Indio, CA – Imperial, CA & Slab City
October 17, 2016
Photos by Arina Bleiman
10/14 As has become a common theme, I’m delayed once more, which is what gives me the time to detail some of my adventures. I’m stranded in Dallas, TX, which is easily the cushiest kind of “stranded” I’ve experienced so far. We’re at Stephen’s father’s house. It’s beautiful, and we’re about to grill a steak dinner for the second night in a row. It’s nice to breathe and I know I should be taking advantage of the rest., but I’m incredibly nervous. With every delay I have to shift the schedule around again: looking at the calendar, we’re in the final third of the route with about 19 days left. I’ve got a lot of flying ahead of me still.
Yesterday, I waited out some cloud cover, but by the time I was in the air it still wasn’t broken enough. I couldn’t climb above it without losing sight of the ground (not okay if you’re flying a trike). After 40 minutes I landed at Dallas Air Park, a rundown field in Plano. We were still only 20 minutes from Stephen’s dad’s but in the opposite direction. I parked Eddy under an overhang and tied him down.
Anyway, let’s backtrack to Los Angeles.
9/21: Los Angeles, CA – Indio, CA
We lost two days while in Los Angeles. We spent them plugged into our friend (and fellow trike pilot) Henry’s power supply and parked in front of his house. The second day I discovered that the bearing of my front wheel was broken; we spent most of the day chasing down parts, finding a machine shop to drill out the old bearings, and hammering in the replacements. Looking back on it, the tenseness of that delay is one that still unnerves me. “Weird weather for this time of year” has been a recurrent phase.
Finally the clouds were high enough for me to sneak out. So on a cool, grey morning, 5 days after setting out from Lodi, I found myself above Los Angeles, looking down at rows of concrete through a palpable haze. I had 3 alternate airports selected in case conditions deteriorated, especially given the nature of Banning Pass: a place formidable to pilots. It can quickly turn into a giant wind tunnel, and I was anticipating heavy turbulence for the 20 minutes it would take me to fly through it.
Of course, high winds are nothing in comparison to the events of Cal’s flight to Banning in 1911: his engine exploded there, spraying hot oil in his face and causing him to land immediately. That he got back in his machine after an experience like that is still incredible.
I was tense approaching the pass, rolling hills and small peaks beneath me. Incredibly, the winds were calm. I was shivering a little at 5,500′ and was briefly misted by a rain cloud. I leaned my head out the side to let the wind blow dry my face shield. Out of 100 windmills, only one turned.
I descended after Palm Springs and landed smoothly at Bermuda Dunes. A golf cart full of grinning boys escorted me to a comically-oversized hangar. I got to meet Angel, who works for the airport and who had arranged my arrival. Everyone there was very genial and made me feel like a celebrity.
Again we were delayed, this time by sandstorms which filled our teeth if we opened our mouths at all. The winds ripped through the rows of hangars, van and trike parked inside one of them, clanging and rattling like a banshee in a dungeon. Stephen and I sprinted outside in time to see a Cessna actually taking off into the storm; the winds must have been at least 30 knots. The craft rose 1,000 feet before it was halfway down the runway, lights flickering through the mask of sand grain. I couldn’t decide if he was very brave or reckless.
The winds died after the second day, which we spent regrouping, sitting in a cafe and shooting off emails, etc. The town is dead there (when it’s not a festival weekend).
9/23 – Indio, CA – Imperial, CA (& Slab City, CA)
I had to validate with Arina that we did everything I thought we did, in one day, on 9/23. “Yep,” she said.
I took off at sunrise with a 20 knot tailwind pushing me southeast. The valley was mellow in the early light; manicured golf courses rolled away under me. No clouds. I flew along the Salton Sea, described to me as reeking of dead Tilapia. Near the sea the land seemed suddenly desolate, scattered in a sandbox, everything the same shade of desert beige. I was tossed around a bit, the strong winds swirling around the mountains to the west and the air above the sea. At least I was making good time.
The turbulence smoothed perfectly as I flew over the green fields near Imperial and I landed well ahead of Stephen and Arina. I sat in the pilot lounge, dingy and grey, and drank coffee. A lot of these flights are made so early that by the time I have coffee it feels like I’m just waking up.
I fielded two press interviews and we drove to a small Mexican diner before driving on towards our destination for the day, Slab City. Bumbling along a dirt road, the van wobbling irritably, it emerged out of the haze of my early journey, the harried morning, the coffee still seeping in my blood.
The first thing was that we were most definitely in the desert. We drove through the hot, dry road, hand-painted signs pointing the way to the Hostel, where Balu, our guide, would be waiting for us. It was so dusty and burnt out that it was almost pure white, a wave of heat throbbing and baking us the moment we stepped out of the van.
Balu had just returned from a trip to Iceland. He emerged from a cluster of haphazard trailers, a painted school bus, scrap wood nailed together to form rooms; all of it sewn together with fabric, plastic, tarpaulin overhangs to block the sun. He shook my hand through a coil of razor wire that ran along the fence.
We started by pouring drinks and toasting, I forget to what. Balu would pour himself at least 5 more over the course of our 4 hour stay. We toured the hostel; a Pandora station was spitting out a charming blend of 1970s folk rock and funk. The place was wild, an amalgamation of trash and time. We sampled moonshine that had been brewed locally, it’s only label either “strong” or “mild.”
Balu showed us an RV that he had used while touring with a band, something that he has done extensively as an accomplished Vibemaster.
“How many bands have you produced?” I asked.
“I didn’t say produced,” he said. “I’m a Vibemaster.
“Oh,” I said. We looked at each other. “What’s a Vibemaster?”
“I keep it real man! Make sure everyone’s getting along, having a good time.”
I had never heard of this profession but decided that if I ever started a rock band, an amiable, portly hippie named Balu was probably an excellent investment. I grew to like the Vibemaster a great deal. He showed us the VW bus that had belonged to his mother: he’d painted it with rich primary colors, icons, and symbols. From the passenger-side, an Indian woman looked out from a veil under the glow of a sickle moon.
Wherever we went, Balu careened forward first like a bowling ball, clearing the way. We read from a gossip magazine in the middle of a trash site, where Balu said the waste management companies of Imperial dump illegally. He told me that eventually the sun would burn out all of the trash we saw, baking it into dust, the soil of Slab already a toxic, diseased thing anyway.
At one point, making a wrong turn, the van was chased by 2 dogs and Arina cautiously turned us around. “This guy likes to come out and take shots with his rifle, sometimes,” Balu said nonchalantly. I was about 2 seconds from screaming “DRIVE, ARINA! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STEP ON IT!!!” Flash-forwards of my child’s future danced wildly: “Well sweety, your father died of buckshot wounds from a crazed desert hobo. It was a very unfortunate thing, but he loved you very much, even then.”
We swayed through the library of Slab, shelves that had survived the fallout stood in the desert, proudly offering their titles. A thin woman with a boy-cut was conversing with Balu about where to build her shelter. She’d arrived a few days earlier and had decided to live there. I wondered why. Balu would tell me later that he thought she was lying. “Sometimes people say they’re staying because it makes them feel “in” with the Slabbers,” he told me.
There was a time in my life when I considered everywhere I went as somewhere I might live. In that time I might have considered Slab in the way the woman with the boy-cut was. To try something new, entice a new way of living, a place to seek happiness. Thinking about this, I understood that I was no longer seeking. I had a tribe already, a place I belonged to. That place, bizarre and inexplicable, was hundreds of miles away already, in Sacramento, California.
Not to say that I didn’t stay open to the wildness and oddity that was Slab City. Even now, I can’t seem to put my finger on it. It was dangerous: an odd mixture of artists, seekers, wanderers. We met a Portuguese, ex-US soldier who looked and swayed like a pirate. He yelled a greeting from the fence in front of his shack and invited us in; he’d washed up there a year ago in his trailer and built his home around it. Handwritten signs littered the yard, some extolling the virtue of obedience in slaves; one said “You say you support The Constitution? I say f&*% The Constitution / Y’all support the Institution!”
A crib sat empty in his front yard, and Balu asked where the baby had gone. I asked who that was and was told it was a real baby who The Pirate had been caring for a couple of months. “People around here know The Baby,” said Balu. “They feed it and sh%$ if they see it wandering around.” I still don’t know if he was joking; some mornings I wake up and wonder if I should call CPS just in case.
The evening ended in East Jesus, an art commune right next door to West Satan, a neighbor they’ve purportedly had shooting matches with. East Jesus stretched out in front of me, a garden of reclaimed art rising up from the trash and heat of the desert: manakins thrust through the roof of a Cadillac, a VW bus with iconography superglued all over it — mostly rows of whippets. “Charlie loved his whippets,” Balu said, referencing the eccentric and deceased founder of East Jesus, whose curvy nude photo rested atop the baby grand piano I would later play.
I sat with Balu and looked at a wall of TV sets, their screens smashed through and replaced with white slates and red letters: “YOU’RE TOO THIN” “BLAH” “I WAS YOUTUBE” “BE LIKE TV” “FREE THOUGHT * ONLY $89.99”
A little toddler named Nou Nou was wandering around and handed Arina a card: one side with the number 2 on it, the other side 3. “That’s weird,” I said, “23 is my lucky number.” Balu looked at me. “That was Charlie’s number.” It was also September 23. 23 is also Stephen’s and Tyler’s lucky number (my girlfriend), one that oddly pops up in our relationship often. I’m not a numerologist, but something about Balu sitting next to me, quiet like The Ghost of Christmas Future, and stumbling on the number 23 … I felt comforted. I’ve come to associate, in some pseudo-OCD way, seeing the number 23 as an omen of good progress. Finding it here made me feel, in an important moment, that I was on the right path.
