There’s a bag of groceries at the end of the rainbow.
Currency is a big thing in flying. I’ve touched on this before. Rules about recent experience cascade down from the regulatory, insurance, and operational levels. For people like me, who have no innate talent for flying airplanes and have to work to stay minimally competent, there is an additional level of self imposed rules if we know what’s good for us.
Since 2016, when I came back from a long hiatus from flying, I’ve required myself to fly at least once per calendar week. While I haven’t been perfect, life and weather sometimes get in the way, I haven’t missed consecutive calendar weeks in nine years. I haven’t missed more than three weeks in a single year. It’s kept me adequately proficient and incidentally satisfied most of the requirements imposed at higher levels over that period.
But flying weekly presents at least one problem: I have to come up with something to do with an airplane at least once a week. I don’t want to take off, fly in circles, and land. Not every week. Nothing would be gained by that, it’d be technocratic box-checking and it’d be boring.
Over time I’ve accumulated a small list of flying activities for use when I don’t have any better ideas. Usually they involve rolling an errand into a flight. My go-to’s are grocery shopping and gym workouts. There’s a grocery store next to the airport in Reedsburg and several nearby towns have Anytime Fitness franchises within reasonable proximity of their airports. Prairie du Chien is my favorite; Portage, Reedsburg, Tomah, Viroqua, and Sauk Prairie are options. There’s one in Siren when I happen to be whizzing around up north.
Grocery getter
Today I knocked off the weekly flight I require of myself, and concurrently the monthly flight Morey Airplane Company requires of me to maintain currency to rent their aircraft, with a quick hop from Middleton to Reedsburg for groceries.
I fly to Reedsburg at least ten times a year because it’s so quick and easy (I’d actually never been to Reedsburg by car until earlier this year.) Today’s outbound flight was, as is typical, uneventful and not notable in any aspect. The return trip, however, had a scenic bonus associated with it: I got a view of one of the tiniest rain shafts I’ve ever seen from an airplane.
It was so tiny that I misidentified it as smoke when I first saw it on the horizon. I figured it out as I got closer. There isn’t much wind today, but there is some–smoke wouldn’t rise straight up. It’s rain coming down, not smoke going up.
The associated cell on the Nexrad display was only two blocks wide. They can’t get much smaller than that, right?
When I came between the shower and the sun I looked over my shoulder and saw one of the most brilliant rainbows I’ve ever seen. The photo at the top doesn’t do it justice. It reminded me of an NPR-esque monologue from an old episode of Northern Exposure:
I remember one time I was up at Cape Lisburne this time of year. Took a walk at midnight and saw a rainbow. A rainbow with the richest, deepest colors I have ever seen. As if I could put my hand into it… my fingers would come out wet with paint.
Those old words capture what I was seeing better than any photo could. I wanted to fly over and play in the mist for a while at the risk of being penalized for returning a tie-dyed airplane.
Alone in the plane it felt like my very own personal rainbow. Nobody else was around to see it. I mean, every rainbow is sort of your own rainbow, someone standing right next to you looking at the same rainbow is seeing a zillion different photons refracting off of a zillion different water droplets. But in this case it felt even more “my own” than usual. It was me and an old Cessna. Nobody else was in that sky to see it.
A lot of times when there are low clouds, especially if I have more distance to cover, I’ll fly IFR and go over the top of stuff like that. Turns out sometimes there are benefits to staying low.
Friends in high places
When I got back to Middleton a friend recorded my landing from another airplane unbeknownst to me. He sent it to me a little later. There’s nothing special about it, it’s roughly the same as the two thousand landings that came before it.
While the landing wasn’t special, randomly receiving a video of it certainly was. It’s truly a privilege to be able to chug around the atmosphere in these silly little contraptions with so many familiar people.
I’ve been working on an entry for this journal/blog/whatever-you-call-it that tries to explain why I fly–why I accept the cost and the time and the risk associated with it, sometimes simply to go grocery shopping. It’s been a difficult thing to write because there are lots of reasons why I do it and they change over time. It’s tough to wrap a unifying narrative around it.
That said, while it is not the whole story, I can say this video represents a critical thread of it: the community, the subculture, the friends.
I can drive hundreds of miles and see thousands of cars and I’m not likely to notice or be noticed by a single soul with whom I share anything except a road. But flying is done by such a tiny slice of humanity that I see some of the same people and hear some of the same voices every time I do it. It’s a familiar world overlaid a few thousand feet above a mostly unfamiliar one. Most people are barely aware that it exists. It’s just us.
When I first moved to this area I rarely had contact with anyone I knew except when I was in a plane. The voices in my headset were familiar. Some of them even addressed me by name. It was a different, smaller, more welcoming world.
The people and the rainbows. Two great reasons to fly.