To go north, however: that’s the problem I had to figure out this morning, and what I’m going to try is my sudden devil-may-care attitude — I plan to keep the blue part on the left, and see what happens.

( A few hours have passed.)

There was an odd feeling, earlier today as I wrote the words “I plan…,” as though I was being reminded about schemes and mice again, plus the meaning of “ganging aft agley.”

No problem with the morning, save the wind was 25 gusting 33 a few miles north, which was no real problem save they were directly on our noses, and forecast stronger as the day warmed.  Dan calls them “fortuitous headwinds,” since they mean more flying time for him than a tailwind.

We reached the airport, made ready to fly, and before I even got to the Tail Section Inspection in my preflight checklist, Dan said, “Looks like you have a flat tire.”

It did look that way, tailwheel all squashed against the ground, and I flickered back to the odd feeling about planning things.

We couldn’t fix the tire in Bandon, so we found a lawnmower wheel at the hardware store, which wheel fit perfectly in place of Puff’s tailwheel.  By the time it was installed, The time was nearly noon and the wind had picked up a fair amount…Puff’s airspeed indicator bounced up to 24 mph as she sat on the ground, even before I started her engine.

Soon as I did, she made it clear that she was not in favor of a lawnmower tire for her tailwheel.

It’s an emergency, Puff!  We’ll repair your tire at the next stop, I promise…this one only needs to last one flight!

I feel so silly, she said.

I promise…next airport.  My promises mean something to her, now.  I didn’t mention this earlier, but last flight her oil was a little low and I told her I would add some before she flew again.  When I checked the oil today it was a little low but still within limits for flying.  Pouring oil in a 20-mph wind while balancing atop the rear fuselage to reach the engine I’d rather not do, but I had promised.  Yes the wind blew oil all over the place for a while, and I wiped most of it up afterward.  Some of it, anyway.

Puff noticed, when her engine started.  After the comment about the tire she said no more, trusted me to keep my word.

I was leader again, so determined that if our airspeed dropped to nothing I would change course and set sail for central Oregon, where the winds were promised to be not quite so hurriquesque.

Blue side left, blue side left, I repeated as I brought Puff awake.  She was happy with that at once, for she’s been dreaming, I think, of her new hangar and of exploring new flying-grounds.

Jennifer and Puff taxied carefully in the wind, not to be blown over by a gust, and in a minute, into position for takeoff at the end of the runway, pointed into the wind, Dan nodded to me: Ready to go.

I pushed the throttle ahead, held the control stick back and Puff was flying after a five-second takeoff roll, pitching and yawing in the tumbling air.  We turned for the beach, settled down a few feet above its runway of sand, hundred miles long.

The air was in a hurry to get south, and it intended to take the sea along with it.  Four and five rows of tall waves, all of them breaking at once onto the wide sand that’s the West Coast.  Just above the waterline, where the sand’s still dark, one can land there safely…the moisture binds the grains, firms them.

Our groundspeed was down to 50 mph, sometimes less in the gusts.  Deserted beach, easy landing, save for the wind it would have been a lovely soaring flight northward.  Yet the wind kept battering at us, slamming our wings so they banked left and right, usually shallow sometimes steep.  This, I decided at last, pushing the throttle to climb power, is no fun.

We lifted skyward, borne on rocky updrafts, till we leveled at 4,000 feet and turned inland toward calm air.  Mountains below again but not for long, melting as they did into the Willamette Valley, that broad plain the color of warm emerald, stretching past the horizon.

Puff didn’t breathe a word as we taxied in for fuel, then to the tiedown spot, she and Jennifer side by side.  She didn’t need to, as Puff and my conscience apparently have adjoining rooms.

An hour in the big fixed-base hangar at Corvallis and the tire was repaired good as new, installed again, the other tire whisked out of sight.

You may ask how I replaced the tailwheel without a jack to lift the tail. That is a good question.  The answer is that I didn’t need a jack because I had a Dan, who was happy to dead-lift the 160-pounds required to get the wheel off the ground, so I could quick-swap it out for the lawnmower tire.  I shall arrange to leave the surrogate wheel in the rental car tomorrow as we fly away, since Avis likely has need of all sorts of tires and Puff no longer does.

So it was a day of little flying and lots of messing around with mechanical stuff.  Not so touching as flying.m I was accepting the belief that I may be a little tired this evening as I checked into the hotel.  Hungry, though, Dan and I repaired to a Corvallis restaurant for our one meal of the day.

Entering, this is what we saw on the wall:

The sight stopped me in my tracks.  How many signs do I need, somebody’s caring over us?

I asked the waitress.  ”Would you mind telling me what the feather on the wall stands for?”

She glanced in that direction.  ”It’s supposed to be a palm leaf,” she said.

I ask you: if you found that figure on the wall of your restaurant, would you ask Would you mind telling me what the palm-leaf on the wall stands for?

i woudn’t.  I’d say why are blue feathers following me all across the country?

A sweet little sign, but ambiguous, I thought after a while, as it wasn’t meant to be a feather.  The sign-leavers need to be clear, talking with their mortals, or we won’t notice we’re being watched over at all.

Went to my room, tossed stuff where it was convenient, dropped my room key-card on the night-stand.  Only then did I notice that it had shifted part-:way out of its envelope, two words visible:

(Honest, it’s a photo of the cards just as I tossed them on the night-stand.)

The day snapped back into perspective.  Not things that matter, Richard.  It’s the meaning of things.

Thank you, Granma.

Puff has picked up one of my traits, I think: it’s easy to say things, promise things, then we’re jostled when it’s time to make it so.  I’ll set an appointment, agree to one meeting or another, then time comes to meet and I’ll whine, “Why ever did I agree to this?  I’d much rather be alone than keeping my promise!”

Puff isn’t like me, she doesn’t whine.  Today, though, it impressed her: running five hours over Nowhere to Land takes hard work ,when the chips are down.

She’s such a gifted little airplane, she doesn’t blink when I go an about she can land anywhere, she’s a STOL airplane (for Short Take Off and Land), whether it’s land or water, Puff’s safe as a helicopter, and without the mass of moving parts.

