Chapter 16: Leaving Home and Flying Free

Bullied at school and bullied by my mother at home, I was miserable. Then fate intervened and provided me with an escape. At the age of thirteen, I crossed North America unaccompanied by any adult. It was also my first airplane ride.

After my folks had gotten divorced, I had done everything in my power to convince my mother to let me live with my father. Essentially, I was an insufferable brat for eight months. Much to my astonishment, I succeeded.

Joyce gave me two weeks’ notice to say goodbye to friends and pack three suitcases with whatever I wished to take with me to my new home with Dad. She told me, “I’ll throw anything you leave behind into the trash.”

Just before entering Logan Airport, I asked for a favor from my stepfather. Could he please stop for a minute or two and let me stand on the shore of Boston Harbor?

We found a small beach near a boat landing. Public parking was not available unless you had a beach sticker. Richard, my stepfather, kept the car idling while I pulled off my shoes and socks and raced to the water’s edge.

Pausing for a moment, I rolled my pants legs up, stepped into the water, and wiggled my toes in the sandy bottom. For about a minute my toes played with the sand under the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Just before returning to the car, I wet my fingers in the ocean and licked them. The water of Boston Harbor was salty with an aftertaste of fuel oil.

Back in the family vehicle, my stepfather gave me a puzzled look and asked, “What was that all about?”

Shrugging my shoulders, I answered, “It’s nothing. It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Richard asked me to explain myself and I told him that I planned to get my feet wet in the Pacific Ocean when I arrived in Los Angeles in about twelve hours.

“I think it’ll be cool to walk in two oceans and taste the water of two seas all on the same day,” I said.

Richard smiled and said he thought that would be a nifty thing to do.

My mother said, “That’s a stupid and no big deal. Sailors do it all the time when they use the Panama Canal.”

About an hour later, I waved goodbye to my family, took a deep breath and boarded my flight to Los Angeles.

I was a bit of a novelty onboard the aircraft. Kids my age traveling across the country solo were rare. Flight attendants kept a special watch over me. The jetliner was so new that the windows were still flawless and clear. The entire aircraft had a touch of the new car smell about it.

Flying was pure joy and something about flying over the changing landscape of America compelled me to write. Joyce had nothing except disdain for my prose and poetry. She called my efforts childish and immature as she pointed out every misspelled word.

Despite misgivings about my ability to write, an overwhelming need to write compelled be to write. Somewhere over Ohio, I started to jot down my thoughts and impressions of the land six miles below our wing tips. I felt like a bystander at my creation as words filled my paper almost without my intervention. I finished writing somewhere over Omaha.

I don’t remember what exactly I wrote, but whatever it was it made one hell of an impression on the aircrew. Since I was a kid flying without the accompaniment of an adult, flight attendants would frequently drop by my seat and check to see how I was doing. On one such visit I showed the stewardess my essay.

I looked up from my seat and studied her face for any clue to her reaction as she read the composition scrawled on a sheet of complementary stationary provided to keep passengers amused. I had found the writing paper stuffed in the pouch in front of my seat.

I glowed with pride when she smiled and shifted nervously in my seat when her lips stopped moving. Now and then her eyebrows would wrinkle in concentration when she paused to decipher a patch of bad penmanship or poor spelling.

“Did you really write this?” She shook her head and smiled down at me.

“Yes,” I answered and she asked if I would give her permission to show my essay to the captain.

Again I nodded yes. But, before I could ask, “Why?” she was striding up the aisle toward the pilot’s cabin. I was pleased but also a little bit uneasy about the attention my scribbling was receiving. Had I broken some rule?

After several minutes, the flight attendant returned to my seat accompanied by the captain. He also wanted to know if the words on the sheet belonged to me. Again, I assured him that I had indeed written the composition. I wondered, why all the fuss?

The essay was only a few hundred words in length. I had compared the farms and towns passing beneath our wings to the squares on a beautiful quilt, all woven together by our ancestors on a loom of destiny. From the altitude where angels trod, none could see religion nor politics, creed or color. Laid beneath us were all the parts of America and our individual lives were the threads that stitched together the quilt.

The captain invited me to join him in the pilot’s cabin. As he escorted me toward the cockpit, I was aware of puzzled looks of interest from my fellow passengers. My perplexed expression was probably a perfect mirror.