When I was a kid I wanted to fly crop dusters. Those magnificent machines would fly over our house and rattle the pictures on the walls and I would be outside looking up with the wide-eyed wonder only possible to a child. I played with toy airplanes, flying them up and down our driveway and across our yard at eye level to whatever age I happened to be. As I grew, the planes flew higher, and I never stopped wanting to fly.
First Flight
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I took my first trip off the ground. Mid to late teens is a best guess. They opened a new airport (a tiny one) in a small town near ours and a pilot was selling rides. My older brother put his money down and we went up in a small single-engine plane. We didn’t dive toward the ground at a high rate of speed, but it was fun.
My mother was opposed to the idea of me flying crop dusters. In fact, she flat out refused to talk about it. No son of hers was going to kill himself spraying insecticides on cotton. It was a fool thing to do, and no way to make a living. Being a disciplined child, I put that dream on the back burner.
When I graduated high school my father gave me two choices: Go to Mississippi State and get a degree in Electrical Engineering, or go to Itawamba Junior College and get a degree in Electronics. Two choices, that’s what I had. Crop dusters weren’t on his radar. I suppose I could have left home, but you didn’t grow up in our household and not do what our father said. The only wiggle room we had with him was none. Zero. We may as well have been in East Germany before the wall fell, or in the county lockup.
I graduated two years later with an associates degree in electronics. Four years seemed such a long time to spend learning to do a job I didn’t want.
My first commercial flight was from Tupelo, Mississippi to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, via Memphis. When we landed in Memphis the small plane bounced around a lot but I was too dumb to know it wasn’t supposed to. As I deplaned, I heard the flight attendant say it was the worst landing she had ever experienced.
Flying on a big plane was pretty boring after the first several minutes, and that was years before they cared much what you carried on the plane with you. I flew enough after that to learn to hate it — the hassle of getting into the air, not the flying itself.
Lessons
When I was about twenty-five I decided to take flying lessons. I think I logged a little over six hours before I became bored with it and decided it would be cheaper to buy a new motorcycle than to continue with the lessons. My flight instructor was the nervous type, and I wondered what made him decide to teach, so I quit. At the time, I wasn’t making enough money to support a private pilot’s license, and the thought of taking all those tests and physicals caused me to make a decision I’ve always regretted. Sure, I could’ve gone back and finished it but once you quit a thing it’s hard to pick it up again, unless it’s cigarettes or alcohol. No, I quit and stayed quit. Momma’s boy wasn’t going to die spraying insecticides on cotton.
Not all dreams are meant to be, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need them. Some dreams we chase, others we leave untouched so we’ll have something to reminisce about in our golden years. There’s magic in an un-chased dream. I still rush outside if I hear a crop-duster fly over (or a helicopter), and I still look up every time I hear an airplane, and I often stare at it until it’s gone. I probably would have died had I flown a crop duster because I’ve always been reckless. I would have skipped a pre-flight check, or I would have ignored some warning light or broken gauge the way I have ignored the check engine light on every vehicle I’ve ever owned. The most reliable part on any vehicle is the bulb behind that check engine symbol.
I’m not at all sad about not becoming a pilot. You see, I had another dream when I was a kid. I wanted to be a writer.
Awesom story Carl