Living intentionally

“I miss Apalach,” she says at random, when picking up her toys or coloring or petting the dog. It’s a special place on the Forgotten Coast of Florida, with beautiful, nearly empty beaches, shells as big as your hand, and dolphins that come to play in the boat wake as you motor out to the islands. We spend a couple of weeks there every summer, and that free and easy beach feeling feeds our souls something necessary for survival in the otherwise go-go-go lifestyle we typically lead. This year, though, the day before our arrival, there were two separate shark attacks about 50 miles up the coast. Concerned friends messaged from home, “Did you hear? Better stay out of the water!”

While I appreciate their concern, we got in the water anyway. I didn’t let the kids swim all the way out to the sandbar this time, and we made sure to play away from where a couple of people were fishing, but we were going to have our ocean time. Water in the nose, sand in the hair (and various other parts unmentionable), sunburned, paddleboarding ocean time. I made a conscious choice years ago to refuse to live a life dominated by fear…maybe about the time I started flying airplanes.

Pilots have to make that decision again and again every time we get in the air. It is a daily exercise in living intentionally. If you fly long enough, you will have lost friends to airplane accidents, maybe even friends whose piloting skills and safety practices you admired. And then there are the stories: the engine that quits on climbout, the cabin fire, the bird strike. The list goes on and on of completely unforseeable events, and even the most stubborn of us start to question our it-won’t-happen-to-me decision making. Oh, we’ve all heard the statistics. You are more likely to die from cancer or a car accident than you are by shark attack or airplane crash. But tell that to a pilot and see if that stat makes him feel one bit less anxious as he loads up his entire family in the airplane.

I made a conscious choice years ago to refuse to live a life dominated by fear....Pilots have to make that decision again and again every time we get in the air.I was recently giving an instrument checkride in a Cessna 172 at my local airport when I heard a slight change in the engine noise. My applicant didn’t seem to notice anything different, continuing to load the GPS. Was it just in my head, I wondered? But I took my noise-canceling headset off one ear anyway just to listen for a second. I didn’t hear anything unusual, nor did the gauges indicate a problem, so we just kept on, business as usual, completing that approach, then going back for the last one. We were at 2,000 feet agl and 5 or so miles away from the airport when the engine made a new sort of vibration, one that got the attention of my applicant if his wide eyes were any indication. I took the controls and made a beeline for the airport, letting ATC know we were heading back for possible engine failure. The applicant tried to read the checklist in an airplane that was shaking more and more aggressively as we neared the airport. When we got within gliding distance of the runway, still at 2,000 feet, I pulled the power to idle, put in a forward slip, and landed on the runway without incident.

Days later, the mechanic sent me a picture of our cracked cylinder. It was just a thin crack, no more than a couple of inches long. How could something so seemingly insignificant be the thing that could possibly have kept me from getting home safely to my family? For the next several days, I continued to hear what a friend called the “automatic rough,” whenever I was in the air. It’s the same thing that happens when you’re alone in a dark house after watching a scary movie. Every shadow and creak causes your heart rate to spike with an am-I-in-danger rhythm.

Here’s the conclusion we all have to make peace with as we choose how to live out our days. We can hole up in our safe spaces and imagine that we and our loved ones are safe from every danger. And to an extent we may be reducing some level of risk. But at what cost? Some things just make life worth living. I have no idea what it is for you, although if you’re reading this column, I could venture a pretty good guess. For me, feeling the pull of the ocean waves and the wind underneath my wings make me feel a part of something vast and sacred. In the immortal words of Eleanor Roosevelt: “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”

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