Chapter 9

Haley’s turn:

Dead heat of summer on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Heat is unavoidable, augmented by humidity that turns it into a stultifying range of experiences.

Modern life, though, includes air conditioning. Home, office, classroom, lab, all those are where one dashes when the car is parked – one air conditioned refuge after another.

I have another refuge, too. That Stearman – open cockpit, a few thousand feet, the temperature drops, eighty or ninety knot winds working their way around the minimal windscreen.

I walked through the building, saw a dark head bent over a book in one of the offices.

“Mila, are you too busy for a little spin around the patch?”

“The Stearman?”

“Bubba needs the exercise. I need a few thousand feet.”

“Are you going to let ME fly too?”

“Don’t I always?”

She closed the book and stuffed it into her backpack. “Let me text my family.”

Half an hour later our wheels are lifting from the runway and a few minutes after that we were over the farmlands, sparsely populated so that it was unlikely that people would be harmed as a seventy-year old biplane disintegrated at the hands of two girls playing at aerobatics.

We’ve both benefited from instruction at the hands of Hanna Bertrand, trophy-grade aerobatic pilot, so we kinda know what we’re doing as we alternately coax, cajole and prod the old Stearman through a repertoire of loops, rolls, Immelmanns, chandelles and other aberrations to straight and level flight.

“This is why I came,” Mila said over the intercom. “Flying like this. I have to put all my thinking into this. No school. No work. No anything. Just airplane and sky.”

“I need that myself, sometimes,” I replied. “Barrel roll!” and I urged the stick and rudders to push the old biplane through a corkscrew in the skies.

“My plane,” Mila said. “Hammerhead.”

I watched the nose point upward, the ground somewhere behind us now. Speed bled off until “Whoop!” and we turned to the right, pointing back at the ground. The nose reacquired the horizon.

“I am no way saying that I have any less love for my family,” Mila stated. “I...”

“Head-clearing,” I pushed.

“Yes. Head-clearing. Roll left.”

Swoop.

Half an hour later we’re putting the old plane away.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Mila smiles.

“You’re perfectly capable of just going out by yourself.”

“Then where would I have shared my thoughts? Sometimes thoughts are meant to be shared.”

That’s our Mila. Three years ago she was a paragraph in the child sex trafficking narrative. Now she’s fluent in English, a college student, a licensed pilot, and yes, ‘our Mila’, a member in a community that smears the lines between ‘community’ and ‘family’. And she thinks tooling around the sky in an eighty-year-old biplane is therapeutic.

Five-thirty, I’m having dinner with my family.

Tomorrow’s my public debut.

It’s what happens when you toy around the edges of subject matter on the periphery of your major. I majored in electrical engineering. I needed a few credits in other subjects. History. I LIKED history. A great professor saw something to gently cultivate, and next thing you know, I’m getting a Masters in history with my emphasis on industrial history.

A presentation here and there and I’m asked to take a position with the local industrial council as a spokesman/historian.

They have an annual industrial exposition. I have a named appearance in the event, a presentation of the historical growth of local industry from farm and forest to petrochemical and aerospace. My name! In BIG print! I may hang around to sign autographs.

Meanwhile, back in Alabama...

George Stebbins’ turn:

Thought I’d check up on Mandy this morning. It’s been a week, and she’s been raising some eyebrows. MY eyebrows, for sure. Got snagged on the way down the hall: “Pardon me, Doctor Stebbins?”

I looked. A student, George Gray, who said, “Just wanted to say ‘thanks’, sir.”

Expressing my wisdom, I said, “Huh?”

He smiled and said, “For giving us Mandy, sir. Probably the best teacher we’ve ever had, even if she’s 6 years younger than most of us.” He snickered and said, “It’s a happy day for her -- she turned 16 over the weekend, so she’s going to get her driver’s license today.”

We both chuckled, and I kept walking to her engineering studies lab, hoping she’d still be there.
She was, with two of her students at desks, and her at the white-board, with some calculus equations. I stepped in to hear: “OK, guys, does that help?”

Nods, and “Thanks, Mandy. It does. Maybe we can pass this math test, now.”

She said, “Following the exam, you DO know what comes next, don’t you?”

They looked perplexed. She said, “It’s the AFTER-MATH, guys. C’mon, work with me, here!”

They laughed, and started closing notebooks. I was chuckling, too. I said, “Good morning, Mandy. Just checking to see how things are going, but it looks pretty good to me. And what was THAT all about?”