The trip still felt impossible; I couldn’t grasp at it’s realness. This would all end soon. It was insane that I’d even come this far. It was as unreal and impossible as the day I’d gotten my pilot license.
I left Slab City in the same way I had entered it: not knowing quite what to make of it. A mirage in the desert, a haven for creativity, a hideaway for ex-cons and addicts, or people who just want to be left alone.
A disturbing darkness there also. A woman passing through on a road trip, mechanical camera in tow, badgered Balu with questions about a murder/rape that had happened there. According to Balu, a woman had been flirting with a man who was spoken for; he and his girlfriend took the woman outside, raped her together, and carved an anarchy A in her chest with a knife. They left her there to die; someone found her crawling in a ditch and she was airlifted out in time to save her.
“But don’t quote me, I wasn’t there.” To be fair to Balu, I’m paraphrasing.
Thinking of something this grisly amidst the quiet, fleeting oasis of Slab seemed odd, impossible. It was like wildness itself: beautiful but liable to shift, become unfriendly. Full of potential and demanding of respect. A place you might go at a suggestion from a friend: “hey man, you want to meet some really freaky people?” Vagabonds from all over flowing through it, to experience, to be free, to wander in the desert like Jesus. I’d been one of them for a day.
I left that wilderness and planned my next flight, falling asleep in the pop up roof of the camper van and hoping to be in Arizona the next day.
Los Angles: September 17 – 21
October 6, 2016
10/6 I’m too tired to do much of anything right now. I’m stranded in the middle of Texas without my ground crew, I haven’t kept up very well with this blog, and there’s a layer of cumulus above me that threatens to hold up further progress to San Antonio tomorrow. I’m nowhere near marathon shape and even after 9 hours of sleep in a dusty Del Rio motel I find myself as lethargic as the airport courtesy car I’m using (the check engine light has been on since I sat in it). The wind is picking up outside; I’m crossing my fingers for more fly able weather tomorrow. Ever since the van’s transmission quit three days ago I’ve been without even my logbook, meaning that the last 7 hours of flight have gone unrecorded. The three cups of Starbucks I’ve had today aren’t working; I salivate for a carefully-pulled, single origin ristretto shot. I’m looking at you to provide, Austin. As if to spite me, Step Out by Jose Gonzalez just came on (the song I blogged about as having inspired me through the darker times of this adventure). This is one of those periods, a dip in the momentum. They are expected, but that doesn’t make them suck any less.
Look, I haven’t been great at keeping up with this but there’s nothing I could have done differently. This has been the most demanding, the most nonstop, intensive thing I’ve ever done. I’m planning to write a book about everything once it’s all over and I promise, if you backed the Kickstarter, you’ll get a copy regardless of whether it gets published.
In the meantime, while I’m stuck alone in this Starbucks in Del Rio, let me tell you about Los Angeles.
Flying in LA is beautiful once you’ve climbed up past the smog layer to 3,000′. Even at 10 in the morning it’s hot up there. The Class B airspace (B for busy) is like an upside down wedding cake extending from LAX. Stay clear of that and you’re golden. Commercial jets on final approach stretch for miles to the east; at night they’re like a never ending stream of lights.
Comicon
On 9/18 I took some friends flying, edging around the thick marine layer by the coast that obscured the coast below for a bit then cruising back to Hawthorne. It was beautiful and weird to be taking friends for rides in a place I’d never flown before. This was especially true for Christina, who really pushed me to do this, three years ago when it was just an exciting idea. It was full circle. “You’re finally doing it!” people kept saying to me. I think I was still so shaken from the enormous repairs that I had completed that “finally doing it” felt way too good to be true. I didn’t dare believe it; I was suspicious of my joy.
Cal landed in Long Beach in 1911 — right on the damn beach actually, because it was 1911 and the FAA wasn’t around to revoke his license, and even dipped his landing struts in the Pacific.
In the middle of writing that sentence I received 5 text messages, answered them, started an Instagram post, and refreshed my weather app before I realized I was off track. Maybe this is why Cal’s story holds so much appeal for me: it was a time when everything was very focused. The whole country was behind one pursuit, cheering for Cal because of what he represented. He wasn’t just flying across America, he was pulling the future along with him.
Very little is still standing when it comes to Cal’s story. There’s a Vin Fiz replica and a little write up at The Smithsonian, his grave, and then a 1/3 scale replica in the lobby of the Long Beach Convention Center. Our visit happened to coincide with Comicon weekend.
And there it was. In the midst of royalty from Game of Thrones, Suicide Squad devotees, members of the Imperial Federation, The Vin Fiz flew 30 feet above. I looked everywhere for the plaque.
“It had to be removed when we remodeled, we just haven’t put it back up yet.”
“When was that?”
“About 4 months after we put it up” (5 years ago).
I stopped and asked passerby if they knew what was flying right above us. Predictably, only one person did (and her career had been in aviation). I had a nice, prolonged conversation about Cal and his modern relevance: why he is not remembered and what that says about the state of things. She blamed social media, citing it as a distraction from progress. Yesterday, holed up in my Del Rio motel, I caught a glimpse of her as I flipped through the TV stations. She was on E! competing with other women for a sports star on a reality dating show. She was voted off in the first episode.
The night of the 18th we gathered at a friend’s house. I was surrounded with people I hadn’t caught up with in months, maybe years. Though I didn’t expect it, the night ended with everyone sitting in a circle and telling me, honestly, they’re thoughts on Tilt Shift. I was embarrassed in the kind of reddened way I am when people sing happy birthday to me.
it was beautiful though, to hear the honesty of the other side of my experience. It was strange and surreal: friends who thought it was a pipe dream, friends who were proud, friends who were inspired, one friend who actually cried because of its emotional connection to her. I don’t think I stop often enough to consider the waves I might be causing. We don’t come through life without stirring the motion of everything; we all create a current. Like a cosmic blanket that we ripple and poke without realizing it.
Well, the pressure was on. I still couldn’t fathom that I was in Los Angeles, but I soaked in the moment. I felt enormous gratitude for it, was flattened by it. The path ahead would be [IS] rough; I wanted to save the energy in that room for later. I felt the weight of what I was about to attempt, the love lof everyone who wants to see me land Eddie in Montauk, and knew then that I was going to really go for it. Up until then it hadn’t taken shape, was still just an idea. Now I would take a shot at Banning Pass, see how I was doing in Indio, set out towards Arizona and weave around the higher mountains, one at a time.
“You’ll Know When It’s Time”
September 29, 2016
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
I’m sitting in an auto repair shop in Wickenburg, Arizona, waiting for the muffler on our GoWesty (a VW Eurovan) to be repaired. The wind is strong, on the ground as well as aloft so there will be no flying today. Wickenburg is the kind of cute western town you might want to spend an afternoon in. Anything after that and, at least for me, my “go go go!” mode kicks in. It has a kind of blue collar, old world grit I remember from small towns in Pennsylvania. For no good reason, realistic concrete statues of men in cowboy hats are placed in front of a few establishments; I joke with Stephen and Arina that this is how people are tricked into stopping here.
I landed at Wickenburg Municipal on Sunday in a strong, steady wind, after getting pushed around by headwinds as strong as 25 knots en route from Dateland, AZ. The plan was to head into the mountains past Prescott, but the winds were so strong that instead I chained Eddy to the ground here and joined a genial group of pilots for coffee and doughnuts. Sunday happened to be their weekly get together. A man with a cowboy hat asked where I was headed. “New York City,” I said. They all laughed and asked what my groundspeed was — “43 knots” — and laughed some more.
I haven’t written anything so far except for letters, but it’s all imprinted itself so well that I’m finding no trouble recollecting. First: everything leading up to everything else.
The Cal Rodgers Experience
The pedal was on the floor for the entire month before departure. Every day I would come home from work, make a sandwich, and sit at my laptop for 6-8 hours planning the route, sending out paperwork, checking things off lists, ordering a backup pair of glasses, finalizing contracts, calling airport managers, and collapsing into bed next to my already-asleep girlfriend. We’re expecting a baby in March, by the way. March 12th, right between my father and sister’s birthdays. Without blinking I can tell you that leaving my impending fatherhood behind for 40+ days has been the hardest part of all this.
Bigger even than the broken landing gear strut that sparked a 2 week sprint to the starting gate. On September 2, a windy day at Franklin Field (F72), I came down for a practice crosswind landing. One moment I was hovering above the runway, the next the trike was on the ground and shaking back and forth, dancing from wheel to wheel with unanticipated violence. I was clenching the control bar, struggling to restore equilibrium, my only words “oh boy. OH BOY!” I knew something was really wrong. It’s incredible to me that I didn’t flip Eddy right over. I ended up running off the runway into the dirt. The trike was leaning to one side. I taxied it, slow and sad, to the parking area, bracing myself to consider the damage.
Eddy was leaning to one side like a crippled thing — the right strut had snapped at the root, the brake lines were torn and leaking, and the propeller had sliced through a wheel pant. I sat down on a bench and cried. So began the second “trike recovery effort” I’ve ever made, involving a tremendous effort from Doug and Tom (my instructor and hangar mate/mentor) to buy wood for ramps, rent a U Haul truck (incredibly one was available; it was Labor Day weekend), wheel Eddy into the truck, disassemble the wing, and get the injured bird back to the hangar.
