My dad taught me to fly his airplane the summer I turned sixteen. I’d never taken much interest in aviation, at least until I stumbled across a magazine photograph of a Citation jet banking gracefully into the sunset. In one small photo I saw artistry and skill, glamour and pride, fluidity and serenity. That jet represented a clean merging of man and nature: a three-dimensional dance with her.

From that moment I understood that a pilot does not strap into an airplane; instead she straps the airplane onto her.

Once I got tall enough to reach the rudder pedals with my feet, Dad taught me the basics of how to keep an airplane airborne. He sat with his toes tucked away from the pedals and his hands folded in his lap, contentedly watching the view out his side window. It seemed he wasn’t paying attention, but I learned later that the airplane’s wingtip told him everything he needed to know about our course of flight. For me, the independence was magical.

Dad’s two-seat Aeronca didn’t fly very fast, but one hour took us far enough, to places like Jaffrey, Keene, Hampton, Nashua, and Laconia. The trees would grow bigger beneath us as we descended, the horizon gently sliding behind hills. Geese or deer basking on the warm runway would scatter before us as our wheels gently kissed Mother Earth. Once down, we’d gaze dreamily across grassy fields of tail-draggers, and biplanes. Some days a corporate jet would stir up the silence preparing to fly far away.

Today I have a career as a pilot flying transoceanic flights for a major airline to places such as Mumbai, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. Airliners navigate via instruments and satellites, and cruising seven miles high at 10 miles per minute, means most surface details are lost. The earth appears mostly flat and monochromatic, often covered in clouds. There are some rare and beautiful things to see such as St. Elmo’s Fire and the Northern Lights, but usually the thin aircraft skin acts like a warm cocoon luring my attention inward. Flying for work and flying with Dad are two very different experiences.

Dad is a fair-weather flyer. He cruises low and slow and enjoys the view. He navigates by visual cues: train tracks, racetracks, the rivers of power lines, and the dots of cell-phone towers. Cloud formations and waves on water provide necessary information about wind direction and speed. Mountain peaks seen on the horizon make useful landmarks; a couple of Dad’s favorites are Mt. Agamenticus and the Pawtuckaway Mountains.

Flying low means being close enough to see the movements and impacts of people on the earth while still feeling the serenity and freedom of the wide, expansive sky. More than once I have cruised Dad’s plane at 2,500 feet, and he always asks me how can I see anything from up so high. So high up? I’m used to cruising at 35,000 feet. Everything is relative.

Long after I learned to fly, Dad traded in his Aeronca for a Lake Amphibian LA-4. By then he owned a summer house on a pond. We’d fly in, land on the lake, and tie it up to his dock where he’d leave it to float. One time, when we were airborne on the way to his lake house, we spotted a thunderstorm looming overhead his pond. It would pass in due time, so Dad casually asked me what was my preference in the meanwhile: tour North Conway and the eastern slopes of the White Mountains, or go land elsewhere to wait out the storm.

I delighted in how easily we modified our plans, and in the freedom of changing course without the usual rigmarole and procedure that I’m used to with an airliner. Three hundred passengers and a monstrous company “toy” require calling the dispatcher, revising the ATC clearance, reprogramming computers, pulling out arrival charts, refiguring performance data, re-briefing the cockpit and cabin crew, and advising the passengers. We get very busy, very fast. A recreational flight such as Dad’s leaves us free to just turn the airplane and go.

Dad gently slid the plane into another nearby pond and, for lack of anything else to do, we taxied to an island. We tied the airplane to a tree much the same way we tie up a canoe, and we clambered out to explore. We found an abandoned cabin with bunk beds and a small kitchen. On its front porch we shared a snack of rations scrounged from the airplane. Then we played tic-tac-toe in the sand on the shore. Loons, waterbugs, and lapping water provided a serene spirit so different from the angry, rumbling clouds in the distance.

Eventually the storm passed and Dad said, “So, what do you think? Are you ready to go?” Nobody but us knew of our decision. We didn’t need a new flight plan, release, or clearance. We didn’t need load planning, refueling, or a ramp crew. It was just Dad and me. We were free as birds.

By Dawn Klinker, Master Gardener