I. Teardown
What does it mean to savor the fast, fleeting, and final hours on the tach before the engine goes idle and the last puffs of burnt fuel begin to fizzle into a wide and far-reaching silence?
What sense does one have of eternity when, with a single glimpse, there is captured high above the flight of so many others who will long continue their airborne adventures after the rubber of your own wheels has chirped resignedly onto the runway back home?
How does a one manage to pick up a screwdriver, pop off the cowling, and drain the oil a final time, watching the hot black ooze as it pencils a perfectly straight line into the bottom of a bucket while the drab and dreary drizzle through a hangar door ajar taps a dance upon the tin overhead?
What thoughts begin to screw through the mind as the seats come out—just as they already have countless times before—as do the floors and baggage bulkheads, then rudder pedals and panels and all else in the airplane that impedes sight, the movement of tools, or the contortions of the builder’s body as it writhes impossibly in spaces normally meant for a pilot’s feet?
Then, when the dykes come out of the toolbox and the shredding of wire begins, what fondness for the sky exists in a pile of wire that gets yanked, tugged, snipped, and gutted from the hollows of the smitten bird?
And when there comes a firewall divorce after two decades and 2,500 hours of time in the sky, how does one permit hope to heave the two apart, to wedge with such blind ambition a beatless bank of pistons from its long-cradled grasp?
After wiping up the last remaining drips of blackened blood from the hangar floor, what emotions spring forth from the uncoupled clamps that now weary the bottom of a dirt-crusted pan where a capful of hapless hardware meets its end?
When once was beheld a sleeping city below the pinks and purples of a coming dawn, where the gape of heaven tugged man and machine through the shade and shadow of a world unlit by uncertainty, there came the vision of a newness of life, of a resurrection that must needs be followed first by the pain of tearing down, of stripping off, of gathering up the old and casting it as chaff into the wind where the yearning for rebirth yawned as far as eternity.
Thus, here lie the meditations of a man who once was airborne but now is not, who chose to make a second build out of a bird that was already airworthy but crying out for upgrade, for redemption, for emergence into an evolving world where modernity was a must. What comes next are the yearnings to return to the skies, born from a haunting host of memories seen only by the man himself from the very cockpit that now lies tattered and tool-ridden under the dinge of a poorly lit hangar, the irony being that there is an incredible beauty to be found in a grounded RV: Getting airborne again never looked so good.
Can't wait to see the reborn creation!
