Seconds to Infinity

by Fawn McManigal | 3 Comments

How did a rigor-mortissed rabbit’s foot end up an icon for good-luck? After all, the rabbit absent his foot isn’t very lucky is he? But somewhere along the way the rabbit’s loss – capped in aluminum and strung on a short ball-chain – becomes our gain. Possession promises fortune in both wealth and days lived. A good-luck charm is, of course, not limited to a furry foot but can be anything believed to possess supernatural powers: a tiny statue of a Buddha, your grandfather’s pocket watch, a pendant, a coin or stone. One might suspect, then, that a pilot who pokes her nose in wildfires would jingle when she walked or bent at the waist, weighted by the deities worn to offset her death-defying work. But that’s not the case for me or other tanker pilots I know. Our good-luck charms are as personal as religious beliefs and advertised with similar reluctance. One of my closest friends pastes a photograph of his wife to the instrument panel and inks her name inside a heart on his hand. I asked Charley about his artwork once. He said his wife was the last thing he wanted to see should he crash and die. I keep a small leather pouch in my helmet bag that contains a glass marble, a quarter, a string, and a tiny hoof – from what, I don’t know. The assortment was a gift from a friend and I'm told, blessed by a shaman. I can't claim my survival relies on this collection of trinkets but I haven’t died yet either.

“Hey, remember that time,” Charley asks, sarcasm frosting his speech, “the time you shouted ‘mother fucker’ over the radio across the entire state of Arkansas,” Of course I remember. I remember it with the kind of clarity someone recalls a moment that may have been her last. And since it could have been, I remember it better than he does. Every time he rehearses the story I have to remind him that I did not, technically, swear.

We had worked a wildfire that day – each piloting our own airtanker. It was August. Hot. Humidity weighted everything from aircraft performance to mercury’s vertical reach. Our flight suits stuck to our bodies like wet leather. Dispatch sent Charley and me to the incident together, a rare occasion we celebrated by flying to the fire in formation – because we could, and because our camaraderie was not bound to earth any more than we, as individuals, were. Our bond was something colleagues can’t build; we were unidentical twins born six months apart to different mothers, separated at birth like the halves of a friendship pendant. This pull of twinship eroded a lifetime of separation, and it brought us together to share, on that day, the sky above a ten acre wildfire.

We circled that fire like vultures around the week’s first meal, our souls ravenous, our minds planning the perfect attack. But what transpired after I dove, skimmed the trees and dropped, had little relation to the rapacious attack I envisioned. Upon releasing the load the airplane pitched up and gave me a terrifying view of angelic blue. “Mother Fu__!” Like an upset turtle I wrestled for control: hands grabbing for the control stick, arms forcing it to its forward stop, legs kicking, feet dancing on the pedals trying to maintain coordinated flight. I realized mid “Fuh,” that my thumb was pressing the mic button and transmitting my voice over the radio. I let go of the button as if it were a burning ember and completed the expression in the solitude of my cockpit. The words just slipped out, happened instinctively as did my physical response. Trouble is, firefighters throughout the state monitor that frequency, including, at that time, Charley. But the phonetic of the letter f – in my defense – does not constitute profanity.

Our aerial supervisor for the state’s Forestry Commission was on scene and frequency during my little outburst but neglected to mention it – then or since. Charley is the only one who harasses me about it. He likes to joke about the unnecessarily dangerous situations our naivety slung us through. I remember sitting at a table in a Mexican restaurant one rainy afternoon waiting to devour a lunch that didn’t come in a brown bag or candy wrapper. Charley stabbed a basket of warm tortilla chips repeatedly with his stubby index finger as if his digit were a kitchen knife and he was some possessed character in a horror flick. Though this behavior was typical and I was desensitized, it demanded an apologetic glance to anyone joining us. As he salted the shards with a Corona bottle turned shaker and lobbed fragments into his mouth, I scanned the restaurant for our waiter. A hailstorm of chip bits brought my attention back to Charley as he choked to say, “Boy, we sure did a number on those trees in Booneville. Remember the ones we rolled our tires through, knockin’ down branches on departure cuz we didn’t want to download?” Yeah, I remembered. We gave that airport a complimentary tree-topping on every one of our 18 takeoffs that day. We could have kept a reasonable safety margin had we downloaded. But reducing a sortie’s potential on a fire threatening barns and out-buildings was not, in our opinion, logical. The fire was winning – torching sixty-foot trees like kindling, heating the cockpit floor and the leather of my boots. The smell of ash and devastation followed us to and from the reload base nearly ten miles away. In reality, two small tankers would never dominate its force, but we did what we could even if that meant collecting a few branches in the wheels, even if that meant bent metal.