When I was young I had a hamster who I named Houdini. He escaped upwards of 8 times. It’s no surprise then, that an adventure modeled after Cal Rodgers might include, already, some of the roadblocks he encountered: mechanical issue, weather, the odds seemingly insurmountable. But Cal had a lot of help, it turns out. So do I. More than I deserve, I’m sure.
Something I realized recently: Cal never could have gotten halfway to the opposite coast without a lot of help. My adventure is no exception. Having Kamron Blevins of Northwing on my side is crucial — I called him immediately and he overnighted me new struts, a brand new prop, and a new wheel pant. Having community is crucial. A group of people who will unite behind you, believe in you, cheer for you. Completing this flight will be in humongous thanks to my community, for the people who braced my effort.
A prop strike can have tremendous consequences on the interior of an engine. Compounding the problem: the only HKS mechanic I know was backed up with work until the middle of October. I begged him to let me bring the trike to him. This involved approximately 12 hours of driving, and two U Haul rentals. Three days before our estimated takeoff date, I found myself standing in a hangar, wind rattling it quietly, while the mechanic removed the spark plugs and poked a slender metal rod into it. It was as if I were being surgically inspected. I could feel the cold rod slipping between my organs, prodding me, icing my soul. The man looked at me: “It’s okay,” he said. I might have had a stroke.
I spent days crawling around on the hangar floor, asking Doug to drill out my fiberglass struts, figuring out how to fill brake lines by myself (soaking my jeans in transmission fluid), tying the trike down to the ground with ratchet straps, adjusting the prop angle three times until it was right, safety wiring the propeller… I came home with fiberglass splinters in my hands, inexplicable little bruises and cuts all over my fingers, so much grease under my nails that it took a brittle brush and 15 minutes of merciless scrubbing to remove all of it.
And all the while… press! All of a sudden the news outlets I’d been pestering in Sacramento wanted a piece of the story. I wasn’t even sure I had a piece to give. On the day that I flew my trike again, a photographer from The Sacramento Bee was there. I assembled the wing, reattached it and was up, only to discover that I seemed to be flying sideways. The wing was pointed in a different direction than the carriage. I landed, and taxied back, whispering to Stephen (who had arrived by that point with our Director of Photography, Arina), that it might be all over.
I wanted to curl up and die. The story I’d worked so hard for a chance to tell had an audience, only I didn’t know if I could tell it any longer. There was a possibility that it was all for naught. I might walk away without the adventure I’d strived for, with only a corny positive spin like “it turns out the real adventure was just everything that led me here!”
The only reason I didn’t have a breakdown was that I didn’t have time for one.
In the midst of this, on the day Stephen arrived, we threw a housewarming/sendoff party, managing to cram about 30 people into our apartment. I made six pizzas from scratch and left for 45 minutes to rent another U Haul truck. I was surrounded by people who believed in me, who wanted to see me succeed: the people I loved, the people I was just getting to know, the people I’d been raving about my project to for the better part of 2 years. My manager handed me an envelope which I believed was a reimbursement check for work, but turned out to be a Kickstarter donation that he’d pooled from all 4 of our cafe locations. I wanted to sit alone and cry, weeping because of the gratitude and because of my fear. I did not want to disappoint anyone.
It turns out that the main mast had also been bent in the accident, accounting for the misplacement of the wing in regards to the carriage. Once again, Northwing came through — overnighting me a new mast without hesitation. Sitting in my kitchen in the cold morning, waiting for it, I got a call from another reporter. I was so broken that I told him without any hesitation what was going on, sparing no details. He wanted a piece of that, even. Like a wild non sequitur I had a dude in my house asking me about everything. My mast arrived at the door about 20 minutes after he did. He followed me to the airport to get more footage and even helped me install the mast. Even the press was helping me get Eddy ready! I took the trike up again and it flew better than it’s ever flown. Flying like that felt incredible. Eddy felt sturdy, strong, and clean again.
The Cheering Dims, The Engine Hums
We departed on September 16. The news was there that day; the cameraman asked if I would be taking off in the parking area outside of the hangar, rather than the runway. When I got to the airport that morning, the first thing I did was to screw my new wheel pant in and zip tie my parachute cable. Even then, I was still buttoning things up. I kissed Tyler (my girlfriend), and hugged everyone. A man and his wife, who said they lived down the road from the airport, came to see me off. “We’ll pray for you, honey,” said the woman. I told her I’d take anything I could get.
It was cold and still. Stephen was wearing a race car jumpsuit; he’d misplaced his flight suit. We got in the trike together for the first time ever. Almost 3 years, and we’d never been in the air together. I warmed up the engine. I made a normal radio call — “Lodi traffic, weight shift 6688 Lima departing runway 26, departing southwest” — suppressing the urge to jinx everything by yelling out “Lodi traffic, weight shift 6688 Lima departing runway 26, HERE WE GOOOO BABY waaaaHOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!”
Once airborne we came around for a low pass and waved at the cameras. Later I would watch Heather from Good Morning Sacramento interviewing Tyler after takeoff. Everyone looked small as we rose away. Tom and Manouch, in their trike and Cessna, respectively, flew by us a few times. Tom snapped some beautiful photos. It was the first time I’d flown in formation. After about 15 minutes Tom peeled away and we continued on, the sun painting the valley red, woozy, unreal, none of it for a moment registering. Just the flying, the focus on the craft, the millions of worries not mattering because there was no room for them: the unfunded Kickstarter with 2 days and $6,000 left. My child, my girlfriend — the woman I love and cherish more than flying and music combined and all of the novels I have yet to write — on the ground without me. A part of me not wishing to go, not wanting any of it now that I was doing it, had proved I could make it this far.
Tom peeled off and there was only the hum of the engine, me at the controls of a trike, and 4,000 miles in front of me.
Someone once told me “you’ll know when it’s time,” in a discussion about the adventure and when it would occur. It didn’t come true. I didn’t have any sensation that the moment had arrived, that the winds were in my favor, nothing that prophetic. Only that I could, now, begin. I thought I might as well start flying down the coast and see what happens. It’s only now, 11 days later that I realize I’ve started.
A Word from The First Trike Pilot Around The World
August 29, 2016
“David Grabowski, reaching back to the early 20th century history of American aviation, has found a genuine hero to commemorate. Why is it that hardly anyone at all knows the name of the first man to fly an aircraft, coast to coast, across the USA? Have Americans really lost touch with their historic heroes? Calbraith Perry Rodgers comes from genuine American historical stock. One of his ancestors was the 1812 US naval hero of Commodore Oliver Perry, author of the famous American quote ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship’, and Cal’s 51 day flight across the US to win a prize of $50,000 – withdrawn halfway through by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst – was one of the ‘sickeners’ Rodgers had to overcome. There were no airfields for his landings each day and he crashed 12 times. But sponsored by the then-famous drink ‘Vin Fizz’, Cal Rodgers won through, though tragically, he was killed shortly afterwards when his flimsy Wright Flyer struck a seagull flying low along a California beach. He should be famous, but he isn’t, and David Grabowski’s brave and imaginative flight along Rodgers’ route to get him remembered should be something all Americans support.”
– Brian Milton, the British pilot who made the first Ultralight flight around the world in 120 days in 1998
One Year Later
August 19, 2016
Mid-day: a blistering hot street in Land Park, Sacramento. A bearded man in Toms dismounts his bicycle and carries it through his front door. He is greeted by a Chihuahua and a Maltese who yip and lick his legs. He hurriedly makes a sandwich and brews his third cup of coffee that day, bringing both with him into an upstairs room. Above his desk hangs a U.S. VFR Wall Planning Chart, 1:3,100,000 scale. The northeastern portion of the map features a connected series of red lines drawn with Expo wet erase. He sits and begins to plan.
For the last 6 hours I’ve felt fine, mainly because I’ve been ignoring the chorus of “To-Dos” thrumming in my limbic system. The knowledge of how little time I have left crashes in on me and I feel panic. I open a voicemail on my phone: it’s from the documentary’s Director, Stephen, expressing the same. We have just enough time to get to day 1 of production.
The good news: I’m flying again. I have a pilot’s license. I passed my exam in March, shaved to celebrate — then immediately regretted that and haven’t shaved since. I ran my first full marathon. I’ve flown every chance I’ve had, even though those opportunities were marred at one point by a series of light repairs and alterations that had to be completed. The upshot of the tweaks and repairs: Eddy is running better than ever. The downside, obviously, was the loss of two months.
I feel a bit like the kid who starts a “travel journal” on vacation and comes back to it years later feeling sorry for neglecting it. The honest fact of it, Dear Reader, is that I haven’t had oodles to report. I’ve been doing the same thing I’ve always done: hang in there, do everything I can to get to day 1.
Every second of my day is hung up with planning or making phone calls. In a lot of ways this makes me very happy: I finally have concrete plans about which airports I’ll land at and what we’ll film in which parts of the country. It makes me smile when Helen (by far the greatest Long Island accent I’ve ever heard) calls me from Montauk Airport (our finish line) and tells me there’s hangar space available.
In other ways it’s rattled me. I’m exhausted with the push of getting ready for this. I berate myself constantly for, really, having done anything else except prep for this trip… and I am tired of this. I miss having the time to compose music; I haven’t written a story in over a year. These are the things that I have always had, have always done; For the better part of the last three years I’ve put them aside. I look forward to the day I wake up and find only “drink coffee and read” on the agenda.
