02 - Sosua / Puerto Plata

Sosua

(Codes for this chapter are: male adult/female adult, consentual, lesbian, heterosexual, true story, light bondage, polyamory, oral sex, body modification.)

Over the Caribbean Sea enroute to POP, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic

Dewey Bunnell was thinking about something else when he penned the lines, “The ocean is a desert with its life underground. And a perfect disguise above.” But he was right, to the navigator open water is more of a desert, as in deserted, than any land desert.

I was sitting in the left seat because I was going to shoot an ILS, Instrument Landing System approach and landing at Puerto Plata, in the Dominican Republic and Six-Niner Three-Four-Five, like all of our airplane had only had one GLI, Glide Slope Indicator. Sitting in the Captain’s seat it was just above my right knee.

The ABCs had perpetually good weather but we were 500 miles due north of there, flying through a tropical storm in “Hurricane Alley.” Pretty soon we would be the second CLTM C-46 stuck in this storm. Three-Four-Six was still sitting on the tarmac at destination waiting to be unloaded.

While the oft quoted quip is that the way to make a little money in aviation is to start with a whole lot, the story of my life disagrees. My whole life has been the story of making connections with people and figuring out what all parties need and desire. Then if we are mutually compatible, figuring out the logistics.

It’s how we built our family of seven, and became parents and grandparents in the wondrous process. We count four and a half decades of stability and love. It’s how we built our many businesses. It’s how we serve God, thanking providence for our many gifts, by trying to do good for others of God’s children.

Tonight we would be tangibly enjoying the fruit of making personal connections. Mimi and Mitch had just left Puerto Plata Airport for Aruba a few hours ago with Zero-Zero-Zulu. On designated IFR airways traffic is separated by direction of travel and assigned different altitudes. We flew over one another about eighty minutes ago.

This whole flight had been by IFR, Instrument Flying Rules. I was getting the hang of doing it over open water, on land when you fly IFR most of the time you can usually see something. I just had to be like Aristotle, and find the middle point.

I am a believer, and I believe that heaven awaits me, but I am having a lot of fun here on earth. I am certain that Jesus will not mind waiting another seventy or more years to see me, no need to add to Saint Peter’s workload. (War Department Training Film 1-3300 [1943] is a hoot.)

Besides my God gave me a big enough brain to comprehend the concept that I could be wrong, and that he might not exist. Yes, I know exactly what I just said. No, it is not contradictory and isn’t that brain God gave us just beautiful in its complexity.

Many of the songs written about flight and sailing face and laugh at the prospect of death. There is an inherent risk associated with both. Many early pilots met their demise through a lack of knowledge, but complacency is a killer as well.

Eddie Stinson whose family built one of the first public airports in America, in San Antonio Texas ... Eddie had amassed more hours than any other pilot when he fatally “failed to maintain adequate separation from prominent terrain features” as the official accident report read.

Education is always important, in life, in love, in business and in flying. It just has a bit more urgency when you are flying over open ocean through a tropical storm in the dark. Pilots and sailors cannot take a Mulligan.

Doctor Maria Montessori, an Italian medical doctor who built a school for the poor children of Rome’s slums, and later fled Fascism to build her world renown school in Chiaravalle, British India ... Dr. Montessori said that education was a process of three parts. Learning a thing through observation and hands on tactile experience.

Mastering that thing on your own with supervision but not intervention so that you understand that thing. Finally, permanently imprinting that knowledge in your brain and passing the knowledge along by teaching it to another. That has worked for us in life, business and fun.

We worked hard and played together harder; we always had several irons in the fire. Above all we heard the words that the ancient Romans whispered into the ears of their conquering heroes as they paraded through the streets of Rome.

Paraded in horse drawn chariots with their wheels spaced to ride on those flat stones placed the same four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inches apart that British and American railroads adopted, that “all victory is fleeting.”

A successful life is built one brick at a time. I took reading a borrowed library book about Jeanie Cochrane, a famous pilot of the thirties, and turned it into an airplane that we owned free and clear, and then three. But it was a process of many steps, over many decades.

I took the discovery that I had erogenous zones, and turned it into perfect love, a family, accomplished and well-adjusted children, spoiled grandchildren and great passion in all of its conceivable forms religious, physical and emotional.

“Aeropuerto Interactional Gregorio Luperon, Caribische Lucht Transport November-Six-Niner Three-Four-Five copy that. We are cleared for straight in I-L-S on runway Eight,” Punch answered the control tower over the radio as I flew the airplane through the rain.

As I looked at the two needles on the GSI above my knee and manipulated the airplane’s yoke to keep them centered like a rifle-scope crosshairs, I was continuing that process of education. The runway at Aeropuerto Interactional Gregorio Luperon in Sosua had several directional FM radio emitters alongside of it.

Once my GSI was set to POP’s unique frequency it read their signal and its vertical needle showed deviation left or right from center. Its horizontal needle showed if I ventured too high or too low. Keeping them centered I flew the airplane onto runway Eight in the dark and rainy moonless night.

Just as if I was a U.S. Navy Wildcat pilot in an old ‘Movie Tone News’ short that I had seen as a child, I landed my plane with an electronic device taking the place of the young seaman with the red ping pong paddles.

I did as I was instructed by the GSI, and we had safely arrived at our destination, Puerto Plata the Dominican Republic. The resort town of Sosua with Mimi and Mitch’s house was just waiting for us on the beach to our east, not that anyone could see it in the rain.

I parked Three-Four-Five right next to Three-Four-Six, that while sitting on the ramp all day had not been unloaded yet. I didn’t blame them, I wouldn’t want to be outside working in this weather either. The heavy rain tonight was not so unusual in late April, mid-May was the peak of the rainy season.

Mid-April was typically the end of the primary tourist season here. Since Halloween it had been in the seventies and the small amount of rainfall came with darkness and in small bursts. Snowbirds fleeing winter quadrupled the population in the resort town of Sosua, but in the summer it was pretty quiet.