All the way across the country I’ve been her pilot: where do we land if the engine fails now.  And most all the way there’s been an answer: here’s a river, here’s a lake, here’s a road, here’s a sand-bar, here’s a smooth place in the desert it only needs to be a couple hundred feet long.

Today it didn’t matter if she were a helicopter, today it was hour after hour over trees everywhere.  Lose an engine in your helicopter today and you’re going down in trees, not much guarantee you’re gonna walk away from that landing no matter how good a helicopter, how good an airplane, how good a pilot you are.

Worse for Dan and Jennifer, I was leader today, all day.  Their job was to go where I chose, where Puff flew.  I decide to fly over trees, Jennifer’s engine fails, it’s Dan in the trees, Puff and me circling helpless overhead as they go down in a seething ocean of pine.

I could have chosen to stay over roads all the way; I didn’t.

We were wheels-up from Susanville at 0730, as we used to say in the military since that sounds more unswerving than 7:30 am.

It was forest right away, as Susanville marks the boundary tween forest and desert in this part of North California.  It is serious you might say implacable forest:

What cleared places there were, now and then, were logged-over, tree-stumps and slash (what the loggers call the tree-trunks and limbs they leave on the ground), a field of tank-traps on some wilderness beachhead.

Meanwhile, second after minute after hour after hour, Puff’s engine’s turning five thousand evolutions per minute, three hundred thousand revolutions in one hour, a million and a half revolutions today’s flying alone, and we’ve been flying these last sixteen days, except for Plainview, every single day.

When I pull the propeller through by hand every morning, turning three blades is about one and a half engine revolutions, I pull twelve blades, seven revolutions and I feel that, it takes energy.

Puff’s engine has fire to help it turn, but those are a lot of revolutions when lives, aircraft and human, depends on those turns.

After a couple hours with our noses pointing west, the Sierra Nevada  gradually dropped behind, reluctant to see us go.  Once we clung to 8,000 feet to see us over the ridges, wishing it were 10,000, now the ground fell away near Redding, California, and we were way high.  Sigh of relief, for not only are the worst of the mountains behind us, there’s water ahead!  The reservoir north of Redding has over the years been slowly filling…last I flew over, there were fifty feet of bared ground above water level, today it’s brim full.

“Wheels up for the water,” I called.

“Two.”

We turned down in a long sweeping arc, Puff and Jennifer, to a perfect liquid field stretched wide before us, steep slopes and pines towering each side of the water as we touched.  Glad fastboats, we held half-power and hushed for a mile along the surface, speed making our snow-path turn graceful art behind us.

Refreshed by the splash of sea-soul to air-soul, Puff was ready to fly again.  A motion of the wrist, throttles pushed a few inches forward, the two seaplanes lifted from the water and climbed away from the planet.  Climbing, turning in the shadow and snow of Mt. Shasta, I had thought to circle it, say hello in the morning.

The closer we came to the mountain, the more I realized that sort of hello probably wouldn’t be said today, for the peak of the mountain lofted high over the highest we could climb.  Shasta misses by a few feet being the tallest mountain in the country, at eight thousand feet a single circle of the giant would add fifty miles to our journey.

Past it we flew, we the size of gliding butterflies, wrapped in reverence for the place…one whispers in the silence of Shasta’s heights and snows.

I once lived in this country, south of Medford, Oregon, so I played with remembering in the minutes we flew past. Then memory failed, it was new country ahead, unending trees once more.

Puff purred along, not a single miss from her engine, nor had there been one ever, since first we met.

What a dear soul you are, I thought, how close is your spirit to mine.  Not one second of this adventure, of this bright whole discovery-of-life would have been possible without you!

I felt her own life, gently brushing.  Nor without you, she said.

There’s a minute I’ll not forget.

This last horizon-wide plain of trees settled, softened as though the winds of earth had ceased to blow, the terrain going softer, gentler beneath us.

Way far out ahead, the horizon was no more rippled and tossed.  The horizon was a level smooth line, and it was blue.

This has happened to me before, I thought, how does it feel for Puff?  All her life, flying east brought her to the ocean.  Today the ocean’s west.  In a few minutes, for the first time ever, she will have flown coast to coast!

I felt a quiet joy in her, fascination with the sea turned round, of course, but more a delighted relief, that she had kept her word…she had done what she promised she would do, bring us safely across a continent.

I touched the controls, began to turn us back and down to land, but she said, Wait.

I waited while for reasons she did not speak, she watched westward:

Part of the earth and part of the sea, is Puff,  Part of both is thee and me, as well, I thought, we’ve chosen a playground suitably vast to be the stage for our lessons and adventures as mortals.

What a game, we play!

The prudent course: take off and see what it’s like, land if it isn’t pretty.  Which we did, Dan and Jennifer leading as we climbed from Carson City over Reno, Nevada.

I once lived in Reno, a quiet, pretty town and if you like flashy lights, there’s an area for that, too.

We were two prospectors out of place crossing the high-tech Class C airspace over the city, but hey, what are radios for?

By 10 a.m., the smooth air was giving way to a few thermals, bouncing us a bit and saying wait till afternoon.  Big talk, thermals.  Come afternoon, good luck finding us.

Off the controller’s radar, Puff and I took the lead, calculating fuel load and distance to fly and what the weather might be ahead and if it were such as to make us unhappy such as thunderstorms and high winds what options would I have and I don’t care for those I’d rather divert to Susanville.

“How’s Susanville?” I called to Dan.

“Agree.”  He’d been doing some calculating of his own.

Since Susanville was no more than sixty miles away, Puff dropped down toward Pyramid Lake. a bright liquid jewel on the high desert, magnet for small seaplanes.

“Feel like landing?” I called.  Water liquid turquoise, shore rocky.

“I’m wingman,” he said, throwing the responsibility back to me.

“Wheels up for a water landing,” I replied.

Don’t care about rocky, the water, after all this desert, is so deliciously…wet!

Wind calm, water smooth, what a pleasure it is to feel Puff splashing happily down, that sun-glare spray diamonding everywhere, splashing drops in the cockpit, over me.  I licked them from my lips.  Delicious; water clear enough we floated in transparent color,

Then off again, out toward a remoter part, with what looked like islands but weren’t.  We flew low over these, and Dan called, “A vent!  Do you see the vent?”