Mercifully, at the end of each week’s stream of “GO GO GO!” I am reminded of why I haven’t ever, for a second, given up.
Early morning, a quiet Sacramento street. Sprinkler systems are running. A bearded man emerges from his home carrying a travel mug of hot coffee. He locks the door, gets in a car, and guns it south for Lodi. There is no traffic.
After a thorough pre flight he takes off on runway 26 in his trike and turns to the southeast. He climbs into a layer of warm air at 1,500 feet and levels off. The sun is just rising, the land below is golden. Mount Diablo stares solemnly. The air smells fresh, the atmosphere winds around the fairing of his trike. The hum of his engine and the hiss of the air streaming around him are the only sounds, the world passing under him the only thing to see. He breathes a sigh and hears the crackle of his own headset in his ears. He has 4 hours of this ahead of him. Moving along at 50 mph, he is home.
Purgatory Part III: Shimmy Shake Shake
August 7, 2015
Some adventures are simple. Pack supplies and a map and go. Boom: adventure!
Tilt Shift was never going to work that way. The trip always involved acquiring a new and serious set of skills, an aircraft, and a database of knowledge that I didn’t have. Learning requires patience; patience requires discipline; discipline requires commitment… and on we go down the rabbit hole. These are the psychological prerequisites.
Then there are the physical ones: a working aircraft, properly equipped and registered. I don’t need to go further than that. That’s the wall I’ve been slamming up against these past months.
Let’s start with Mr. Shakey. I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly when it all began. All I know is that, suddenly, keeping my trike from flipping me off the runway became of concern. The wheels would touch down (sometimes smoothly too; well done, me!) and then the trike would begin to oscillate back and forth violently. Sometimes it took both Doug and I to muscle down the wing and dampen the shimmy. (My previous definition of “shimmy” — meaning “a dance move usually accompanied by jazz hands” — was eradicated).
There was no way Doug was going to allow a student pilot to solo in an aircraft that could potentially send his sorry, flustered ass shooting off the runway. I wasn’t at all disagreeing with him. And there it was: another wall, another delay, another round of frustrating phone calls, and the possibility that Experimental Weight Shift N6688L might not be going anywhere except via FedEx Dreamliner… in a packing crate.
We tried everything. We tried to “toe-out” the trike, thereby increasing the angle between the wheel path and the direction of the plane’s motion. This involved attaching straps to my airframe and hauling back on them while simultaneously kicking the struts out into position. I can’t tell you how many hours of measuring, hypothesizing, and teeth-sucking went by. I noticed that the front tire wasn’t holding air adequately and, thinking it might be abetting Mr. Shakey, spent 2-3 hours wrestling a tube into it (and swearing a red streak under my breath). This still did not fix the problem.
When a well-respected member of the trike pilot community explained to me that trikes like mine simply shimmy, and the only solution is to learn to always land slow, I thought it was the end. That might be all right for the weekend pilot who wants to putter around over his cornfield when the weather’s perfect, but not for me. Not for 40+ days of flying across the country with Stephen’s life in my hands, when there will be times that I need to land fast without wondering if the trike will go cartwheeling into a ditch once I set it down.
One day, I had arranged to be at the airport when Bill Sherlock, the same mechanic who had fixed my engine post-engine out, would also be there. Me, Doug, Bill, and Tom were all standing around my trike, picking up the nose, spinning the wheel, hypothesizing. I was poking around inside when I discovered a slightly loose bracket. It couldn’t possibly be that silly, right? RIGHT?
That bracket happened to hold the steering damper and it was preventing the damper from working for the first 10 degrees of movement. It was enough to cause the oscillation I’d experienced. We bolted it tight, glued it in with locktite, and took it for a spin. No shimmy, despite several “exciting” landings in midday turbulence (the jump plane saw us coming in on final and radioed “little bumpy up there for you guys today, huh?”).
Front fork fixed, it was time to get everything sorted out for me to start flying solo. This meant securing insurance, a registration, and installing an in-dash radio (thanks to Manouch, our friend, fellow pilot, and electrical wiz). Unfortunately, when I started up the engine to test the new radio with it running, I discovered another problem: the key switch was sticking, in turn causing my starter motor to continuously run.
I ordered a new key switch. Naturally, the manufacturer was backordered so I had to wait 10 days.
They sent the wrong switch. Head → wall.
What has all of this taught me? What’s the big takeaway from being grounded for approximately two months, to the point where I’m starting to wonder if I’ve forgotten how to fly?
I don’t know and I think it’s right that I don’t know because the takeaway, the “big event,” is in the future, waiting to surprise me.
I’ve lived in Sacramento for over a year and will spend a second summer here; it’s something that I never intended. I also didn’t intend to find a sweet one-room cottage and six awesome roommates in the adjacent house. I didn’t intend to spend my birthday sitting in with an impromptu funk band at a friend’s BBQ. There’s a lot I didn’t plan for and that’s just fine with me.
Being a pilot and an adventurer means being fluid, to adapt to newness but to remain, at my core, confident. “I endure, I conquer” does not mean “if I just force this, if I just push and push and push, I will conquer.” Endure means to remain in existence; to last. I wouldn’t call my mini-purgatory painful, but it is difficult. It’s difficult because it is teaching me to be true to my Polish roots: to be goddamn stubborn as well as patient. My challenges do not scream “ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.” They are here to test my resolve.
After the starter switch discovery, we (the pilots of the hangar) were standing around N6688L talking about the issue. I expressed something along the lines of “why does this keep happening to me?” Doug spread his hands and said “Hey, it’s a machine. It’s not going to be perfect indefinitely. You’ve got to maintain it; that’s part of owning an aircraft [paraphrased].” I was ashamed of how impatient I’d been.
Congratulations: you’re all caught up. My starter switch arrives on Monday. Stay tuned.
Purgatory Part II: Step Out
April 23, 2015
Being back in Sacramento feels surprisingly good. I say surprisingly because this town isn’t easily adapted to. The pace is different from most places I’ve been: Sacramento is “The City of Trees,” not “The City That Never Sleeps.” It’s refreshing to be on my own time and geographically closer to the airport too. Bed acquired, I take a job at a local bike shop and resume flight training.
Flight #1 of 2015 is on January 25. Doug writes “beautiful air — lot’s of birds” in my logbook. Had I been making the entry, I might’ve written “reduced to sniveling wussy, not sure I can do this; terrifying.” Every movement causes panic, I grip the bar for dear life, the wind causes the noise of the engine to oscillate wildly, and my eyes scramble along the ground for somewhere to land. An impish creature dances around in my head, chanting a playground taunt: “your engine’s gonna dieeeee, you’re not ready for thissss, what the $#%@ are you doingggg, Doug can see right through youuuuu…” and I don’t have much to say back. The imp giggles.
I return home defeated, too shaken to bring myself to open the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (which I lovingly refer to as PHAK!), down a few beers, watch a film, and go to bed bleary-eyed. This is the highlight of my week for a couple of weeks.
After two or three tangos with the imp, I know something has to change. It’s funny, but writing this now, I can’t pinpoint when exactly anything did. I only remember the Walter Mitty Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.
I’ve been avoiding the inevitable comparison with W.M. (in our press release I will beg journalists not to use the phrase “Walter Mitty moment”) but this soundtrack got to me. The film is pretty great too. The first track is “Step Out” by José González. It leads very quickly into a rush of heady power chords and full-voiced chorus. Go ahead. Press play below. I started playing the first couple of tracks before heading to the airport; I got myself worked up until I started verbally combatting the imp which, to any observer, would make me look like a complete psychopath.
Imp (in my head): “Your engine’s gonna die and you’re gonna crash!”
Me (out loud): “Shut up! Shut the *&%$ up! If my engine dies I’ll bring it down safely and land it because I am trained for this and I can handle it.”
Imp: “You’re not ready for this!”
Me: “Yes I am! I’ve been training for almost a year, I’ve pulled off an engine-out without panicking, I’m a good pilot, and I will only get better from here!”
Imp: “Your wing’s gonna snap!”
Me: “I have a BRS chute; if that happens, I’ll pull it! I can do this. I can do this! I CAN DO THIS. COME ON. LET’S GO!”
Time to step outside, time to step outside
Time to step out, time to step out
Time to step outside, time to step outside
Time to step outside you
I’m in my “cabin,” the blinds are pulled, and I’m yelling out loud and pulling on two pairs of socks (it gets chilly up there). Whatever it takes. I’m not exaggerating. Two months later, I’m chatting with Sharon, my roommate Kelsey’s mother. She smiles and says “you were dealing with PTSD and you didn’t even know it.” Oh Imp, you.
The imp vanishes. Well, fades at least. Doug and I start cross-country training, where I plan a route to distant airports that I’ve never been to, locate landmarks for pilotage, make calculations, and fly the route with Doug. This is the most exciting thing I’ve done in my trike.
One day, Doug reaches forward and turns off my GPS. “Oh nooo!” he says. I still find my way back to Lodi (K1O3, for all you pilots). On another, we take the trike up to 2,500 feet and fly into the Amador County foothills. It is stunning. So beautiful that I get lost after takeoff and earn a lecture about being home before sundown.
A few weeks later, a Bald Eagle shoots 200 feet underneath us. Doug takes the wing, unable to restrain his inner ornithology geek, and we circle around looking for it. It vanishes before we even started the turn. In this moment I feel a distinct reverence for the craft I am learning; that I have the privilege to occupy the same airspace as a bald eagle.