Five single-engine airtankers crashed my first year flying them – three were fatal. Another five crashed the following year, maintaining the historical norm among small tankers. The cause of each varied as much as the personalities flying: a few forgot to arm the drop gate and positioned themselves in a place a loaded tanker couldn’t escape; several ran their machines out of gas; others mismanaged a mechanical failure; a couple were just plain unlucky. The scenario that forced a “mother fucker” to fill my cockpit claimed a couple of lives too. If you’re a millisecond late in applying increased forward pressure, or you add too much throttle prior load release, some airframes will point straight to the moon the instant you let the slurry go. It has to do with the drop gate and how it opens against the airstream. There are guidelines during a drop sequence and airspeed is crucial. If you’re too slow and allow your tanker to pitch up on a drop there’s no hope for recovery. Insufficient speed combined with an abrupt vertical pitch can stall the wing while further deteriorating airspeed. Control surfaces loose effect. The nose points down and the aircraft corkscrews to the ground. No one survives that ride. Carrying too much speed is slightly better because momentum prolongs the effectiveness of control inputs, providing an opportunity to recover. Cockpit integrity of these aircraft can withstand up to 25G’s, depending on manufacturer; but the human body can’t.

The industry’s poor safety record and subsequent death count is not something pilots like to discuss. My festering concern manifested into a compulsion to meticulously organize my personal effects before reporting for duty each day. Due to limited baggage space on the single-engine tanker I was forced to leave a bag in the support truck, a duffel containing four months worth of necessities secured with optimism and a neatly concealed zipper. Should my things get shipped to those who survived me, I hoped to minimize the number of eyes that sifted through them. I didn’t want my coworkers to disregard my life’s contributions and instead remember my stinky laundry, or that I packed a small stuffed animal, a golden dog named Cloudy. They’d use the excuse of “gathering” my things to pan for secrets, nuggets they could later use as drink tickets at the bar. I practiced this behavior for nearly two years when I mentioned it to a friend.

“You are not going to die in an airplane,” Kerri consoled. “I just know. You aren’t.” I listened because she spent two years copiloting a heavy airtanker. But I wondered if she believed what she said, or said what she thought I needed to hear. It didn’t matter, really, I started believing her. In this case, the right words at the right time could only come from someone who, like me, wasn’t afraid to teeter an airplane at the top of its power curve. In an industry as specialized as aerial firefighting one might suspect human bonds come easily, but they don’t. There are only a few people I consider good friends and some of those friends have died in the line of duty, killed on impact. But I still count them.

I still count my friend Gene who was killed in Tanker 09, a four engine, 80,000 pound Neptune P2-V. An explosion on takeoff and a string of shrapnel led to a scar in the desert and three dead. The addition of a catastrophic failure during the busiest phase of flight left them too few options. I should have been on that flight. Tanker 09 was my tanker, more so the captain’s, Gene, my friend, mentor and motivator. We’d flown together less that 50 flight-hours prior, and I was to return by month’s end. I can’t claim that Gene and I would have managed the emergency any better than he and Gonzo. My knowledge of the Neptune and physical strength – a questionable requirement for manhandling that airplane – were inferior to Gonzo’s; he had six years on my copiloting experience and was built like a Clydesdale. But if I had occupied the right seat, Gonzo, at least, would have been home, safe, with his wife and three kids.

Like a wind-driven wildfire the news about Tanker 09 reached me in record time, traveling more than a thousand miles to devastate my inner ecosystem. “I wanted to make sure you knew…” a colleague said when I answered the phone. “Tanker 09 crashed about an hour ago, out of Stead. The jet engine caught fire, probably on takeoff.” He paused, reluctant. “They impacted three miles from the airport, inverted.” Shock skews intellect, and even though heavy tanker accidents are almost always fatal I had to ask. “Yes, three,” he said. “They had a mechanic on board, too.” My brain scavenged for bits of logic like a firefighter searching for hot spots before calling the fire out. Perhaps … perhaps another crew flew 09 that day, an absurdity that an unusual training schedule made possible. “Was Gene flying,” I asked, mumbling a prayer of please and no’s to a God I didn’t know. …“Yes.”

I remember where I stood in John Day, Oregon when those sentences pierced me, the sullenness in my colleague’s – my friend’s – voice, the tremble in my hand that held the phone and the other that reached for something to grasp. As the horror became reality my throat constricted, chest tightened, and my body forgot to breathe. The gravel of the parking lot I paced grew sharp, its rocks penetrating my shoes, feet, ankles, and knees. From the neighboring restaurant wafted the stink of boiled meat and seasoned beans overpowering the succulence of wild blackberries. The horizon swirled as did I, blurring nature’s palette into a monotone of nausea. My legs buckled under the weight of my heart and I took my place among the dirt, lost bolts, spent bubble gum and a broken charm.

