|
It has been a wonderful additional skill, but like scuba diving, ice climbing, or any other exacting technical endeavor, it is not something one should do casually once a year. So although my earliest flying in unrestricted airspace was in the line-of-sight daytime navigation over Nigerian savanna, and continued over the Ituri forest of what was then Zaire, and around the inland sea of Lake Victoria at Uganda, I am happy that there are people more serious about this somewhat demanding application of skills in confrontation with multiple unknowns, and I go with them where this magic carpet can give us access. The best of these examples is with my Hermano Luis.
"These are things that we only like to do," Luis once offered as explanation in describing the adventures that he and I have got into to someone at a party who asked "whatever for". And they have included: wading up a twisting canyon cut back through rock and time to stand under the world's second highest waterfall (the water falls like misty rain from nearly a kilometer distance and does not have the force of the smaller waterfalls); Seeing how many consecutive casts our sons could make in the Rio Arun before they did NOT get a strike from a pavon, or piranha, or paraya machete; making a first-ever ascent of two unexplored tepuys; hunting the royal duck ("pato real") in the vast llanos; paddling silently through the inky black night in hunting the lapa, and when the light was switched on, seeing the yellow eyes of other hunters looking back at us. And most all of these treasured experiences in very remote places are made possible by the "Wings of Man", not to mention the refined Lago Maracaibo crude cheap product of OPEC Venezuela.
"To Fly" has it right, when it says that there was a change in the way we looked at things from the time when our vision was horizontal to now when it is vertical, and space and time become fused. Nearly endless possibilities open to the imagination when a new way of looking at things is developed. I am glad to have lived in the relatively recent age of flight, and what worlds have been opened to me through the exploitation of this medium. For the relatively recent nature of this revolution and its ever more rapid expansion, read HREF "Three Generations of Three and a Half Year Olds" HREF in the context of the American Geelhoed boys described against the time line of flight from my father's age at that first flight of Wilbur and Orville's at Kitty Hawk to my son's age at the first moon landing. Stay tuned for the next developments as my grandson (the fourth "William Geelhoed") reaches that same age; what new imagination may then take flight?