Everything is wonderful, until a new imp waddles into plain view, a scoundrel whose name is spoken in hushed tones in hangars the world over: Mr. Shakey. A darkness descends over everything…
Purgatory
April 15, 2015
For three months following the engine out I lived in three places: a festival producer’s living room, my aunt’s house in Oakland, and my home in Pennsylvania.
The other day, after froyo with my roommates, I started walking back towards the middle of the parking lot, confident that the car would be there, when in fact the car had been parked right in front of me. The past three months were like that: everything kind of blurry. It doesn’t feel like a beginning, middle, and end, just moments and segments that get fuzzy when I recollect them. What was most definitive of a certain moment may actually be unrememberable now; just the feeling remaining.
Let’s just dive in.
PART I: THE PROPELLER SILENCED
The engine dies and a mini-purgatory begins. That sounds negative, but is purgatory all that bad? It’s not good, but it’s not, you know, hell or anything. It’s an in-between, thumb-twiddling, utterly frustrating period in which you prepare yourself for a next step.
After the engine dies there’s a lot of back and forth between me, Stephen, Doug, and a fine gentleman by the name of Bill Sherlock who’s flown this same engine (a 60 horsepower HKS700E) over the Alps. During this time I continue to work at a local wine bar, and Stephen and I decide to move to different ends of the country. The plan at this point is that Stephen will continue to flight train with me in Sacramento, commuting out by plane twice a month. I think we both understand that this isn’t going to happen.
We both get hired on as Production Assistants for TBD Fest in Sacramento. For a week we run around with walkie-talkies strapped to our shoulders, getting sunburned, drinking too much caffeine, running last-minute errands, and generally having an incredible time.
After the festival I move in with my aunt Naomi in Oakland, who immediately has a serious foot operation. The day I move in, Stephen has his car smashed into and over $20,000 of equipment is stolen, including a bag full of the disposable cameras he’s been accumulating since day one of our trip. By some miracle of God in Congress, the hard drives containing all of our footage thus far are not taken.
The next time I see Stephen I’m holding him in a swanky bar — the kind that makes bespoke, craft cocktails — while he sobs into my arms. We get some stares. I tell him it’s going to be okay. We argue on a street corner about whether or not Coldplay should play TBD fest next year (he was right about that one). The last time I see Stephen before he heads back to New York City, I hand him a Murakami novel, get back in his car, Sheila (now entrusted to me), and drive back to my aunt’s.
The next two months are a frustrating smudge in which I commute to the airport in Lodi maybe 2 or 3 times and study a lot. It’s good to be with family though. My cousin suggests that I grow a beard. Eventually, my engine is repaired to Bill’s satisfaction. The engine’s starter motor had gotten stuck, which eventually caused a massive draw on the power and killed the engine.
The last flight before I went home for the holidays, in December, is one of the most beautiful I can remember. There are flocks of birds soaring beneath us and a puffy cumulus cloud that Doug lets me fly under.
Stepping onto a commercial jet feels strange. On my way home, I spend some time in Annapolis visiting my good friend Missy, who’s been away in Istanbul. I am so happy, just relating to her and her adventures, catching up, drinking coffee, looking at Christmas lights.
Going home is like stepping out of a dream, except I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep. I kneel down and pet Nicky, our dog, and he seems older. He is older. My home has aged and for the first time I haven’t aged with it. I find myself in tears, just three minutes after stepping through my front door. I hug my mother. A wave of relief settles as I unpack into my childhood room, slip into flannel pajamas (it’s below 20 degrees) and fall asleep with the moon slanting through the slats in my blinds like I remember. It’s funny but I can remember arguing with my mom about what color they should be, back when I was 14. Now I just feel ungrateful, because I didn’t realize then how lucky I would feel, at 25, to come back to a home at all.
This feeling persists through the holidays: a profound thankfulness to just be somewhere that I know, doing the things I remember, relaxing, being together, seeing my old friends, sleeping in. Seeing my extended family, I feel almost embarrassed, because in a way I’ve failed. My original mission has extended far longer than I expected it to.
How could I possibly have expected that Stephen and I would become pilots, get two aircraft, and fly them both across the country… in three months? It’s so ludicrous to me now that I laugh every single time I think of the original plan.
When I leave home I am scared, low on money, and very unsure about what the hell comes next. I touchdown in Oakland around noon, gather my things, get a jump start from a neighbor, and drive back to Sacramento, to the place I’ve rented out, not having met any of my new roommates, and having no idea what to expect. I stop at an In-N-Out (sorry everyone, still one of the most overrated burgers in my opinion), pull into a parking spot, and snarf the whole thing down in about five minutes. I don’t even bother to shut the engine off, I just sit there pigging out like a kid who’s escaped from fat camp.
I finally arrive at 36th/X St. and Mandolin is the first person I meet. Mandolin is ⅙ of my roommates (six, if you count their animal familiars, and I do). Next is Nibbler the Boston Terrier, who promptly pees all over my shoes, and Pumpkin the cat, who makes a hell-bent dash for freedom out the front door. Though I do not realize it, Oatmeal the cat is lurking in the shadows, analyzing my every move.
The room I’ve rented is a converted garage with it’s own bathroom, shower, kitchenette, and wood stove. I throw down two camping pads, get under my trusty army blanket, roll up a jacket for a pillow, crank up the space heater, and fall asleep on the floor. Immediately I have flashbacks to Chelan, where Stephen and I slept on the concrete floor of our trike manufacturer’s airplane hangar. Because of this, I feel as though I’ve picked back up where I left off, and it makes me not miss home so much anymore.
When I wake up I’m focused on one thing and one thing only: getting a damn bed.
“Ohhh Doug…”
August 4, 2014
When I wrote last week’s blog post I had no idea how relevant it would soon be.
On July 30th, at approximately 12:00 PM and 1,000 feet in the air, my trike’s engine coughed. “Oooh Doug…” I said, sucking air in through my teeth. “What?” “I think we’re going to have an engine out. I’m going to land in that field there.” I pointed to it. I flipped the electric fuel pump (our backup), and eased off the throttle. Looking down, the volt meter had dropped from 11.5 to 7 and I knew we were going down.
The engine died quickly and I brought my full attention to landing in the field below, sucking the bar in to increase our airspeed. Doug’s “trainer voice” never for one minute faltered. “That’s it, that’s it, now remember we’re downwind… good, good… now keep your eye out for fences…any fences, anything sticking up out of the ground…”
“As long as we stay clear of those trees we’ll be just fine…”
“Good, now round out… round out…” we touched the ground and began jostling and jumping over bumps, reminding me of riding a jet ski. I applied the brakes gradually and we came to a complete stop, the acrid smell of burnt oil and fuel in the air but uninjured and the trike without structural damage.
Suddenly n the middle of a giant field, I collapsed into hysterical laughter, my head against the control frame. I told Doug that we should get out of the trike immediately (in case, you know, something ignited). He put a hand on my shoulder and told me to take a deep breath.
A man was waving to us by a fence to our right. His name was Trevor, and he turned out to be the caretaker of the adjacent property. He’d seen us flying overhead and was shocked when, five minutes later, he saw us stationary in the middle of the field. He was kind enough to give me a ride to the airport where I retrieved the car and wing bag. “Are they going to fly away?” asked his 3 year old daughter, Megan. No, Megan. No.
The adventure quickly went from “thank god I’m alive,” to “my god this is a pain in the ass.” Six 100+ degree hours later, Doug and I had the trike back in the hangar, where Tom (another trike pilot) met us and helped me return the U Haul I’d rented. I could not have taken care of everything as quickly as I did without the help of these two men and I feel incredibly grateful to call them my friends.
I never envisioned myself recreating this part of Cal’s adventure even once. This was a frequent event for Cal, landing and sometimes crashing in farmer’s fields where the reactions ranged from hysteria (mobs of fans sprinting towards the Vin Fiz) to apathy (farmers looking up from their rakes, shaking their heads, and going back to what they were doing).
I sent Stephen the cover photo above (he’s salmon fishing in Alaska with his father), and his reply was priceless as what had transpired slowly dawned on him (right).
I feel that my inner Cal has surfaced. Never once during the whole ordeal did I panic, and I knew as soon as I saw the field that we were going to be alright. I have Doug’s uncompromising training to thank for that. On landing, two thoughts came in quick succession. First: “will you still do this trip, even after this?” Second: “of course I will.” I have never been so confident in my flying ability.
This event has implications for our trip going forward (a delay the most obvious). Right now I’m just thankful to be alive. My father told me that yesterday he had been mowing the lawn and the thought “is David okay right now?” popped into his head out of the blue (I’m sure that thought is frequent when you’re a parent). He said another voice had responded “he’ll be okay.” Yes I will be.
Someone get me back up in the air again, and soon. Until then: I endure, I conquer.