I wondered why he should sound so enthusiastic about a camper’s shelter.  Someone wants to be alone.

“Make a ninety-two-seventy,” he called.  ”Look at that!”

What kind of a wingman gives commands to his leader?  Ah, I realized.  Not a wingman.  A geologist.  Dan has found something scientifically remarkable on the surface.

A turn of 90 degrees in one direction followed by a turn of 270 degrees in the other will bring you directly over the point where you are now, and we were directly over something major neat.

I did as instructed, and in that place, coming from the ground, a feather of steam blowing thirty feet high!  Not a tent, Dan had said, a vent!

Jennifer had already splashed down, Puff and I turned to follow.  Wheels up for a water landing.  Flaps.  Boost pump.  What has he found?

Next minute Puff’s bow was scraping on the sand, stopping in water clear as air.

How can this place be so isolated?  Why aren’t there hotels here, bright umbrellas dotting the beach?

The reason why is that there is many a place on our planet which remains undiscovered.

We walked over the grass toward the vent, the sound of it a steam locomotive at the station ready to move.  It wasn’t a periodic geyser we saw, but a continuous one, round-the-clock steam and spray hissing and whuffling, whooshing boiling water firehostlike upward.

It is doing this with nobody around to watch, I thought, although we filled that slot for half an hour and I couldn’t be certain it would continue after we left.  I asked Dan if the water from the geyser, which ran in s stream down to the lake, was drinkable.

“It contains dissolved salts.”

“But can I drink it?

“if you like the taste of sulphur.”

Thunderstorms were afoot, so after we had a few hundred photos we were on our way.  We landed at Susanville before the storms, tied and covered the airplanes.

How fascinating, I thought, that we’ve been led through all these adventures, and nothing’s  harmed us, nothing’s shown us the dark side of the Force.

You don’t believe in the dark side of the Force, something thought to me.  At that moment,  paying my fuel bill in the office at the Susanville Airport, as far from the ocean as it is possible to get, I glanced above the doorway through which we had entered.  This is what I saw:

Not Granma Cat, but her mother, a Douglas Dolphin amphibian airplane, looking down upon Dan and me.

I shall open this sentence and not finish it:  ”What are the odds, that over the doorway….?”

Finishing it is your job.

We have no destination we must reach, no heading and altitude we must hold, no briefing says Dan’s leader today or Richard is.  What we have is we generally agree on the approximate direction we’re heading, and we’ll land maybe somewhere that looks inviting, and now and then for fuel.

Today’s flight was yesterday’s agreement: our Geologist’s-Dream Air Safari and Gentle Cross-Country Adventure should probably include a circuit of Mono Lake, filled chock-a-block with natural wonders like tufa and lava and brine shrimp, and whatever came after that, all it had to be was north.

Dan turned out to be flight leader by virtue of he’s got the camera —  I’m leader when Puff’s ready for her closeup, and he flies Jennifer as required to get the picture he wants. From Bishop there wouldn’t be pictures but a long climb to altitude, since Mono is surrounded by high country, so Dan was leader.

While Dan navigated, Puff took the chance to nail her altitude record above ten thousand feet:

She will place this on the wall of her hangar next yesterday’s 100-feet-below-sea-level record from yesterday’s Death Valley adventure:

The difference in airspeed has something to do with the density of the air, but that’s a story for you to explore as you get your Sport Pilot’s license.

Puff stayed up at altitude, watched Dan and Jennifer play down among the tufa towers, which I had never heard of and for which Mono Lake is famous to everybody else.

Dan was aloft in Geologist Heaven — who else is using his airplane to study stone?  When I innocently estimated that by now he must have a thousand photos of rocks and Puff along the way, he looked at me pityingly: “A thousand?”  I didn’t want to compound my out-of-it-ness by asking, so I suppose he’s got fifty thousand photos on this trip for his book which ought to be titled Jennifer’s Living Geology: A Handbook for Small Amphibian Airplanes.  That may not be quite the title, but I’m ready to be floored by the photos.

Of course he had to touch down on the surface of that strange lake, just touch it and fly again.  If he had stopped on the water, at that altitude, Jennifer could not have taken off again till the air went much colder.

This is the real color of the water where they touched, by the way.  I just held my phone-camera out the window and clicked:

After a while, Dan called Puff down for her glamor-shots in the Land of Odd that is Mono Lake.  It’s a strange feeling, flying there.  Strange as in creepy, weird, dead.  There are no fish in the lake, Dan said, but millions of brine-shrimp, supper for seagulls.  And Mono is supposed to be a water supply for the city of Los Angeles?  Hm.

We flew around a volcano vent or whatever it’s called, in which the lava had been tumbled in blocks.  I have not yet been able to stump Dan with my questions on how can the earth possibly do rocks like that, but I’ll guess lava-blocks have to come from earthquakes and I’d guess large earthquakes of the sort human beings have never witnessed.

I’ve never had more than a passing interest in geology, but this flight with a man who has such passion for studying it first-hand is getting me fascinated.  I had thought of rock as, well, rock-like: hard, unyielding: bonk-bonk.  Not so.  Watch it on a newsreel of millions of years, Dan says, or watch it deep beneath the crust, and rock is liquid, plastic, curving, twisting, bubbling.  Look at it from altitude, you can see solid ground rippling away like water from crust-plates crashing together, splashing mountains all directions.  I’m waiting in line for his book to come out.

By the time our photo-shoot was over, the ground was warming and we became pretend-sailplanes looking for lift to get out of the soup-bowl that holds the lake.  On her own at that altitude and temperature, a SeaRey can climb a few hundred feet per minute…she’s near what they call her service ceiling, about as high as she can go unaided.  But we found today that aided by columns of rising air, a Rey can climb more than a thousand feet per minute.  She can also lose altitude that fast in falling airs, so it was a dance we did, changing partners with air-columns till we were over the rim to lower country.

Relatively lower.  We reached Walker Lake after half an hour’s flying through rough air.  Density altitude was 6,000 feet, and we chatted on our private radio channel:

“Elevation’s four thousand, Dan, but the density’s six.  No wind, or not much.  Can we take off again if we land?”

“Don’t know.  Let’s try it.  I’ll try it first, see if Jennifer can do it.”