She smiled, and reached for her orange vest and hard hat. She said, “It wasn’t about load flow studies. Those guys were having trouble with some stuff for their Differential Equations class - somehow they weren’t recognizing the patterns for using LaPlace or Fourier or Hilbert transforms. Pretty basic stuff, really.”

I said, “A little birdie told me you were gonna get your driver’s license today. Congratulations!”

She said, “Yes sir. Us old-maid-schoolmarms need driver’s licenses, too. Changing the subject, I was thinking of taking a couple of my students on a field trip next week. We’d have to leave on Friday - might just be a day trip, but I don’t know yet.”

I asked, “What’s this all about?”

She said, “It’s power grid stuff. One of our sub-station projects down in Florida. Big transformer coming in, three-phase, 320 tons, 30 feet tall. We only have room for 3 students, since we have to take a crew of techs down. Do you suppose I could get a receipt for charitable contribution?”

I asked, “How will you pick the students? And how will you get them there?”

She grinned and said, “I’ll leave it up to the students. Draw straws or something -- however they want to do it. But we’ll fly down, of course. Ordinarily we wouldn’t use one of the big birds for a trip this short, but when you have to move several bodies and their equipment, it makes more sense.”

I said, “Mandy, I have no objection, and I’ll ask my secretary to see about the charitable contribution. Frankly, I have no idea what’s involved. However, I have to ask, why the interest in moving a big transformer?”

She said, “I haven’t ever actually SEEN one of ‘em being moved, have you?”

Had to smile, and I confessed, “No, I never have.”

She said, “I’ve been out to five of our projects so far. The classroom is too far removed from the reality on the ground. We need to change that.”

I had to smile. I’ve often entertained similar views, but the reality of universities and resources often means one doesn’t get to do what one wishes.

Then, “Gotta run, Doctor Stebbins. My ride to the driver’s license place is waiting.”

She stepped down the hall, hard hat, vest, all that, and up to an Army officer, sporting captain’s bars on the collars of his uniform shirt. She kissed his cheek and his eyes lit up, along with his smile.

By God, MY eyes would light up, too. If I were fifty years younger ... but I’m not.

And she’s right about the “field trip” idea. Of all the students I’ve had, she’s one of the few who actually understands it, and has the ability to make it happen. Come to think of it, the few others who could do it were ALL wearing the same shorts and 3Sigma polos. We should re-hash this whole curriculum, to whatever THEY think it ought to be.

Paul Hoskins, again:

Good Lord, NOW what? Just got a call from Doctor Ramathani, requesting “a couple of minutes” of my time. Well, what the hell -- I have a couple of minutes before having to deal with the next disaster.

THEY stepped in -- Bren and Ram. I stood, smiled, and said, “Good morning gents. What’s the bad news we have THIS morning?”

Bren said, “Paul, a few of our students were really struggling with differential equations, about a dozen of them, and evenly split between physics and electrical engineering. All of a sudden they’re doing much better -- looks like they may actually pass the course. There was some serious doubt about it earlier, but they found a REALLY good tutor. Just so you’ll know, she wears a 3Sigma shirt.”

I laughed and said, “Let me guess -- a skinny little redhead, maybe sixteen years old? I wonder who that might be?”

Ram said, “Paul, we heard about her getting her BSEE and BS in Physics. Why didn’t we give her one in math?”

I said, “Gentlemen, I’m not gonna argue. Draw up the certificate and I’ll sign it. No ceremony, though -- if we do that, she’ll bring Cindy and cookies -- it’ll burn up two hours. Just the certificate, and we’ll just go surprise her at her next tutoring class.”

Buddy Jeffries’ turn:

It happened this way, and I’m an “outsider”, if that term means anything to you. Anyway, it was REALLY early on a Friday morning, and three of us arrived at the 3Sigma airfield to be met by our TEACHER. Yeah, all hundred pounds or so of her. Damn, somebody please pinch me -- maybe I’ll wake up to something resembling reality.

Let’s see -- a sleek turbo-prop aircraft, and several intense guys loading equipment and baggage into the cargo area. Mandy saw us and said, “Morning, guys. Get over here and help our crew load their stuff.”

Three of them and three of us, we got it done pretty quickly. While we were doing that, Mandy strolled over to an identical aircraft, talking to a skinny blonde, who got into THAT aircraft with more burly guys. A bit of a shock: The “little blonde” is Dana. Yeah, THAT Dana. Probably the ONLY female college student who wore a football jersey for real. She’s one of THESE.

I saw lights in THAT cockpit and the interior for a few minutes. The engine started, the internal lights went off, external (landing?) lights and strobes came on, the bird rolled out to the north end, then took off to the south, banking around to head a little north.