On Weighing Risk
July 30, 2014
My sister (21, Mezzo Soprano, got all the beauty genes) leaves for Finland tomorrow. She’s one of two U.S. competitors in the Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition, and also the competition’s youngest. She’s just been told that her host has a swimming pool, but not to wear a bathing suit (they swim in the nude), so she’s already feeling culture shocked. She’s scared about flying overseas. I don’t blame her, given recent headlines. I’m of course referring to MH17, but also another event that shook me:
Last Wednesday, Haris Suleman (17) and his father Babar crashed into the Pacific ocean en route to Hawaii. They had been flying around the world from Indianapolis in a world record attempt, and were supposed to make their final touchdown on Sunday. The flight was to fundraise for new schools in Babar’s native Pakistan. Haris’ last tweet: “Pago Pago is without a doubt top 5 places I’ve been this summer :)”
This was too close to home. It hit that area of my throat that makes me uncomfortable. “This could be you,” it whispered. The point in bringing this up isn’t to make anyone nervous or our parents cringe. It’s to talk about death.
My patron saint of cross country flying, Cal Rodgers, met his untimely end just after his own flight was over, and it’s a surprise that he didn’t die before he made the flight. He crashed 14 times and was hospitalized for a month before he could complete the trip. The very reason that Cal’s name is so enigmatic is because he died, the ensuing boom in aviation all but writing him out of the books. I think that he was keenly aware of the possibility of dying. How could he not? Multiple deaths had occurred at the Chicago International Aviation Meet just a few months before he began his trip. But he pushed on anyway, fighting pressing crowds, delays, injuries, and his own mother, who forbade him from completing the trip (apparently worrying mothers could be major delays in 1911).
I recently had a conversation with a customer (I work at a winery now) about the differences between the west and the east coast, he being a refreshingly cynical New Yorker. He paused for a moment, took a sip of cabernet sauvignon, and quipped: (I’m paraphrasing here) “the biggest difference between the east and west coast is how each views death. That’s what defines the life of everyone: how they view death. No one lives forever.” Ironically, the guy was a life insurance salesman.
I told my sister that part of the reason I stayed tied to New York was that anything outside New York, whether I realized it in these terms or not, meant uncertainty. I stuck with what I knew, afraid of having to readapt to something different. I think that in some ways I wanted to take this adventure to face my own mortality. As a result, I’ve come face to face with the present, i.e. life.
I could toss out statistics and stats about light sport trike crashes, but everything about risk ultimately comes down to weighing it. That is to say: is it worth it? Will you regret it if you die because of that risk? For my sister, leaving to go compete in a major international singing competition far outweighs the astronomical possibility of crashing in the plane she’s travelling in. For Stephen and I?
We’ve talked about this. We may pantomime having an engine out over Los Angeles for comedic effect, but both of us understand what we’re undertaking. We’re doing something that nature did not intend human beings to do. We’re taking every precaution, of course: proper instruction, a ground crew as backup, and a ballistic recovery parachute installed in the trike. The question remains, as I said before: does the act outweigh the risk?
Being on this adventure is the first time that I’ve been okay with the idea of dying, and I don’t think that’s as morbid as it sounds. If I had died in New York, for any reason, I would have (for the sake of discussion) regretted it. If I die having an epic adventure, pursuing something that I’m passionate about, and aiming to create a portrayal of that experience, I’m very okay with it. I wouldn’t take the (still relatively small) risk I’m taking otherwise.
I’m really not being flippant. We generally don’t want to talk about death because we don’t want to think about it. Even Stephen (and of course I don’t fault him for this), brushed this conversation aside last time we had it. But it’s important to think about. Time is limited. Time does not exist except the present time and if you aren’t okay with the present, you shouldn’t be doing whatever it is you’re doing because then… why? Why any of it?
I tried ignoring death for a long time. In my initial flight lessons I would suppress the idea that there was a finite amount of space between my body and the grape vines below. That didn’t eliminate the thought, it just struck harder whenever it came into the foreground. It doesn’t surface anymore (at least in flight) for the simple reason that I’ve accepted it and moved on to the reason for the risk: the why and the now.
Haris Suleman and his father knew what they were getting themselves into. Their death is a tragedy, but it’s not a reason for anyone else to stay on the ground. And it’s certainly not a reason to stay cloistered in a practice room when you could take a miniscule risk for a major international singing competition. I’m more excited for my little sister (sorry Adele, can’t stop thinking about you as “little”) than I ever have been. I can’t wait to hear what happens after she lands.
The Way Through
July 23, 2014
At the northern end of Lake Chelan is an unincorporated community called Stehekin, which means “the end of the road” or “the way through,” depending on who you ask. It’s inaccessible except by boat or plane and the introduction of phone lines is very recent. I found myself heading there a second time, the weekend after I’d turned 25. Alone, I was going with the sole purpose of garnering interviews from the people I’d met. I imagined in my head that they would be exactly where I had left them, and yet I was surprised when they were. I’ll start with a moment during my interview with Mark, a bearded park ranger who’d moved to Stehekin in the 90s.
We had been talking about ambient noise and how it had affected our past lifestyles. I was comparing Stehekin to my apartment in Brooklyn, where the soundtrack usually consisted of full-blast reggaeton and the whirr of my roommate’s juicer. I’d blamed this environment on my own unhappiness in the past.
I smelled pines and crisp plants. I heard birds moving above me, the wind bending the trees they sang in. In the middle of the movement I felt still. Between pine smells and subtle mountain sounds, I was calmer than I’d been for months. I think the reason for this ran deeper than it simply being what I was used to (having been raised in Lancaster County).
Mark told me that he’d expected our conversation to be more superficial but was pleasantly surprised, which thrilled me. This was the first true interview I’d had on the trip thus far and I’d felt stupid and unsure of myself coming off the boat.
That night, the lake seemed to have caught fire from the moon’s reflection. I marveled, falling asleep in my cocoon of a hammock, slung between two pines. I thought about skyscrapers and mountains. Sometimes I feel as though this entire trip has been one long open house: should I live in Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles or Stehekin… I wondered which was more organic and if that mattered anyway. Most importantly, I considered which would give me peace. Mark had offered me temporary lodging if ever I wanted to come back and I was feeling the place pull at me.
What struck me was how simply happy Mark seemed. There wasn’t the typical airing of grievances that I’d normally get in conversation. Even though he described himself as a “7 out of 10” on the happiness scale he held a certain aura: a calmness, an image of being able to transit life slowly and with enjoyment.
Digging deeper, in conversations both on and off the record, I discovered that the notion of a life without worry or regret is fantasy. I learned about undercurrents, factions, and religious fanaticism in the community… you know, the usual stuff. Humanity was still humanity.
I remember walking around the lake and to the bakery, on the second day. I felt wonderful, listening to the land waking up around me. I began to smile and faltered. Stressful thoughts swept back in, and I had to fight to keep them out. I smiled again, telling myself it was okay to do so. This little skirmish persisted for a while, ridiculous but important.
Deciding to believe that Stehekin translates to “the way through,” I boarded the boat and drifted. I wrote this on the way home:
“I truly feel that I’ve somehow made new friends on this trip, and also that this place really is calling to me for some reason. I’m learning to open my eyes to more people, and to become vulnerable again…Having the camera out is a wonderful excuse for asking these people a million questions. I also feel that I am on the correct path after all, that this adventure is what I needed, that throwing myself into this weird quest is already causing change in myself and in my view of everything around me.”
The Experience Collectors
July 10, 2014
We haven’t flown a trike for over a month and a half and we have yet to fly our new trike in the air (it needs some minor modifications before it’s airworthy). This isn’t to say that we aren’t making headway — we are — it’s to point out that the journey hasn’t been one of instant gratification. I am overjoyed that this is my experience.
Adventure is a concept under threat. In a recent Stuff article, writer Michelle Duff asserts that the most memorable experiences in travel are those experienced spontaneously, then goes on to wonder if travel apps like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and their kin are sucking them away. I’ll come back to this.
Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock is a book that recently fell back into my hands. It’s an endlessly fascinating book about the emerging super-industrial world and our imminent collision with it. Published in 1970, some of Tofflers’ predictions about the future are so accurate that they’re unsettling. Here’s a quote that jolted me a few days ago:
“As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things…The packaged experiences offered in the future will reach far beyond the imagination of the average consumer…”
Back to Ms. Duff’s article, published yesterday: “Research by the World Travel and Tourism Council concedes that nowadays, only the most intrepid traveller would “dare to journey blind” without using the reviews, rating and recommendation sites at their fingertips.
Instead, they suggest a future in which the “safe surprise” reigns supreme. “Discovery is managed, experiences vetted and true adventure marginalised. Instead of surprise and chance, travellers are increasingly seeking vetted spontaneity.” ”
Destinia.com has released an app for Google Glass that allows you to explore nearby hotels using augmented reality, then guiding you to the hotel by micromanaging each turn. If visually cutting yourself off from the world isn’t the beginning of the death of spontaneity, I don’t know what is.
I’m often accused of being naive and romantic when I speak about spontaneity, but there is a sacredness in entering moments untethered.There is a looseness when I leave my phone at home or just wander. What I discover and who I meet seems more authentic than if I’d planned my urban adventure by the hour and plugged in my headphones before I walked out the door.
I bemoan a future in which adventure tourism is the norm, where your trip is contrived by a concierge, your experiences collected digitally, and the common rooms of hostels filled with clicking laptops and an absence of conversation. Maybe that’s why I feel frustration whenever I see a tourist photograph a painting: it’s as if they’re trying to collect the experience, rather than simply experiencing it. It’s the latter that matters.
I am beyond grateful for the hardships of this adventure — that we’re risking everything for it and involving ourselves in every aspect of it. I’m ashamed to admit that we even once considered taking our trip with “guides” (who would’ve flown with each of us in in separate trikes). A diluted process produces a diluted outcome.
