the hundred and ninety sixth story

Once upon a time there was a helicopter seedpod, still holding to the tree, nervous and excited, waiting to fly.

the hundred and forty seventh story

Once upon a time there was a mouse who truly wished to fly. She stuck feathers to her ears, and, when that wasn't enough, she studied engineering and by the next year was making brand new designs of paper airplanes- stronger and more maneuverable than any made by man.

The Seventy Second Story

Looking out the window as we were landing in Florida, there was an egret, enormous and white, floating along outside my window for a very long moment. It was as though he was guiding us in; some sort of divine tugboat so gloriously graceful that he needn't a rope to pull us behind him.

The Twenty Ninth Story

Today's story takes place in Ohio. For my birthday, my mother gave me some amount of money and told me to use it to learn to fly. I wanted to go hanggliding, but much of Ohio has the wrong geography for that, and the amount wasn't quite enough for a flight lesson, so I decided to jump out of a plane. There was a place not too far from Oberlin where you could take a two hour course and then they would take you up; so I signed up there. The class was about 20 minutes of knowledge one might need when jumping out of a plane. This advice included the nugget that we weren't to have long in freefall and should pull our cords about 15 seconds after leaving the plane; but this was our first jump, and it would probably take us that long to start counting, so to just scream FUCK! at the top of our lungs about 5 times and then pull. (this was good advice)

The rest of the two hours was looking at a map of the surrounding farmland. We were supposed to land on their property, but again this was a first jump, and if we screwed up, we might end up at the neighbors'. Most of the farms we were to gather up our parachutes as best we could and find the nearest gate (gates were marked in red on the aerial view). There was one place where they were breeding thoroughbred race horses, and we were on no account to open any gates there; the woman had raised the lowest bar on the fences towards our goal and we should be able to roll under. "And THIS field. This field here- there is a bull. If you land here, fuck the parachute- there is a knife in you jumpsuit pocket, cut your lines and run for whichever fence is closest. Jumping out of a plane isn't dangerous. That bull though- that bull is dangerous" (I'm not sure whether this was good advice. Should one run from a bull? or back away slowly? Don't know, didn't have to find out)

The Twenty Eighth Story

My brother went to Japan for several years after graduating from college. The first Christmas he was gone, my mother and I flew to Thailand to meet up with him and his then girlfriend, Vika. There are lots of stories that come from that trip (the one about the hiking boots and lack thereof originates here). This is just a short aside, though. It is easy to lose track of days when traveling; Mom was more alert than the rest of us. Christmas morning found us on a plane on or way to Phuket. Mom pulled a tiny fake pine tree out of her carry-on and started singing christmas carols in the middle of the flight.

story 6.2

I love flying over mountains and seeing their shadows. I love seeing farms from way way up and trying to figure out what the very long, very light coloured thing is. I love flying over subdivisions, with their little curvy roads spouting culdesacs, and how they look like mesoamerican petroglyphs, if you're far enough up. I love seeing puffy clouds on the horizon, and I love the way the sun hitting the top of the cloud, and the shadow on the bottom, makes them look just like mountains reflected in clear lakes. For what may be the first time, I was descending through those puffy clouds right at sunset, and they were red the whole way through, and then, just as the cloud started feathering, and we were coming out, the whole world was momentarily rose coloured, before it became it's usual, still beautiful, self.