I reported for duty the following morning, my head hanging, weighted by a pair of hundred-dollar Oakleys and the sorrow I hoped they hid. The world was different – darker, meaner. Why wasn’t it me? Why them? Why Gene? Why the fuck wasn’t it me? I hated the industry and especially Tanker 09. I hated the death count and how it reminded me of my own mortality. I was alive, it seemed, however hollow, absent one of the greatest persons I’d ever know and deprived the honor of his adoration. For months it seemed I’d never recover, that I would never cherish the thought of Gene with dry eyes. Never again would I hear the excitement in his voice or see his grin gleam through his tinseled goatee, nor could I encourage a sarcastic remark by gloating over one of my – lucky, granted – but flawless touchdowns. Rehearsing memories kept them fresh, like the time we flew from Missoula to Lancaster to support a late-season fire bust. Some distance east of Bakersfield I enjoyed watching Gene dance with the foothills as if our wings were arms outstretched and tethered to individual peaks, swinging round the right side of one and left of the next. His voice came through my headset, “My wife told me we’d gotten a lot rain at home but I didn’t believe her until I saw my raspberries. They were out of control. Could barely walk through the patch, the tops came up to here.” He lifted his right arm and saluted his chest, keeping his focus outside. A radio call interrupted his story and alerted us of an aircraft in close proximity. I crosschecked the TCAS to pinpoint its position. Sure enough, five miles at our ten. High. No factor. Gene continued, “The neighbor kids … they’re all Mormon in Ogden, not that I have anything against that, they asked me if they could pick some raspberries. I thought … shit, why not? They’re kids, after all. Well, you know what they did?” He looked at me as if I couldn’t hear his smile. “They turned around and sold them…. I could have sold them myself.” I consoled him by telling him they’d likely give the money to the church. The belly of his plaid shirt palpitated. But regardless the clarity of my memory, the unrelenting truth always returns – my world will never be like that again. The world will never have a Calvin Gene Wahlstrom quite like that again.

I still count them, friends taken by fire’s reign. Though their physical bodies no longer walk this earth or fly its skies, the petroglyphs of their lives leave permanent impressions. Their essence may flutter on a falling autumn leaf, briefly inhabit another’s laugh, waft among the aroma of fresh raspberries, or robe me in a red, hooded sweatshirt bought in their presence. The sputter-cough-rumble of a radial engine resurrects details regarding which boot Gene laced first in preparation for a mission. Of the friends I still count, I remember the warmth in their faces and conflict in their eyes. I remember idiosyncrasies and nervous twitches. I remember the sound of their voice over the radio and how it differed in more intimate settings. I remember how many cigarettes they smoked, if they smoked, and where they stole the pleasure. Their behaviors and mannerisms are forever etched in my memory. I can visit their stories like ancient rock art and summons remembrance. But these imprints are scratches on an otherwise giant sphere, unsuccessful in exposing the quintessence within.

Something shifts when the physicality of someone you care about disappears. You, the surviving, are free to carry that person with you wherever you go. My first captain in a Neptune died of cancer many years back. One might think that losing the privilege of flying with a friend is a pilot’s greatest heartache. But Bob and I have logged more hours since his death than we had before. The same is true of Gene. I like to imagine they impart wisdom and skill through some sort of telepathic osmosis that’s accessible in the confines of a cockpit, that they can rescue me from questionable predicaments. Yet in exceeding the perimeters of a human body they exceed that of cockpit, too. They always have. But the concept of boundless energy is overwhelming and dizzyingly incomprehensible, like light years, God, and luck. So we quantify incomprehensible magnificence by reducing it to a name or label and attaching it to physical form. Then we stick it in our pocket, hang it around our neck, or preserve its spiritual significance with a shrine or some historical site. In turn, we forget that we are more than the identities we’ve built and cling with homesick desperation to the trinkets that symbolize infinity. Through tangible things like a rabbit’s foot, petroglyphs, Gene and Charley, we touch transcendentness in a way that makes some sort of sense. I feel more connected to Gene under the hood of that red sweatshirt, and to Bob when wearing the company tee he sold to me. But these articles aren’t necessary. Like the existence of sky beyond its blue, Bob was with me when I nearly broadcasted profanity across Arkansas – the day I could have died.

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