I’ve learned more about myself during this adventure (in the air or otherwise) than at any other point in my life. It wouldn’t have nearly the same effect, were it a packaged experience or a safe surprise. A true adventure cannot be collected, played safe, or repeated. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. I hope that Toffler’s prediction will be reversed in the future.
My Big Fat Selfish Adventure
June 24, 2014
6.19.14
We were eating vegan food. I think mine had beets in it, but I could be remembering the bottle of red wine. I didn’t know why I was on a date with only two weeks left in New York, except that I liked this one and didn’t care. Anyway, that was when she dropped the bomb.
She came right out with it in that bold, forward way that I claim to crave. She thought my adventure was silly and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to see a film about someone trying to learn how to fly across the country (in a trike of all things).
All that paled next to the nuke that followed, which was the accusation that the adventure was incredibly selfish. Even the presumption that people would want to watch the film was egotistical, that people would want to watch my life unfold onscreen. Why not do the trip and not film? Was my little “quarter life crisis” worthy of mention? “Privileged White Guy Uses Resources for Literal Ego Trip.” I heard echoes of Elizabeth Gilbert and quietly began to panic.
It was as if I’d drunk a bottle of liquor on top of the wine we’d just consumed. We argued about veganism (I don’t know why) and kissed by the door of a jazz club and I stumbled out into the freezing January rain. It turned the ice and snow to slush; I had elected to wear my leather jacket because I thought my winter coat made me look like a marshmallow and was now deeply regretting it. I waited fifteen minutes for the train before I realized I’d left my credit card at dinner. As I dashed up the stairs of West 4th St I heard my train arriving behind me and swore loudly. I careened through maddening West Village streets in the sheen of the rain and hated myself and my big fat selfish adventure until I fell asleep three hours later.
The adventure seemed instantly repulsive. Who the hell did I think I was? I sounded like a whining child, going on and on in our sizzle reel about “society, man,” and complaining about being trapped in a vaguely defined system that I couldn’t get out of. Even worse to complain when I had the opportunity to travel and have an adventure at all. Right? Well, my date was half right.
The thing is, I was quite selfish at the time, and by necessity. I was deeply depressed, truly depressed, and had to find a way to defeat it. For me that meant doing whatever I had to do to make myself happy again and at the time it meant leaving New York City and finding out what was wrong. The question was if I was really turning into a selfish, egotistical nightmare or not.
Stephen and I spent days arguing about what the film should be before we arrived at anything concrete. Unfortunately, this was after the first take of our sizzle reel. I don’t like the way I come off in it: I sound heated, pretentious, and condemnatory towards a lot of people when I didn’t mean to be. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have a point, but I think whatever it was got mangled in the hot, selfish frustration I had with my current life. I had trouble seeing the larger picture. It’s difficult, turns out, to have a “point” off the bat with this kind of adventure, which unfolds in new and unexpected ways every day. We don’t know what the footage we’ll end up with will look like, so how can we outline the final product concretely?
The philosophy behind the film is to tell it how it is. “How it is” is simply that I’m out here doing this: learning to fly, having an adventure, and chasing happiness. I want to film it because I want to share it like it is — not only in the shots where the light plays just right on my beautiful face, but the ones where I’m stumbling down a West Village side street after being dismantled over a bottle of red wine. More importantly: everyone I meet and everything I see across the continent, without which my story means nothing. You have to look outside to bring context and focus to what’s within.
This isn’t a vacation and I don’t feel privileged. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, flying is the hardest thing I’ve ever learned how to do, and I’ve learned more about myself in the air than I ever have on the ground. It’s like examining my emotions under a microscope. I’ve been sleeping on the floor of an airplane hangar since May 24 (I’ve turned 25 since) and I don’t know how I’m going to make enough money to get through the summer (boy do I miss steady paychecks). Yet I do feel incredibly lucky, and a little undeserving that even as I type a professional engine mechanic is mounting the heart of our aircraft. None of this “just happened” though, and at no point do I expect it to, although I have discovered that the universe has a way of yielding if you push at it enough: thanks to my Polish roots I’m pushing like a donkey stuck in mud.
Does sharing the adventure make it any less selfish? No it doesn’t. But is that inherently wrong? Doesn’t every art form have a component of self-interest? Who in their right mind would choose to paint, play music, or (sin of all sins) become a writer if it didn’t please them? So is it really contemptible to have an adventure, effect a change in yourself, dig and find out what the hell is really in there and then share all of it?
I can’t know for sure what this adventure will bring (otherwise it wouldn’t be). But it won’t be a story about a vacation abroad in which I treat myself to spaghetti, gelato, and a dalience with a sexpot Italian woman (though I wouldn’t say no to that last bit…). If doing this is egotistical and pompous then fine: I’m the biggest, most ego-tripping bastard around.
I think I’ve actually become less selfish. I’m exhausted with talking about myself, branding myself, self-examining myself — especially when so much life is happening around me every second of every day. In many ways I want to go back (I can’t believe I’m writing this) to the east coast where my friends and family are and reclaim the life I left. To borrow from a recent journal entry: “…I want to turn myself outwards and to give love and trust again that people are not out to screw me over and at least give people the benefit of the doubt. Until my wants are a dull roar and the present is all there is. I want to not want.”
If our final film is a 1.5 hour biopic on my psyche over the course of a 40 day trip then I’ll walk out of the theater. There’s a whole crazy country out there waiting for Team Tilt Shift and I can’t wait to get some footage. To my aforementioned date: thank you for tossing the kitchen sink at me. Really. I needed to stumble a little bit, and I’m still stumbling but hey: I’m telling it how it is.
Memory Lane
June 10, 2014
It’s difficult — in the wake of the intensity of building an aircraft, learning to fly it, and planning for forty days of flying in it — to remember where you came from. Stumbling across this entry (from dark days past) jogged my memory immediately. I wouldn’t have life any other way than it is right now and that, despite whatever is to come, is a wonderful acceptance.
Hashtag throwback; hashtag all of the feels.
I feel fragile, unwound, exhausted. As the haze of my own exhaustion settles though, a certain clarity comes along too. I miss my family so much, in this moment.
I realize too, that I’ve been so angry. Why am I always so angry and dissatisfied? And this is what matters most. Finding a way to be happy no matter what.
Food’s here.
I wish I was eating with my family. I love them.”
This is Happening
June 3, 2014
5:08 PM, the squashy chairs at Starbucks, Chelan, WA. I’ve sat in every one of them now, buying a watery iced Americano in exchange for a sluggish internet connection. Mostly it’s been handling miscellaneous things – emails, inquiries, follow-ups (texts from mom asking when we can Skype). What it hasn’t been is blogging, which I have to apologize for. Writing is one of the only things keeping me sane, so there’s no reason not to channel it here.
We’re existing in a semi-permanent dream world: living in and around an airplane hangar. The first night – camped on the front lawn in my circa-1960s tent – I was woken up with my books soaked by the rain. I sat up: “come on David, you’re made of stronger stuff than this!” (a phrase I have never heard myself utter before). I made a dash through the rain, only to realize that it was really the sprinkler system. Last night we slept on the hangar floor to stay out of the wind and woke up to little presents from mice in our cereal bowl and on Stephen’s sleeping bag.
We’ve only been here for six days but we forgot to pack an accurate sense of time into our suitcases: it blends together like the sagebrush and dust in these mountains.
I feel lucky and simultaneously unworthy. Last week we watched a team of three sew our wing together over a day, quiet for most of it, running the cameras and reverent towards the craftsmanship. For the past two days we’ve been with Dan, a man who’s closest neighbor is two miles away and who thrives on coffee, nicotine, and the musical stylings of Deadmau5 (not what I expected – I told him so). We’ve been assisting him in building the trike body from the bottom up: we’ll know it intimately when we move the pedal to full throttle for the first time. How many pilots have actually had a hand in building their aircraft?
What’s most disconcerting to me is that this is happening. Disconcerting because I’m not ready for it — I don’t know when I ever would have been. This is the biggest step we’ve made so far and I’m halfway between sleep and dreaming. I can’t imagine everything will really focus until we’re making the first leg of our trip (Sacramento to Half Moon Bay). I’m watching my dream unfold along with our wing and I don’t feel proud. I feel lucky, and overwhelmingly so.
I can’t believe this is me: standing up in the back of a pickup truck and screaming as it barrels down a mountainside; watching three hang glider pilots soar off a cliff and into evening thermals; waking up besides a roaring river and seeing stars like silver through my hammock’s opening. The amount of change and the pace of that change, since the day I stepped out of Brooklyn, has been delayed in getting to my brain.
I left what I knew in order to affect a change in myself but I’ve seen so much already that I’m scatterbrained. I shudder in the morning cold, hearing gunshots from a firing range and a rooster in the opposite direction. I climb out of a hammock slung between a truck rack and Stephen’s SUV and head into the hangar.
Next week: our adventures in Stehekin: an unincorporated mountain community only accessible by plane or boat, in a nook at the far end of Lake Chelan.
Flight Log – 4.29.14
April 29, 2014
Updates on bedbugs, our training, a new partnership, our tadpole farm, and oh so much more.
A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
April 25, 2014
by David Grabowski
We’re passionate about cutting a film from our experiences because we believe it will inspire and inform our audience in a unique way. But we’ve also been searching for a way for Tilt Shift to serve a physical, very real, humanitarian need. We found our answer in Angel Flight West!