“If she can’t, we’ll land too and camp the night.  Fly off in the cool air tomorrow?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Then I’ll go first.  See how Puff likes western high altitude.”

“You’ve got  it.”

We’ve got it, Puff, I told her.  Let’s have a little splash.

She was keen for the adventure, sure she could take off again.  It’s a pretty lake.

I agreed.  Walker had none of the eerie vampire-ness of Mono,  The water was blue-green, sparkling colors and clear.

“We’ve got it.  Wheels up for a water landing.”

I checked the wheels up for the millionth time, slowed Puff to 60 mph, flaps down, boost pump on, turned down into the wind.  In a few seconds the wavelets were whipping by inches beneath us, then the juddering hiss as Puff’s keel touched down.  She slid graceful to a stop, floating calm and sweet as Jennifer came sweeping by on the step.

Now, my Puffly, I thought, Let’s see if you can take off again.

Piece of cake, she said.  She has picked up that phrase from me.  I got it, I think, from the Royal Air Force.

The throttle came ahead to takeoff power, yet for a few seconds Puff didn’t react, as though she were startled by how thin the air is, here.  She moved, but plowed through the water instead of leaping on top of it.

I pushed the control stick full forward, a trick that Dan had suggested for high-altitude takeoffs, and sure enough, Puff went a little lighter, picked up a little speed, spray beginning to fly.   Then she sort of shook her head and got serious about this project.  With that, she was all at once lifted from plowing the water to planing on top of it, and after that there was no doubt that she would fly.  It was a long takeoff slide, for her, but finally the wavelets were barely flickering on her keel, and then we were flying.

“Good girl, Puff!”  I said it aloud, I believe, as when I fly alone with her I’m not sure when I speak to her and when I think to her.  All the same to Puff.  She was quite pleased with herself, her chance to show Jennifer how it’s done.  I felt her big sister noticing.  Good job, Puff!

“Wheels up for the water,” Dan called, and as we climbed and turned, he and Jennifer descended.  What a lovely sight that is from the air, his little ‘Rey, touching down.

We landed again, close by Jennifer, as she taxied on surface toward shore.  We taxied too, and I watched through six feet or so, clear water to the bottom.  Sand it was, with bits of broken sandstone scattered there.  The water went shallower, and clearer.  I noticed that Jennifer, ahead of us, had stopped, her engine shut down.

A second later I felt a bump as Puff’s keel touched sand. then another.  We were a hundred feet from shore, but with a final sliding stop Puff said this is as far as we go.

“Thank you, Little Cat,” I said, and before she could protest, switched her engine off.

It was totally silent, save for the lap of waves against Puff’s hull.  As I unfastened my shoulder harness, took off the headset, I noticed that Dan was out of his cockpit, wading to shore.  He moved unsteadily, as though he were sinking in mud with every step.

In a minute, I found that’s exactly what he was doing.  I sank eight inches in the thick stuff every few steps.  I could pull my feet out of it, but not my water-shoes, which stayed buried there.  Finally found those and pulled ‘em loose, made it to shore.

I stood there, watching the wide empty lake and our two airplanes.

We four were the only living creatures in sight, miles around every direction.

Dan and I looked at the sight, at each other, and then we started laughing.  The laugh, it had happened before in the same situation: are we the only two crazy nuts in all the world, to come out here to the center of nowhere no other soul for fifty-hundred miles?

Answer: Yes.

What it felt besides funny, was free. We had nobody’s permission but our own, and needed no other, to follow what we each most loved to do with our lives, which at that moment was standing on this beach forsaken by all others.  No footprints, no tire tracks, no nothin’ but us four friends in the sunlight, clear cool water rippling like high-speed rock as we stood nearby.

We laughed for that freedom.  How much study and work and cash and loving effort we had taken, giving priority to these little airplanes and to practicing our own skills, and now we stood free on a desert lakeside that could be any waterside anywhere in the world, if we chose to be there.

By that moment I had spent over a hundred hours in Puff’s little cockpit, flying, had made hundreds of practice water landings.  Scared myself now and then, laughed alone in the sky and now with a friend who had made so many of the same choices, sacrificed other possibilities to make this one come true.  No golf, no bowling, no sports events, no drinking or card-games with buddies on Saturday night.  Gave it all up.  To stand where we were standing.  Now.

And that, somehow, is so funny that one laughs out loud, for the joy of it.

From there is was half an hour to another Nevada lake, this one with people here and there, dots on the beach, a sparse few boats on the water but not in sight when we came ashore.

We called it a day at Carson City, put the airplanes to bed at the airport, were offered and accepted a ride from a local pilot on his way home for the day.

Now it’s two a.m., time to finish writing for the night.

There’s no sound in the room, but I’m still laughing.

There’s a restaurant in the hotel in Boulder City, Nevada (I’ve forgotten the name I think it has “Ranch” in it) surrounded by slot machines in which after dinner if you say you’d like to taste the carrot cake they serve you a six- or eight-layer cake about the size of a pumpkin.  You take the seven-eighths of a pumpkin leftover with you to your room, but at 6 am the next morning it may no longer be what you had in mind on which to start your day.

So it was with me and Dan.  We continued our journey carrotcake-less, as how would you feel to have an engine failure in the middle of Death Valley and they find you fifty years later with a petrified cake in your hand?

We did take extra water, as in case of a forced landing we would find ourselves in what the military calls a “survival situation.”

We were airborne as early as the opening of the fixed-base operator would allow.

It still feels odd to me, to see Puff and Jennifer, these wilderness creatures, on a busy modern airport:

We left quick as we could, Dan carrying five gallons of fuel in the cockpit with him as our destination, the Furnace Creek airport in Death Valley, has no fuel available.

The air was warm turning cool as we climbed, but it didn’t look all that cool outside.

I happened to be leader at the time, when I heard Dan call, “This is too good to miss!” and all at once Jennifer went wild-spiraling down, throwing away our hard-won altitude for this:

Dan will have some photos tonight, I thought.

Death Valley is some 250 feet below sea level.  Down there strange things happen, bonkers-things happen.  Puff’s shadow took that moment to break loose on its own again.  She’s sometimes forgotten to bring her shadow when she flies, or it’s missing when we’re ready to go…this is the first time I’ve seen it leave us behind, rush on to Furnace Creek ahead of her.

