Recently my BFF sent
me a couple of mementos from her mother, who was my Mama II.
They opened up a whole new aspect of her—and of women—for me. So today I’m
grateful for women who soar.
All this time I’d had
no idea that Mama II loved to fly. The cutthroat-pinochle-playing,
joke-telling, altar guild stalwart learned to fly at a time when it was
something women just didn’t do. She flew bi-planes. I don’t know how many hours
she logged, my friend is still digging around for her logbooks; but it was one
of the defining activities of her life before she married.
Flying small aircraft
isn’t something that appeals to me, but purely for physiological reasons: I get
sick. I’d lose all concentration on that roll, pitch and yaw stuff because I’d be puking;
then I’d crash and my life of romance and adventure would be over. If I didn’t
have that problem, I might have liked to explore the sky. In a small way.
Around the time I
received the bracelet and pin, I was reading a rather sloppily presented
history of American women in WWII. There is a section on women who served in
the various military branches, including as pilots. The writer isn’t
terrifically good, but she did get some splendid material from her subjects.
Cornelia Fort joined
the Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Squadron at its inception, in 1942. She’d been
flying for some time before that. Here’s how she described what flying meant to
her, and what I think might have gone through Mama II's mind:
“None of us can put
into words why we fly. It is something different for each of us. I can’t say
exactly why I fly, but I ‘know’ why as I’ve never known anything in my life.
“I knew it when I saw
my plane silhouetted against the clouds framed by a circular rainbow… I know it
in the dignity and self-sufficiency and in the pride of skill. I know it in the
satisfaction of usefulness.”
Fort was killed in
1943 when one of her colleagues in a flight formation got too close to her, his
landing gear slicing through her left wing. She left a letter to her mother
that included these words:
“I was happiest in
the sky—at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon
sun beat down and at dusk when the sky was drenched with fading light.”
You must get a
different view of things from the cockpit of a small plane, especially when
you’re in it by yourself. (Many aircraft in those times didn’t have radios;
when you went up, you were absolutely alone.) Women who, like Mama II swept up
into sun-split clouds, who learned the mechanics as part of the price of flight
and braved the derision and discouragement they must have encountered—did it
for the pure joy of it.
We should know more
about them, and let some of that for-the-joy-of-it into our daily lives. And we
should be grateful for their examples.
So today—thank you heaps to Mama II and all those women who
didn’t just live their dreams, they flew them.
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