Angel Flight West is an organization of volunteer private pilots offering the gift of flight to thousands of stricken children and adults for over 30 years. Along with commercial airline partners, AFW arranges non-emergency air transportation without cost to qualified passengers. Missions have included providing passengers access to treatment at faraway medical centers; transporting blood to critically ill patients; flying special needs kids to summer camps; and many more humanitarian missions.
This organization’s work is close to me personally. When I was in college, my mother was diagnosed with stage three, triple-negative breast cancer. My Aunt Sybil was diagnosed with this same cancer some years earlier, and in the end it claimed her life. Getting my mother the top possible care was of the utmost importance, and in the end she began treatment at MD Anderson: the top care facility in the country. MD Anderson saved my mother’s life, but she wouldn’t have been able to make it down to Texas were it not for the grace of a good friend and pilot. He was able to get standby tickets on his airline for my mother and father, without which they would have been unable to go.
As Angel Flight West’s mission is to provide this same, needs-based medical transportation (along with other admirable missions), I am thrilled to announce that Tilt Shift will be donating a percentage of proceeds from its final cut to Angel Flight West. You can find their site here.
We could not be happier to partner with this wonderful organization, and to spread the word about their mission going forward!
Zen and the Art of Trike Flying
April 16, 2014
When I started out on this journey I knew that flight lessons were going to change me; I just didn’t know how much. In my sixth week of flight training, I’ve found flying to be a parable for my life on the ground, and a possible remedy for two habits that are begging to be kicked.
I’ve always been drawn to slower processes. I like old things — I’m a luddite — and I have a deep respect for ritual. I chose to smoke a pipe when others tried cigarettes; I started writing with a typewriter because a laptop distracts me; and recently I started shaving with a straight razor. I like the calmness of these rituals: they allow me to weigh and consider my actions despite the frazzled pace of life.
Flying a trike is strikingly dissimilar. When you’re in the air, and especially when you’re making a landing — hell, even in the moments before you start your engine — you don’t have the liberty of stopping to smell the flowers. The single act on which trike flying is based (moving above the ground) has to be omnipresent.
Our flight instructor, Doug Donaldson, has over 3,000 flight hours in a trike and is a master of the art. He has an incredibly calm demeanor and a lot of stories. We affectionately call him our “Trike Yoda,” (although we’re not ready to leave Dagobah and face Vader just yet). If I could make any generalization about pilots I would say they have a certain zen about them, and in the air you quickly see why. Flying is an active, present activity. The zen of pilots was something that I was immediately jealous of and now strive towards.
Landings are the hardest: they happen relatively fast and you have the most factors to juggle (Doug calls it balancing plates). You have to monitor the air for traffic, make calls on the radio, keep your wing steady, pick a point on the runway, and round out (change the pitch attitude of the trike so that you don’t careen into the ground). And you have to be “fluid and in the moment,” which, God Almighty, has been my biggest plate.
That’s just not how I process. I’m introspective, I don’t readily commit to things, and I like to weigh my options. I get irretrievably lost in my thoughts, and often. If something’s really irking me, I’ll spend hours with that thought stomping away on my forehead. I’ll be riding my bike, reading a book, cooking, whatever, and that thought will still be center stage; I’ll autopilot everything else.
In a trike, there is no autopilot, and you need that valuable brain space. I’m applying that to life on the ground: forcing myself to focus on the task at hand and table the plates I don’t need. It’s a switch that you have to flip; if you don’t, it’ll toggle itself when you’re not looking. How can you enjoy life if you’re constantly focused behind you or on a future event? You can’t, because joy isn’t something you can experience in reverse or fast forward. It is only now, in the immediate.
Sometimes, in the trike, I find myself quoting the one phrase I remember from my yoga mat: this breath, this moment. This breath, this moment. Sometimes a decision can’t be thought over, and you’ll know because in those moments there is no sometimes. That soup is going to boil over unless you turn down the heat right now. Your sister is going to walk away from you unless you apologize right now. That dying man needs your help right now. The beautiful woman that you’re secretly in love with won’t know unless you take a chance right now and kiss her right now.
Another thing I do: I berate the living daylights out of myself. It’s a cliche to admit, but I’m my own worst critic. I’m a major perfectionist, and the smallest thing can regress my attention until I’m trapped while life dances in front of me.
This tendency didn’t dissipate when I started flying. In fact, it grew. I would stumble into a bad landing or make a mistake because I wasn’t juggling a plate I thought I had under control. I would come out of the mistake quietly insulting myself, but the real problem? I was still flying, and that’s not something you can stop being aware of. Flying isn’t a perfect art: you might have an engine out or a sudden rush of wind from the side when you’re landing — you have to react on a dime. This immediacy shattered my habit almost at once because I had no other choice.
Today Doug switched things up on me, as he is wont to do. Coming downwind (that is, parallel to the runway), Doug made me bring the engine to idle to simulate an engine-out. I had to immediately turn towards the runway and land without preamble. It wasn’t perfect, but when Doug had me take off to go around again he said “…but you were relaxed and in the moment!” Holy crap! I thought to myself, shocked, I was! And then I quickly forgot my shock because I had started lining up for another landing.
Finding a kind of zen is sometimes the product of a certain act, of a ritual that acts as a reminder, a reinforcer, and a guide. It can take on many shapes depending on what you need. I think I found mine.
Tilt Shift FLIGHT LOG #1 – April 3, 2014
April 3, 2014
Leaving Home and What I Brought With Me
March 29, 2014
Leaving home is particularly weighing when you do it twice in a row.
I found myself in my Brooklyn apartment for the last time. Some snow had fallen the night before and a sheen of ice had hardened on the street. I disassembled my bed frame and hunted through the drawers one last time. If this were a movie I might reflect deeply for a moment on everything that had happened in the apartment, but I didn’t. The truth is that I couldn’t wait to leave, couldn’t wait to start my life again, couldn’t wait to reinvent myself, to fly, to become a hard and confident man, to steer my life where I wanted to go. My wonderful trooper of a father arrived and we carted everything down the stairs to the van. We edged onto the freeway and I didn’t look behind me once.
Being at home #2 (which is, of course, still my home) was quiet and wonderful. I got to cook for my parents almost every night and in the early mornings I worked out hard at the gym. By the time Stephen and our affable nitwit of a friend, Jon Mark, pulled up in Stephen’s car, I was feeling pretty terrific and ready to start my adventure.
All then there was Mardi Gras. There is nothing quite so strange as watching an entire city get drunk for five straight days. What’s especially strange is that it really is… everyone. I saw the drunks drunk, college kids getting drunk, and I saw what looked like a country club’s worth of rich white people standing in the middle of a side street drunk and smoking cigars. It can turn dark really fast; in few places on earth can you see the numbness of an entire species quite so clearly as Bourbon St. on the last night of Mardi Gras. A “Romanian gypsy” whose breath smelled like vomit read my palm. I saw people doing scandalous things to try and convince strangers to throw plastic beads at them from balconies. Solo cups slid down a river of human matter and booze so fast that rats could have used them as ferries.
By day three I needed silence and found it by cycling along Esplanade Avenue and north to the southern bank of Lake Pontchartrain. Along the way I found a church, Our Lady of the Somethings, and sat in it for an hour, just relishing the nonexistence of stimulants in my system or sound waves careening around me. In that sensory deprivation tank, I thought back home to my family, to the life I’d left behind. I found my thoughts unsettlingly pulled back to where I had come from, and for the first time wondered if I had made a mistake in leaving. I lit a candle, said goodbye to the silence, and got back on my bike.
By the time I got back in the car, hungover from alcoholic slurpies and desperate for a cure, I wanted nothing more than to flee from the insanity of that festival. What’s strange is that I can’t stop thinking about it now.
There is a place in New Orleans called F&M and it is a shithole. I don’t use that term lightly because that evening it was, factually, a shithole: there was an overflow of human feces spilling out of the men’s room and into the corridor, where I advised the couple whispering behind me that no, no they did not want to have sex in there.
This probably gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of bar F&M is — people dance on top of a pool table, the music is a strange mixture of early 2000’s rap and hip hop, country, and modern chart toppers. The place dribbles over the edges with horny 20-somethings looking for a Mardi Gras one-nighter. I don’t do well with these kinds of situations: it’s like I don’t know what to do with my body. This is how it’s always been, ever since high school dances. Let me reiterate that: ever since high school. Why the hell, then, did I find myself in this shithole in Louisiana? Wasn’t the point of my leaving home to start fresh, to start all over, to not find myself in the middle of a club dancing to music that I hate and wanting to be anywhere else?
Answers don’t come easily to questions like these. I’d like to go back for a minute, far before this trip was conceived. It was winter and I was having a long conversation with a good friend of mine, Jim. We were talking about the west coast, how I was planning on moving there and how much good I thought it would do me. Jim, after a pause, told me that my problems would follow me wherever I went. “Yeah, but being somewhere where I’m at least happy wouldn’t hurt,” I countered. I don’t think I need to say that Jim was right.
Your problems follow you no matter where you go, because having problems is as integral to individuality as having DNA. It’s really pretty out here in California, I’m putting 100% of my time into something that I’m passionate about, but those same “problems” persist and will do until I decide to take action. That moment of decision can happen in New York, in Los Angeles, or in a shithole in the middle of New Orleans. Where doesn’t matter; you is the location of the issue.
So, with that in mind, I’m taking a hard look at myself during what is probably the strangest time of my life. I’m in a city I’ve never been in before, looking for odd jobs, and shooting up into the air a couple times a week in a trike. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.