Puff?  I asked, Your shadow?  Do you know what it’s doing now?

I know, she said.  Can’t help it.  Mind of its own.

Dan didn’t notice.  He was studying geology, a classroom like nowhere in the world.  Recognize this, from your studies?

Dan explained it to me on the radio, unconcerned there was no way for us to sustain life in that silicated, dessicated world if we were forced down.  That is not a geologist’s concern.  These mountains are not being covered in sand, can you forget about surviving and notice…they are not being covered in sand, they are lifting up through it!

About that time, around the moment we were in the center of this lifeless albeit abounding in fascinating rock sand and a million tons of Dry, my so-called Navigation Aid failed.  Instead of this neat moving map with a little airplane at my position, it went blank.  Pouting, I suppose, that it ran out of its so-precious Electricity when the fitting that hosed in those electrons burnt itself out.

According to my gas station road map, however, Furnace Creek ought to be right about … so, out of sight now but right spang off that range of lifeless mountains up ahead I hope.

Dan just plain didn’t care.  In that hour what sane person would care about getting lost in the middle of Death Valley at noon when there is so much… rock to explore?  If you will notice how the sedimentary layers, Richard, have _rotated,_ they’ve been pushed by the Sierra Nevada, fifty miles away!

It felt like flying a movie script, our different priorities, Dan’s being some of the most astounding geology in the world, an open book before his eyes; my priority being…well, staying alive.

The road map was torn and since it covered the whole western United States it didn’t have a lot of time for details like where are you in the midst of this desert getting hotter by the minute, but would you care to know where Los Angeles is, or San Francisco?  The City by the Bay?

What, I wondered, were we doing with two seaplanes – seaplanes, mind you, in the midst of — this?

I wanted to press the microphone button, in my delirium, mirages dancing, and ask, “Oh Dan, can’t you see that big green tree, and the water running free, and it’s waiting there for you and meeee?  Water.  Cool, clear, water…”

But I didn’t.  I folded the map and looked hard.  This way is North, so Furnace Creek must be…

Puff, I thought, I wonder why they call if “Furnace Creek,” instead of, say, “Cool Clear Water Creek?”

My airplane is growing fast, gaining broad experience from her adventures, but sophisticated or subtle she is not.

I sensed her innocent reply: Because it’s burning hot?

Half an hour later, came a little speck of green away out ahead of us.  Green!

I stuffed the map away.  Fortunately one does not transmit thoughts to one’s wingman, who only hears words when a microphone button is pressed.  ”SeaRey,” I called, “We’ll land Runway One Five.  Let’s go two-two-nine.”

“Two,” said Dan.

By now you know your air-talk: that Runway One Five is the landing strip that’s pointed down the magnetic heading of 150 degrees, sort of southeast, which is where the wind was coming from and into which we wanted to land as we always land into the wind or as nearly to into it as we can.   The two-two-nine comment was to the radio frequency that air traffic uses at the Furnace Creek Airport: 122.9 megacycles (all right: “megaHertz,” about as awkward a way to honor Mister Hertz as can be imagined).

Dan said, “Two,” to let me know that the number two aircraft (namely himself and Jennifer) in our formation (often called a “flight,” as in “A flight of two aircraft”), understood what to do, so that he didn’t need to say, “Roger,” which means the same thing.  He could have said, “Roger,” but that would not have been as correct a response as “Two,” in this rather formal transmission.

After I switched to the new frequency, I pressed the button and said, “Lead,” (pronounced Leed, as in Leeder).   Dan said, “Two,” to let me know he had switched frequencies successfully and we were on the same channel again.

At which point I broadcast to any airplanes which might be in the Furnace Creek airport traffic pattern (in the middle of one of the world’s major deserts ha-ha), “Furnace Creek traffic, SeaRey Three Four Six Papa Echo, flight of two SeaReys, two miles southeast we’ll be a left downwind Runway One Five Furnace Creek.”

Redundant, deliberately saying “Furnace Creek” twice since it’s possible another aircraft came on frequency a split second after I began my position report and didn’t know which airport we were landing at and therefore whether to look out for us or not.

The odds of this happening today were shall we say low.

Wheels down for a land landing, flaps down, boost pump on…that familiar checklist.  I slid back the canopy hatches to catch the last of the cooler higher air, pulled the throttle back to idle power and turned to land.

In that instant I saw a flash of dark and heard _VAM!_  Something had hit the airplane!

Not a clue what could have hit us or how badly we were damaged.  I checked the wheels down, to make sure one hadn’t ripped off.  The power doesn’t matter we don’t need power to reach the runway, Richard, no need to think about what the VAM was, all that matters is this landing, you got it made.

If this were the movie Top Gun, the script would have me pressing the microphone button and screaming for help, about the most useless thing a pilot can do.  Fortunately I am not appearing in Top Gun I am landing at Furnace Creek, the runway is clear and broad ahead and below.  Just fly the airplane, glide it down, gently, gently touch the tailwheel first…

and squeak-squeak from the tires and Puff was rolling straight down the centerline.  Whatever we hit, it didn’t wreck the landing gear.

We taxied in and shut our engines down.  Out of the cockpit, I checked Puff over for signs of collision.  Not a mark.  Not a scratch, anywhere.

What was going on?  I puzzled about this, reached for a cookie from the cookie-bag while I considered the mystery.

Something was different about the cockpit.  At first I sluffed it off…what could possibly have changed about the cockpit in which I have been sitting for the last almost three hours?

My snowsuit.  That was the difference.  My snowsuit was missing.

It had been stuffed into the baggage space behind the right seat.  Now it was gone.

Canopy hatches open to get the cool air, turning down to land…my snowsuit saw its chance in the sudden rush of wind through the cockpit and yearning a life without cold, it had bailed out!  That was the dark flash I saw, and the VAM! had been the propeller whipping into the fabric, a sleeve or a leg, as my snowsuit burst out of the airplane.

Dan was not far away, pouring his two cans of gasoline into Jennifer’s tank.

I walked over, shaking my head.  ”Dan, you won’t believe what happened!”

