Snapshots

by Gregg G Guydish

© 2006

I sat on the back of the combine harvester as my father worked on the broken part. With nothing more than the Leatherman tool he kept in his pocket at all times, he was able to replace the broken pin on the auger, and get the massive machine running again. My father, a simple farmer, a man of the soil, was a mechanical genius.

I’d often sit on the hillside behind my home after my morning chores and stare up at the sky, watching the birds effortlessly traverse that endless bowl of blue so impossibly high overhead, stretching from horizon to horizon. Sometimes I felt that it was a giant, inverted, fish bowl, and that we, the animals of the land and sky, the fish.

Long hours I’d spend helping around the farm, learning how to use my muscles, and getting a feeling for the animals we raised, and the cycles of life in the fields. Wheat, sorghum, soybeans. All similar, all unique. The seasons passed as I grew, but never did my fascination for the skies above wain.

Over the years my father taught me how to use my brain as well as my paws; he taught me how to work smart. He taught me how to fix the tractor and the conveyor, and the truck and the harvester. I learned how to plow the earth, and how to repair the plow. It wasn’t all that long before I was the one fixing the combine out there, in the fields, under that immense blank canvas of a sky, the birds: ravens, crows and raptors, circling high above me.

My every free moment was spent reading or sketching the ubiquitous birds I saw everyday. The jays and the magpies, the woodpeckers and the whippoorwills, and the nearly invisible humming birds. I drew the hawk and the eagle, studied their anatomy, and dissected their carcases. The walls of my room were filled with such drawings - pictures from magazines, pages from books, the rare photograph. A shrine to those gossamer creatures that could so glibly defy the laws of man, and steal away from this earth upon a whim.

How I had longed to be among them, to fly with them. Not to escape Kansas, nor the farm, but simply to experience the unbridled freedom of their flight. To commune with these denizens of the sky - to understand their world, and to see ours from their perspective. To feel the wind in my fur, the sun on my back, my mind filled with the details of flight: roll and pitch and yaw - alert to the state of the constantly changing air: the thermals, the downdrafts, the cross-currents. To simply be alive in the moment of flight, consumed in the joy and sheer exhilaration, to know of no other state, than the state of flight, unburned by the toil and responsibility of earthly matters. Just once, to simply be one with that great bowl of sky that dominates my horizon.

As my father grew older, I was given more room in his workshop, and more leeway on how I spent my spare time. I found myself tinkering with rods and gears and linkages, connecting them to the pictures in my head; of birds and bones and muscle. The contraption slowly took shape, with many failures along the way. I spent more time those years studying engineering and aeronautics, retracing the work of the great aviators, Wright’s, Bleriot, Antoinette, Cody. I went back to my books on anatomy, back to my drawings, and made many a long walk to town, to study the few relevant tomes available in the local library.

Years of labor and many a sleepless night were spent in pursuit of a dream only half-realized. A thought, a hope, an idea that wouldn’t sit quietly and let me be. The dawn broke hard and bright that morning, harsh on my perhaps childish ambition, though softly did it seem to shine on my assemblage of wire and canvas, gears and pulleys, motors and parts. I stood quietly on the hilltop, ears peaked, my eyes staring into the distance. Watching with no small measure of awe as the darkness of night gave way to day in awesome glory. The birds rustled, making the noise of a new day, and the convection currents of dawn started to lift the quiet blanket of night.

I crossed my arms over my chest, and grasped the handles, pulling on them experimentally, ensuring that the mechanism worked, twisting them, watching the wings flex in response. Relaxing, the wings folded neatly onto my back, and I closed my eyes for a long moment, breathing in the last vestiges of the evening, before the day made its final claim for attention. I breathed deep, and opened my eyes, taking one last look at the world from the only perspective I have ever seen it, and, pulling hard on the handles, swept my mechanical wings high overhead in a rustle of fabric and gears. A flock of birds broke cover and took to the sky, and I followed right behind them.

Gliding over the earth, I exalted in the joy of it, reveled in the feeling of it, thrilled in the strain, my ears filled with the noise of the gears grinding, canvas billowing, rods and struts cutting the air, and the wind - the glorious wind - flowing past my body in a magnificent rush, making me tingle all the way down to my toes.

As I circled high overhead, birds off my port and my bow, I looked down upon an earth I had only ever seen in my dreams. The rivers and lakes looked like spars of light, lancing and dancing across the surface of a gravity bound world, the sun reflected off them like a giant, moving mirror. I saw the farm, the farmhouse and the barn, the animals in the field; horses running in their pen, as if filled with the joy of living another day earthside. The fields of grain stretched out all around me, merged with the fields from surrounding farms, and made the whole world look like a giant patchwork quilt of greens and golds and browns. And still I climbed.

The sky dominates my world now, bigger, and rounder, and more bowl-like than ever in my time on the ground. The horizon is bigger than I had ever imagined, and the sky is infinitely larger than anything I could have ever dreamt of. On the ground I saw birds everyday, everywhere I looked - up here the sky is empty, the birds are few and far between. Ground is a distant object, an abstract concept, just a green blanket that plays counterpoint to the black sky looming forever overhead. I ride the warm air as it rises, circle the cool air as it falls, and drift as the currents will take me. Now I understand the world of the sky. Now I am complete. Now, I am home.

The end.