There is much I miss about Canada. I love our values. We are nice people by and large. Civility and mutual respect is a shared ideal. There is a social contract and tacit agreement to take care of the least among of to preserve the security and dignity of the whole. Moving to America and marrying an American has given me a front row seat on this culture and country that couldn’t possibly be acquired any other way.

Yet amongst all of the upheaval and overwhelm, a single human story of love and resilience survives. I will never fully understand the forces – internal or external – that threw my husband and I into each other’s path. We both recognize there has been something universal and timeless in it.

Maybe that is the conclusion and lesson to draw. With all that goes on outside in the world, what ultimately matters is what happens inside each of us. Pursuing our inner dictates and journey is what ultimately matters. I love my old pilot dearly and that doesn’t change – no matter what country we are in. And that is what I choose to celebrate on this national holiday. And will on the upcoming birthday in his country.

Are You A Hammer?

“When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

This quote is variously attributed to so many people that I wont attribute it to any. I prefer to play with what the concept might actually mean.

For some, it speaks to the narrow-mindedness of seeing only one use for a particular tool. There is something in there about opposites attracting and seeing something that the other needs. It can be argued that hammers and nails need each other to feel effective in the world.

There is also something in there about sticking to scripts we have internalized and faithfully observe. What we have learned. And in many areas of life, there are absolute “rights” and “wrongs” about how to do things.

Apply those hard-and-fast rules and success will be your reward. I find this particularly comforting when I’m flying. I like knowing that every pilot has been tested and approved by a very stringent set of standards on their skills and competence to fly the airplane.

This quote has also been interpreted to explain cognitive bias. Cognitive bias makes a mockery of so many academic pursuits. But can we apply the same formulae to artists and philosophers? The boundaries are much more blurry in these pursuits. Laws are at work that can best be described as fluid. Creative pursuits are more often informed by culture, zeitgeist, current affairs and spirituality, among others.

I should know. I have a masters in sociology. To this day, studying social groups requires a methodology that is hard to pin down with the traditional “scientific method.” It is more like a smorgasbord of journalism and keeping a diary. Indeed, the term “participant observer” was concocted as a methodology back in the day for what we would now likely call “embedding.”

That sticky bit of intellectual rationalization led to huge disclaimers assuring readers that the sociologists had gone to great lengths to ensure and preserve their objectivity. That strikes me as funny. Along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” If sociologists were so sure that their research methods were pure and unsullied, disclaimers would not likely necessary.

As in the example above, it’s good to know that pilots are following a successful flying formula. The gap between engineering and arts has always been huge intellectually. Engineers – like pilots – learn skills based on certain immutable laws and forces. We count on them to do that.

It does seem we all have certain built-in competencies. Maths ability over writing ability is a common example. But when we only stick to what we know and pursue only those areas where we are sure we can excel, growth stops. Without the natural human tendency to explore and keep trying out new ideas, the world would be bereft of innovation.

We often end up balancing two opposing forces in our lives: the comfort of the familiar or the excitement (and danger) of pursuing new challenges. Maturity informs us which path to pick when usually because we have already screwed up in this regard a few times.

And there is always that great X factor: the unknowns of pursuing a particular path and the general uncertainty of the future.

So which are you? A hammer, a nail or something else entirely. Are you locked into stale and outdated ways of thinking and acting that aren’t moving you forward in the direction you want to move? I think about this periodically. I haven’t actually decided which one I am.

Certainly in recent months, I have moved well beyond almost any of my known patterns and ways of being. It’s stressful, for sure, but also satisfying. It has been the price I have had to pay for any new skill, experience, accomplishment or romance in my life.

They didn’t all work out the way I wanted, obviously, but they all expanded my worldview and understanding every single time. That seems like a fair tradeoff for the inherent risks in following unfamiliar paths. I think I’ve learned enough to modulate my chances whatever path I take.

So there’s that.