“What happened?”  My wingman and geology instructor was ready for me to say anything.  Since Richard is alive and and Puff undamaged, it couldn’t be anything serious.  Could he be about to tell me he had seen a metamorphic upthrust which I may have missed, or a cline, mostly covered in sand?

“My snowsuit!  I was turning base to final and the wind…it blew out of the airplane!”

“Did it hit…is Puff OK?”

When the fuel was poured, we walked to my airplane.

“She looks fine,”  I said.

“Maybe,” then,  ”Look here.  The tip of the propeller.”

There it was, one comer of one tip of one blade, an abrasion a quarter of an inch wide.  To which was yet attached one black thread:

Was anyone watching from the ground?  What could they have thought:

That’s a cute little airplane, about to land.  Don’t see many landing here.  Wonder where it came from, where it’s… the pilot just fell out!   I can’t look, oh the poor man drifting down into the cactus and that cute little airplane it’s landing by itself!

Appearances: Sometimes bizarre, always misleading.  Don’t you dare take them for real.

If you’d care to have a free snowsuit, by the way, it’s waiting for you, only one thread missing, somewhere under the base leg of the approach to Runway One Five at Furnace Creek Airport, California, USA.

Taking my chances with freezing days ahead, I decided to leave the snowsuit for you, on your next visit to Furnace Creek, while Dan and I pressed ahead for Bishop, just an hour-plus northwest.

There were some fairly high ridges to cross, so I was kind of struggling to climb as high as possible, using thermals now and then, remembering all I once knew about soaring.  Turns out I was the one struggling, Dan was enjoying the geology.

“By that sand dune at nine o’clock low, see the road?  If you want to do an off-airport landing…”

“I’m working hard for altitude, here,” I replied.  ”I’d rather not dump it all and go land on a road just now.”

“Roger.”  By way of saying, Oh, flying is work, is it now?  You’re deciding to pass up this chance to look at a sand dune in order to get a little more altitude to cross a ridge that you know we’re going to cross anyhow one way or the other?  Pity your soul!

But I was being too grown-up to play: if the wind is from the southeast, then it’ll be updrafts on the southeast side of the ridge, downdrafts on the northwest side.  Don’t even think about flying the northwest side.  Work this thermal, worrrrk it…  Slide now to the southeast side of the peaks, here.

A wide green square appeared, the color of shade trees, not ten miles distant as we topped the ridge.  Bishop, California.  Cautiously I picked my way amid the family of mini-peaks below, waiting any second for downdrafts should I strive too quickly.  Running out of lift, or hitting downdrafts when one is in mountain country, that isn’t anybody’s idea of fun.

When I had the airport made, that is, when I could land even if the wheels fell off or the engine stopped, I deliberately moved into what I knew would be the northwest-side downdrafts  near the ridges behind.  I wanted to test my knowledge.  Too bad for my knowledge, there were no downdrafts on the north side of the ridges.

All that concern about downdrafts, wasted.   Am I too cautious with my life as well, I thought, concerned about downdrafts which never happen, flying my choices way too carefully?  Which almost never happen.

Funny, how the metaphors of the calling we choose can ask such pointed questions about our way of life.

Am I living too carefully?  Would I change if I could?

I can change.  I need to think about that.  Maybe I need a motorcycle.

No sooner had I written these words than I went to the hotel lobby to find two men dressed in motorcycle leathers, checking in for the night.

Odd that they should be on their way across the country on their Harleys, just as Dan and I are on our way across it in our SeaReys.

I asked if I could take their picture:

They went off to their rooms, and as I was leaving I took a last look at the leader’s machine.  At the rear fender:

Will someone please tell me what’s going on, this trip?

Anybody with an aircraft radio scanner along our way is getting a free education on geology.  I hadn’t paid much attention till this voyage across the continent, but now it strikes me…this entire country (and by now I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the whole world) is made out of rock!

And all that rock?  It’s moving!

We were flying along, our two little SeaReys, and all of a sudden up ahead and to our left, this!

One minute I looked ahead and everything was dead level.  The next minute there’s this big cloud of dust and the block of mountain six miles wide it’s come roaring up from below like it couldn’t hold its breath a half-second longer and had to get some air.

My friend Dan’s crazy about geology, as you may have guessed on this trip, and his talking about things that take millions of years to happen, now to me I see ‘em and it looks like seconds, like we have to dodge this erupting-subsiding-appearing-disappearing earth we’ve been perched on for the last microsecond or so.

He’s quick to say that big things happen that geologists don’t have a clue why.  The Rocky Mountains, for instance.  We have to fly over ‘em but nobody knows why they’re there.  No  tectonic plates shifting below, all that rock just decided one day to hop up ten thousand, thirteen thousand feet into the air.  On a whim, apparently, and if you happen to be flying a little puff of a seaplane, you’d best be careful one like’s in the picture doesn’t hop while you’re cruising at five.  Lucky for us we were higher than this one when it blew.

And listen to this: Your common glass of table water, it isn’t really water.  Another name for it is hydroxic acid (honest!) and it is the most implacable cutter and tearer-downer of rock the world has ever known.  Look below, what a single glass of water, magnified several hundred trillion times did to this table land:

and,

!

Given a hundred million years, that stuff can dissolve anything!

Nevertheless, we mortals love to mess with danger, so Puff and Jennifer homed in on the biggest mass of Danger northwest of the Pecos: Lake Mead.  With the intention, mind you, that if we could, we were going to splash down in a sea of hydroxic acid!

We were following the Colorado River, approaching the northern stem of the lake, when Dan said, “You’re leader.  Go explore!”

Having been here before, I guessed, he wanted to see the lake with new eyes, perhaps Puff and I would explore a place he hadn’t found.  We found a place within minutes.  From the air, it looked as if it could be a gentle haven, clear water and a spice-color beach.

“Wheels up for a water landing,” I called.  Wheels double-checked up, boost pump on flaps down throttle back.  The water was glassy, normally a challenge for seaplanes, but there was a shore nearby for altitude reference and I thought nothing of it.  As we neared the water I triple-checked the gear up and by the time I had turned back to the lake, we struck the surface.  We didn’t hit hard, but getting distracted when landing is not professional and leads to a bounce or ten on landing.

