"That's him!" I told my son, Austin. "It's Mark!" I fought the urge to key the mic, to advise my old friend that we were once again sharing the same traffic pattern, but this time while he was living his dream of being at the helm of a Boeing.
My throat choked with emotion as I thought back 10 years to a young CFI student warmly shaking my hand. We'd flown together, worked side by side as pilots and writers, and then split to opposite ends of the country.
Only yesterday Mark had e-mailed me. "Don't suppose you'll be around Albuquerque tomorrow..." he'd said, only half serious. "I have a long layover there." He knew that we live 300 miles away-unrealistic to assume that we'd come over on a Sunday, with no notice, just to share an afternoon.
I felt the same way at first; there were plenty of reasons not to go. "If only I'd known about this earlier," I told myself. But I hadn't seen Mark since he'd become a Delta pilot, nor since he and his wife, Becky, had enlarged their family with twins. Then there was the flight across Arizona and New Mexico to consider, over enchanted terrain....
"Anyone want to fly to Albuquerque tomorrow in the Skylane?" I timidly queried. "Not me," said my wife. "I'm playing tennis."
"How about you, Austin, wanna go?"
"I'd love to go," my son replied, "but my plutonium poster is due Monday, and I need to work on it tomorrow."
Only moments later he re-entered the room. "Maybe if I work late to-night I could go after all," he said. "It's Saturday and I'll miss hanging out with the guys tonight but...." Here, I thought, is a kid who loves flying as much as his dad.
So after a late-night sojourn with computer and spray-mount, morning found us soaring over wooded peaks in eastern Arizona, wisps of smoke from isolated fires punctuating the landscape of green trees and snow below. Suddenly, between flight duties, I was struck by a thought.
"You won't believe this," I said to Austin, "but I've just remembered that there's some sort of an atomic museum on the field at Albuquerque. Wanna go?" We laughed about the plutonium connection.
Ski slopes at Mount Baldy soon gave way to volcanic cinder cones on the New Mexico border and piney peaks to juniper-dotted high plains. We were too far south to view the jet-black "malpais" lava fields, their gigantic cracks visible from aloft like patterns on the sun-dried floor of an evaporated puddle. But an equally anticipated treat still lay ahead - the 1,000-year-old Acoma Pueblo, arguably the oldest continuously occupied city in North America.
It's been 20 years since I first gazed down from 11,000 feet and saw, to my astonishment, an adobe city perched among spires in an isolated red-rock canyon. Acoma's "Sky City" lies atop a 400-foot-tall mesa; for centuries the only route to the top was via a secret ladder carved in stone. (When I later visited the remote place, I found urban character paired with mind-bending vistas, exquisite white-and-red pottery, and an early Spanish church. I even climbed that ancient, once-secret stone stairway.)
On this day, Austin and I peered frustrated into the confusing maze of canyons, but just when we thought we'd missed it, Sky City granted us an enchanted glimpse, morning sun highlighting ancient geometry.
That wonder would be topped only by the radio call from Delta 1966 and the warm embrace of an old friend in Albuquerque. I conned Mark into taking a photo with me, his dapper uniform contrasting with my old jeans and tired tennies. Over lunch we talked friends and business and babies and flying, ogling airplanes while downing blue corn enchiladas smothered in cheese and green chilies.
Next, we completed Austin's mission at the National Atomic Museum. It was both fascinating and horrifying to view beautiful missiles and airplanes designed for such deadly purposes. For my son's report we photographed a twin of "Fat Man," the plutonium bomb that had rained death on Nagasaki in 1945.
Escaping back to the New Mexico sun, we shared goodbyes with Mark and pointed our spinner westward toward home. By now the scattered fires of eastern Arizona had spread into conflagration, dense layers of white smoke flowing smoothly over mountains like water over rocks in a brook. What caused these fires in mid-winter we could not imagine, but, as with the atomic museum, we marveled at finding beauty and potential tragedy in the same setting.
The final rays of a fire-red sunset silhouetted Four Peaks as we neared home, with silvery Lake Roosevelt floating in the foreground below us. Touchdown came in otherworldly darkness amid the sparkling lights of Phoenix.
The following evening, when asked about the success of his plutonium presentation, Austin shared a small disappointment. "If only I'd thought to be in the picture with the Fat Man bomb," he said. "The kids in class just didn't believe that I really made a field trip yesterday to the atomic museum in Albuquerque."
Maybe including him in the picture would have helped. But sometimes even a photograph can't persuade people that you've done something truly extraordinary, like traveling on a whim across two states to meet an old friend for lunch, visiting wonders of the world along the way-and still being home in time for dinner.
Impossible, of course...except by flying carpet.
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