”Tales From The Underbrush” documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that experienced them.
The artist proposes to post monthly herein a chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry continues the tale.
NO FLIGHTS OF FANCY THESE – PART 5 of 5
“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)
“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible”
Simon Newcomb (1835 – 1909)
Helicopters have never been one of my favourite vehicles in which to fly, but I must admit they have been damn handy to have around a lot of the time. Into areas where no fixed wing aircraft could ever trod or where days of arduous trekking on foot would be required, helicopters have long ago proven their worth. I do remember one instance which might have prejudiced my thoughts about helicopters when I had wanted to land at a particular place on a mountain plateau only to be told by the pilot that that was impossible because he could not generate enough lift to take off again. What happened was we ended up landing on the edge of a cliff at about an altitude of 3,000 metres because “this way I can quickly fall off the cliff and gain lift farther down in the denser air.” Well thank you very much for that very important piece of safety information. There are of course helicopters that work at high altitudes with specially aspirated engines that can deal with the thinning atmosphere.
There was only one other flying incident that ever caused my bile to rise and my sphincter to tighten. It was in a helicopter during a trip to the former producing Churchill copper mine in the extreme northern region of British Columbia. A land of towering mountains, glaciers and deep valleys, the weather can be wicked and unpredictable with storms and squalls forming in minutes when least expected. It was along one narrow, steep sided valley that the helicopter I was in lurched through a blinding snow storm with winds that blew snow and sleet horizontally into our windscreen, making visibility a hazardous exercise. As we passed down a valley bounded close by on one side by steep cliffs that left nothing between them and the valley floor hundreds of feet below, I glanced out my window only to notice the fact that the helicopter’s rotor blades seemed to be whirring mere feet from the cliff faces. As a pilot, I am familiar with the illusions of distance and proximity. Objects in proximity to an aircraft tend to look a lot closer than they actually are. Hundreds of feet away become tens of feet away, and feet become inches away. Nevertheless, after inputting the mental corrections for such illusions, I became even more concerned with how close we appeared to be to the cliff faces as we bounced around from side to side, buffeted by the winds like a yo-yo on a string. I decided that the only resolution to my misgivings was to do a visual check of the pilot who I was sure would be projecting the confidence and calmness befitting the manager of an aircraft under his perfect control. You can imagine not only my consternation but the whistling sound of sphincter tightening that accompanied it, when what I was to view was the pilots’ knuckles considerably whiter than my own. Safely landing at the mine site I had the grace not to ask him questions as one aviator to another, fearing perhaps that his answers might irritate me by their falsehood or scare the hell out of me by their forthrightness.
Logic Defied
While standing on a high hill and viewing a helicopter flying low along a valley or a small plane landing on an airstrip below is not normally viewed as being unusual, it is also fair to say that the standard relationship between an observer and a commercial airliner is that the observer, while standing on the ground, normally looks up at an aircraft flying overhead. Given these observations, the following tale might not strike a chord with some readers, but it has remained indelible in my mind over these long years.
It is the mid-1960’s and I am in Ecuador as has been boringly reiterated numerous times in this book. Part of that country is defined by the twin chains of Andean mountains and volcanoes than run through its extent. Some of these volcanoes are amongst the highest in the world. As a point of trivia and when measured from the centre of the earth’s core, the summit of Mt. Everest is not the highest point in the world. That honour belongs to Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador. This volcano, with its summit at an elevation of 20,700 feet, constitutes the furthest point from the centre of the earth because of its high elevation, its location at the equator and the oblate shape of the Earth, being flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. A fine point to make perhaps, but maybe not if you are an Ecuadorian and interested in superlatives.
There are few breaks to interrupt the continuity of the north-south trend of the Andes in Ecuador. Two of these breaks happened to occur on our exploration concession. Perhaps initiated by structural movements in the rocks and subsequently incised further by swift flowing rivers, deep east-west valleys had been carved out of the mountains. The only two highways of consequence at that time that ran west to the coast from the country’s interior had been carved out of the slopes of these transecting valleys. These valleys were to also serve as aviation highways for commercial flights from cities like Quito, the capital city located on the interior plateau, to the country’s largest city and commercial centre, Guayaquil, situated on the Pacific coast. While the straight line distance between the two cities is some 167 miles (269 km.), the Andes Mountains separating them formed such a high barrier that a straight flight between the cities was neither practical or in many cases not even possible at that time. Instead, a flight would take off from Quito, head south paralleling the inter Andean plateau, hang a right turn along the transecting valley and when through that, then a left turn down the coast to Guayaquil.
While in the 1960’s jet aircraft were becoming prevalent in the commercial transportation of people, propeller-driven airplanes had still not been completely driven from the scene, particularly in so-called third world countries unable to afford the cost of the fancy new jetliners. As a consequence, Ecuador’s airlines, both domestic and military, continued to fly the venerable two and four engine propeller aircraft that had so nobly ushered in the era of world travel and helped to in effect shrink the size of Earth. These aircraft were more restricted than jets in the altitudes at which they could operate, being generally limited to 25,000 feet or less. This sort of performance might not only fail to provide a sufficiently safe clearance with mountain tops but even attaining such service altitudes within the confined space of encircling mountain ranges was both dangerous and uneconomic.
The solution was to fly down one of the transecting valleys at altitudes sometimes not much greater than the highways they over flew! Thus it was with a sense of the surreal that sitting on a horse on our exploration concession at an altitude of perhaps some 12,000 feet, I would observe a two or four-engine commercial aircraft packed with passengers on their way to Guayaquil or Quito wending its way through the air along the valley at an altitude that was perhaps several thousand feet below my situation. It was a perspective that for me has continued to remain impressive over the years.
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Repeating the question: What goes up a drainpipe down and down a drainpipe up?
Answer: an umbrella!
Postscript
Although there is no “high flight” in bush flying, the majestic poem that follows in my opinion best and most beautifully reflects what flight is all about. Written about manned flight, it must surely also be a lyric for what birds experience if only they could talk. It is my favourite poem and perhaps my favourite piece of literature of any kind. While the words define flight, some closer thought might allow the poem’s text to describe the joy of any aspiration or inspiration. So while the words encompass the dreams and delights of accomplishment, there is also the humble recognition that we are all but tiny, insignificant specks of dust within the enormity and grandeur of the cosmos.
The poem “High Flight” was found on the body of its author, a Canadian pilot shot down while on assignment during World War Two.
Copyright © 2009 Ian de W. Semple
HIGH FLIGHT
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
September 3, 1941
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I have climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of; wheeled and
Soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along
And flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
