After a lifetime flying different types of aircraft, in 2017 flight instructor Bill Steuber finally discovered free-flight. And he loved it!
I find myself sitting at my desk at work and getting nothing done. I find myself driving in my car only to wake up and not know how I got to my destination or why I was going there in the first place. I am here, but I am not. I am lost. Something has happened to me you see; something deep and profound.
When I was a child, I would climb this giant tree in the woods, so high I could see the ocean, and dream I could fly there. I thought, “This must be like flying,” but it wasn’t. As a teenager, I flew a Cessna all by myself, spending hours in that worn, leather seat, thinking, “This must be like flying,” but it wasn’t. I later went on to become a military pilot and from that glassed-in C-130 cockpit, I thought, “This must be like flying,” but it wasn’t.
Last weekend, I rode through the desert in the back of a truck, into the back roads of the high desert, where abandoned cars lay in ditches like casualties of war. Old appliances stood out like exclamation points saying, “You are in the middle of nowhere!” Yet, this day had a different feel to it, like something special could happen.
I sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the flat desert rising up to meet Mount San Jacinto. The thick grass in front of me waved in homage to the mountain as the remnant sun generated thermals that kissed the mountain’s shoulders like a lover.
The magic started as I walked to the edge and the wind pushed against me. The sun descended on her glide slope into the Pacific and she cast us the last of her ocean winds. The dry desert air ran to meet her and they collapsed into one another. With nothing more than cloth and courage, I stepped off into their roiling embrace and was carried skyward.
I danced between the ocean’s breath and the mountain’s caress, pushed higher and higher until I was nothing more than a spectator to the lovers’ quarrel of air. Others joined me with their wings of courage and together we danced and circled like children until we couldn’t stand up and fell down laughing. Finally, finally, I thought to myself, “This is flying.” And it was.
An hour passed and then some more and yet a little more. Time lost its meaning. I pulled in towards home as the shadows ate up the warmth. I descended into the growing darkness and then right before I touched down, she came to me and pulled me up again, spinning me higher and higher for one last dance. The houses below filled with light and cars snaked on unseen roads below, oblivious to my silent, soaring magic.
I tilted my cloth for the stadium lights of an unused sports field. I descended once again to my place here amongst the walking and said goodbye to the magic. She let me go and set me down gently in the sand. The benign sounds of normality once again came back into focus; a dog barking, the sound of traffic, laughter from a house I had flown over. Then it was over. The magic stopped and now I sit here once again, earthbound.
Something happened up there. I am not the same. I was blessed and rode the wind longer than I had ever dreamed possible. Like a holy man who has seen the truth, I am now once again walking amongst the unenlightened trying to explain it. They don’t understand me. They can’t fathom why my gaze is always skyward and my head and heart are still soaring in the clouds.
Bill Steuber is a KC-130 pilot and flight instructor in the US Marine Corps. He lives in Upstate New York
First published in Cross Country 184, October 2017