Dan was not distracted, made as pretty a touchdown as ever I’ve seen.  (Keep the volume up on your full screen for the sound of the pass he makes over the beach before he lands.)

This is one of the rewards of the light seaplane flyer and his airplane, this ability to land in places off the aeronautical map.

Here’s a photo of Dan, by the way.  For all the photos he takes, he tends to be shy of camera, himself, but I caught this elusive wildlife in my lens.

One he took of me at dinner yesterday eve:

Off I went exploring again, to find this place:

And this:

And this:

The winds came up in the afternoon, but only in the narrow gorges between sections of the lake.  It’s scary to get caught in a downdraft 500 feet per minute when you’re 100 feet above the water.  As though the wind intended to remind us that she does her share of rock-eroding, too.

Early flight tomorrow, to Death Valley, we think.

Time to sleep.

Remember that part about Dan being crazy about geology?  Is it true that without a passion for something doesn’t matter what, something we love to do or to be around or submerge ourselves in, we’re doomed to lives of boredom, we get the leftovers from the ones who love their Something?

Certain things come true because it is their nature to come true.  Dan Nickens is your geologist’s Indiana Jones.  Other geologists are content to examine their shales and limestones and igneous gneiss, examine it specimen by bagged specimen, they’re happy at the controls of their scanning tunneling electron microscope.

My flying partner of the weeks, I knew it from the start.  He prefers his geology to be blurring a few feet beneath his airplane, to examine it from such a position that a wrong turn would be a spectacular ending to his career.  He didn’t tell me this, I saw it in the way he flies his seaplane Jennifer.

In the military, they call it a CR, which is short for calculated risk.  This means that when one makes this choice or that one, everything will probably work out fine.   It’s understood, though, that once in a hundred times, or once in ten, things may go wrong and one will find himself or herself in a challenging situation.

Jennifer’s engine has been running smooth as a sewing machine for the last two days.  Odds are that it will continue to purr along for another hour without failing.  If if fails, however, the only place for Indiana to land is the river below, complete with jagged stone, white-water rapids, and most likely water spiders, mean little guys and deadly poison.

I took the picture while flying Puff safely above the canyon rim, away from the chasm the river has cut into rock over the last 20 million years or so.  If her engine stopped right now, I would safely land in a level patch of sand or rock above the river.  I would rest and enjoy a cookie, then repair the engine and fly along my way.

The chasm between my cautious mind and Indiana’s inquisitive one is deeper than the gorge bounding Jennifer’s wings with solid rock, and that’s how I knew days ago that I would be making this photograph.  It is characteristic of me to have a backup plan if things go wrong.  It is characteristic of Dan to accept a more adventurous Plan B than mine.

“If the engine stops, no worries!  I land on the river, and shoot the rapids in the SeaRey!  Fifty miles downstream the river widens, I paddle to the nearest comfortable shore, fix the engine and take off!”

You want to ask about his chances of survival, running fifty miles of rapids in the shell of a fragile seaplane, but you don’t because if you’re counseling caution Indy’s just going to smile at you, a sympathetic smile — poor armchair geologist, you’re missing the adventure of science!

Another shot, taken you will notice from a safe altitude:  He followed the river this way for nearly an hour.  Jennifer’s engine did not fail, so Indiana has an understanding of living geology that no other scientist shares.

Me, I’m a flyer, and intend to remain so.  C.R. stands for Colorado River, seen from a conservative distance from my plane Puff as from a flying armchair, cookie in one hand, magnifying glass in the other.

Oddly enough, we get along just fine.  Dan does not mind my living as I choose, I don’t squeak about his choices.  I don’t know what I offer him, but here’s one sight he offered me, that I would never have known, were I not flying with Indiana:

We circled the rock, once buried 3,000 feet underground, Dan told me, now emerged by millions of years’ eroding of everything else above and around.  At close range, albeit without touching, Ship Rock looked hard indeed.

These sites, Ship Rock and Monument Valley and the Goosenecks all passed below, on a route of adventure once scary to think about, today a part of my history.

Such is the power of our interests and loves.  Without knowing, we touch and change the lives of others through our own choice of passions and the pleasures we derive.

From Dan’s CR to the other C.R. we flew.  Soon as the river widened, Dan called, “Gear up…”  Jennifer’s nose dropped down toward the water at a bend in the river, a wide place, and blue.

Puff was anxious to touch water again, and in less than a minute we were gear up flaps down boost pump on, listening to the familiar happy sigh of water lightly on our keel.  We swung in a wide speedboat step turn and joined Jennifer heading toward the beach.

“I’ll take one side, you take the other,” Dan called, for here ahead was a double cove, the rier clear as emerald around.  ”Look out for rocks underwater.”

This was easy to do, for I could see to the bottom as we taxied slow on the surface.  Rocks there were, though fairly deep down.

Puff’s bow crunched lightly on the sand and I shut her engine down into a blanket of silence.  Not a soul in sight, the river itself not making a sound.

Dan set a rock table with cookies for his lunch, I brought my granola bar.  ”This is nice,” someone said.  From the hillside, some photos:

It works, I thought.  Puff can take me to any place, almost, any secret land we’ll find together from the air.  One of the few aircraft built for landing away from airports as much as on them, she’s the perfect intimate flying machine.

We breatjed the delicious peace of that beach for an hour.  One could stay here, I thought, bring a tent, a star map, a hand-cranked computer..one could stay there for a long glad time, indeed

We landed at Page, AZ.  for the eve, and I write these lines.  Practical precognition.  I knew this would come true in my life, because I planned it, loved it, worked a year for it to happen. One doesn’t need to be psychic to see these things long before they happen.

So much I’m leaving out!  But I shall sleep now, catch up later on.

We turned west, though air like brushed satin.  Let go the controls, our airplanes flew themselves, north and west toward the high country.

At first the land beneath us was intensively cared for, no sign of wilderness so far as one could see:

Gliding on that silk, though, the country slid under us like a great earthen wedge, lifting both airplanes higher, butterflies in sunlight.  Within the hour it was just the opposite, we flew over wilderness, one horizon to the other,

as though humans had never existed.

I felt the chill in the air as we climbed.  At six thousand feet, it was pretty cold, I thought.  At seven thousand, it was very pretty cold.  Yet by that time, descending back to six thousand would have put us several hundred feet underground.  Cold I preferred.

