Clouds Come Bearing Gifts

Essay. My last flight with a dear friend.

Growing Clouds | Unsplash

She is ugly. Short stubby wings covered in laminated fabric. No fuselage, just a twelve-foot aluminum pole connecting the front to the tail, pedals, a control stick, and an open-air seat in front of the high wing. The tail is thin, with an oversized rudder and elevators. But she is beautiful, for how perfect she is for the job.

The man who built her named these planes Dragonflies. She is a tug, a tractor of the sky. Her job is to fly slowly, tow hang-gliders to the clouds, and then release them to their own silent flight.

My job is to fly her. It is a summer job, the third summer in a row, filling the time between studies and making ends meet. The best job a twenty-year-old could have.

“Pre-flighting?” Everett walks in through the open hanger door.

“Every decent morning.” I tap the wing. The taut fabric pings like a conga.

Everett looked thinner than last month, gaunt in the face.

“Did I see you fly yesterday?” I ask.

“Tried. You towed me.”

“Right. Dropped you in a thermal over the power plant at eighteen hundred feet. Did you climb higher?”

“Up to three thousand. But had to land; the chemo makes me nauseous.”

“Flying today?”

“No, may have to hang it up until I beat this thing,” he swallows.

I search for words to say, but I am too young to talk of life and death.

“Maybe it was my last flight,” he says.

He walks around the airplane, tugs on the strut, kicks the tire, moves the rudder with his hands, walks to the front. He leans over the seat and looks into a large side mirror the size of a baking cookie sheet.

“What is it like from your seat?” he asks.

“When I tow you?” I ask. Everett nods. “It’s work on the way up. I watch you in this mirror as we climb and chase you through the sky to keep you in the middle of the mirror in the turbulence. On the way down, I enjoy a quiet glide with the engine at idle.”

“Amazing.” He steps back and hits his head on the strut. He laughs.

“I have to go up and check the conditions before the hang-gliding students show up,” I say. “Want to come along? Another flight.”

“Yeah. Why not.”

We pull the plane out of the hanger onto the tarmac. I roll a pair of earplugs, stuff them in my ears, and put on the open-face hang gliding helmet. Everett does the same. He climbs into the rear seat and locks his seatbelt harness. I check his work and climb into the front.

The seat is minimal but comfortable. I sit upright with my legs extended forward, and feet on the rudder pedals — or rather, thin rudder bars. I turn the key, and the engine starts. It revs, then settles into a comfortable rumble. The engine is oversized for the small tug and the two people in it but just right for the fast climb.

We roll through the grass parking lot, still empty of cars, and onto the grass runway. The wind is light and cross. It smells of earth and young cornfields and tastes of greens. The engine is soon warm, and I push the throttle to the maximum. The tail wheel lifts. The plane lurches forward. In thirty feet, we lift into the air.

We fly inches off the ground to gain speed. Thirty-five miles per hour is all we need. I point the nose up at forty-five degrees, and the powerful rear engine rockets us upwards. Our angle is steep. I must look down between my legs to see the horizon. I look in the mirror behind me. Everett’s face is a grimace of terror. He sees my smiling eyes, relaxes, and smiles back.

He is an old hat at flying but not used to the raw power of my machine. His machine is propelled by gravity, controlled by his shifting weight. It is a pure wing, its organic shape borrowed from the expert soaring birds. Like them, it is a silent flyer, which only whispers in the language of gentle whooshes of the wind. Like them, it climbs in thermals, circling tightly in the middle of the warm air escalator, wing to wing with the hawks, on the way to the bottom of clouds. Hang gliding is the flying of childhood dreams.

We roar upwards, tearing the quiet fabric of the sky, aiming at the flat bottom of the cumulus cloud.

But these clouds deceive. They are not flat. They are inverted lenses. They sit atop a thermal. They are made by it. The air, warmed by the ground, ascends to meet the cold, and the cold wrings out the moisture and forms it into fog. The thermal keeps rising, pushes the bottom of the cloud, lensing it upwards, drags the fog with it, pushes it up into billowing shapes.

We are under the dome. The ground is clear below: a car on the road, a golf cart driving on a green field, an exhaust trail from a tractor. To the sides, a curtain of fog spills from the rising column, surrounds us, and severs the horizon in all directions.

We dive under the curtain, escape the dome, then climb along the cloud wall. This cloud is young with defined outlines, billowy fingers aimed upwards, without a saggy edge.

The morning sun casts our shadow on the cloud wall and paints a circular aura, a rainbow, around our silhouette. The wall looks uniform and solid, but our shadow dives into small valleys and darts towards us, sliding on the gentle bulges. The cloud sides are like bumpy lizard skin but rendered flat by the uniformity of the whiteness.

We climb. I have not been this high in the Dragonfly — eight thousand feet. It is cold. The wind sneaks into the sleeves of my jacket, burns my skin, numbs my fingers, my face. In the mirror, Everett is shivering, crossing his hands to hold on to the warmth. But his face is in wonderment. His ascents in a hang-glider end at the cloud base. He does not scale the sides of these sky mountains. This is all new.

I level the flight and circle away from the cloud in a gentle arc. We are almost at the cloud tops. Cumulus clouds fill the sky all around us. They are thousands of feet apart, but in the distance, they merge into a single field of cotton candy hills. White, beautiful, and inviting.

But they are great liars. They lull you into daydreams with their shifting shapes, ease your mind, and cajole you into trusting their welcome shade in the heat of the summer, into welcoming them overhead. But they pack a rage. And they snap at you.

On hot summer days, they inhale humid air, feed on its heat, and explode upwards. They grow and consume neighbors with aimless greed. Bigger ones eat the small, and grow bigger still. Caught in a relentless cycle of mergers and acquisitions, they absorb all around them in a quest for celestial monopoly. And then, too powerful, they forget constraint, grow anvil heads, forge lightning bolts, and pummel all beneath them in anger, wreaking havoc on the earth. But like all things too big, they soon cannot feed themselves and fall apart into derelict pieces, then slowly die and leave an empty sky.

I shiver. I see Everett shivering, too. I wave to draw his attention, point to the ignition key, and make a cut sign. He nods. I kill the engine.

Silence. Only the wind.

I nose the Dragonfly over to maintain its speed. I steer it closer to the wall of the cloud. Usually there is turbulence at the interface of white and blue, the cloud and the clear air, a downdraft to shake you from the highs of the heights and back to the human fears. But only stillness today. It does not make sense. Is it a gift to us? A gift to him?

We glide along the wall, skim the tops of the fingers bursting from the main cloud mass. We dip into them, the blue shifts to milky white, the air instantly cooler, our faces misted by the fog. Then, we are back out to the blue and dry. Sun blinds the eyes. Then we are in again.

Everett extends his arms and touches the cloud. For a fleeting moment, I see the world through his eyes: the magic, the gift of the spring sky. I glimpse what twenty-year-olds must wait decades to notice, wait to purify out of the minutia of existence through the filter of time. But my glimpse is fleeting — a young mind cannot hold onto profundities.

We descend in silence. Just the wind.

Three hundred feet to the ground. I keep the engine off and bank the plane to gain more speed, then slowly flare at the threshold of the grassy runway. I have done hundreds of landings in the last month. It is comfortable and familiar. We skim the ground and rub the tips of the grass with the front tires. The plane exhausts its will to fly and settles. We roll to the parking spot but stop a foot short. Damn.

I see Everett’s white knuckles wrapped around the support of his seat. I laugh inside but say nothing. He climbs out, throws his helmet back on the seat. His eyes are moist from the wind. He squeezes my shoulder. He smiles. He nods and walks back to the hanger.

On this flight, I learned enough to keep the silence.

Two years later, I received a note from Everett. He beat it, he now lives in Brazil with a new fiancé. He writes that ours was not his last flight, but those clouds were the whitest.

Twenty-five years after the note, I am about the age he was then. I remember every detail of the morning. I wonder if he does. It does not matter. I left a small mark on his life. He left a bigger mark on mine. We all do when we invite people to share our world.