Puff was setting new personal altitude records every few minutes.  She would nearly quadruple her record by the time we landed, but she was learning to wear experience lightly, an invisible cloak, tossed casual over her wings.  Some days we set records, she said, some days we don’t.

Then came along the sight upon which Dan and I agreed.  Water.

“Wheels up…” he called and dived toward a turquoise jewel set midst the dangerous unmoving land.

Conchas Lake rests at 4200 feet MSL, and Mister Worry was wondering if we landed would we be able to take off again, in the thin air?  Dan had no questions, as he had done this before.  And so we landed, two trans-con ducks happy to get their feathers wet after so much dry.

So comforting.  I felt Puff relax and enjoy the moment, after such Dry and Sharp beneath her wings.  The two seaplanes drifted side by side for a few minutes, the way before Dan wide open, the way before me and Puff, it had a field of slender reeds some hundreds of feet in front of us.

Then Dan and Jennifer were enveloped in spray and power as they began their takeoff.

Let’s do it, Puff!

I pressed the throttle full open and she surged ahead, though not nearly so quickly as she does at sea level.  Skimming the water, 30 mph lifted to became 35, the reeds sweeping toward us.

It was at that moment that I saw those are not reeds, ahead.  Those are trees!  Those are brittle hard sharp mesquite trees! void of leaves, drowned when the river dammed to make this lake, branches like sword-blades.  Swords closed swiftly ahead, Puff would be hash.  At 40 mph they were on us.  I snatched the control stick back.  ”Fly, Puff!  You’ve got to fly!”

Which she did.  Sooner than ever I had forced her off the water in practice, she lifted, startled, streaked inches over the sharp-like-steel blades, me thinking the screeching clawing drag of them on her body.  Thinking was all that came.  No sound but Puff’s engine screaming wide open, struggling to fly and slowly slowly gaining speed. At 50 mph we had it made, I eased her nose ever so slightly down and we saw 55, 60, 65 mph, and climbing.

I breathed again, felt a rush of love and joy and awe for this dear creature, the one who had just saved our lives, flying when she could not have flown.

Puff, thank you.

Piece of cake, she said,

I felt her proud little smile.

Damn it, Richard, I thought.  Those were not reeds _those were trees!_  Assume nothing on takeoff, Assume Nothing!

We climbed back up to altitude, me chastened, Puff thinking no-problems.  The altitude we had in mind was High As We Could Get, back deep into the cold.  In minutes I was shivering again.

Why did I feel the cold?  _Because I am not a geologist!_  To me, the rocks below were hard, sharp, pretty in a sort of colorful, cruel way.  The rock, the land, was to be avoided by fragile mortals flying fragile aircraft.  The ice of it crept into my bloodstream, sharper every few hundred feet we gained.  Not being a geologist, I was looking constantly for clear places to land, should the engine fail.  There’s a trail, maybe a wild-horse trail, but if I had to land I’d set the wheels down right …there…

Not two hundred feet away Dan Nickens was having a completely different flight.  He insists that he was not cold.  He was swept away by the geology unfolding beneath us, rifts and clines, ranges of mountains ground to level dust by waters while new mountains burst up from beneath no one knows how.  He was fired by adrenaline, I was chilled, pre-living engine failures.

Whom do you suppose learned the most, who most enjoyed that three and a half hours in the air?

The minute we landed at Las Vegas (New Mexiso, not Nevada), elevation 6,877 feet above sea level (that is mean sea level, if you must know, abbreviated msl), I was dragging out my snowmobile suit, grateful for the extra layers, while Dan chirped happily in his shirtsleeves, did I see the color of that last escarpment, the wonder of it?  Did I know what had to happen to slice the rock away from the face of it?

My answers, unfortunately, were no, no, and no.

Subjective flying, it was, so powerful it changed our inner temperatures.  Perhaps all flying is subjective.  Flying with someone terrified of airplanes, I can feel the clash of our two attitudes: Don’t you love the freedom of the sky/ How soon can I land and get my feet on the ground?  Doesn’t happen often, since birds of a feather rarely flock with, say, armadillos.

On our way once again, I was clawing for altitude, Dan loving every minute, every view of earth like boiling honey, a few million years each bubble.

By afternoon the thermals were lighting off as the ground heated.  We rode them up to heights the airplanes could only have reached after long hauls through still air.  Sometimes gentle lift, sometimes nearly explosive, our wings shuddering in the force of them.  At one point the lift was enough to throw Pull nearly to ten thousand feet.

The dial on the right, the vertical speed indicator, shows we’re going up just under 1,300 feet per minute.  There are downdrafts, too, so one slows in the lift, to gain altitude, and dives through the sink to get through it fast.

Then Dan was on the radio to the control tower at Farmington.  Rare event, the tower gave us a downwind runway, asked us to land with the wind on our tail, pushing us fast along the ground.  Dan waited patiently.  In a minute the tower operator corrected himself, gave us clearance for a proper runway, into the wind, and we landed.

The little Cats covered and tied for the night, Dan to his photographs me to my keyboard and the fun of sharing this adventure with you.

Now I sleep, for we have an early takeoff tomorrow to some of the most spectacular geology (and water) in this country.

Good night, Puff, and thank you for our lives.

Her rememberings of flights past but with her still, I’ll bet, as vivid as mine.  There’s a way, isn’t there, of making her living memory our own, if we desire it to be, if we value the lessons she’s learned and chooses to share?  I expect the answer is of course.  I expect we’ll see examples still to come, on this journey with the two Little Cats.

Today was all maintenance, till late,till just an hour ago.  But in this one day, Dan had replaced the carburetor, found a problem and fixed it in the other carburetor (this engine has two of them), replaced the spark plugs, replaced the tailwheel assembly, invented a system to keep freak failures from attacking his landing gear and test flew Jennifer in the sunset.  End of daylight, he’s flying perfectly.

Tomorrow we plan to be on our way early in the morning, a curviwandering route toward Farmington, New Mexico.

It’s already late and my belief is that I must sleep, this quick page all in haste but I wanted you to feel the surprise of Granma Cat, same as we felt it, reminding she’s with us along the way.

Please calculate the odds of that reminder