Prairie Sky: A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude by W. Scott Olsen will be available in three to four weeks. Pre-order it today!
Prairie Sky
explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless
time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social
history, meteorology, and geology. W.
Scott Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the
physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in
interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind
images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the
region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen
rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the
midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the
wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.
Excerpt:
Thin Places and Thick Time
A Duet for Two Worlds
“Ready to go
flying?” I ask.
“Absolutely.”
“Think I know
how to do this?”
Roy Hammerling,
a religion professor at the college, sits in the right seat as the Skyhawk enters the runway.
“I’m counting on
it,” he says.
The throttle
goes forward, and the airplane begins to run down the centerline. It’s a beautiful day for flying.
Clear sky and bright sun. A gentle breeze from the north. Huge distances
between the very small clouds. The type of day where chasing an idea with an
airplane seems perfectly logical and sane. At 60 knots I ease back on the
yoke, the nose lifts, and then the rest of the airplane follows. We begin a gentle
climbing turn to the west.
“I love that initial
feeling,” Roy says. “It’s like you’re tethered to the ground, and then all of a sudden you
break free.”
Roy and I are on
an expedition this morning, a mission, a voyage of discovery. We are looking for the place
where everything changes, the place where the very behavior of the physical
earth changes direction. There are signs on the ground that point to the
spot, but when you are standing there, the shift is too subtle to see. We are looking
for a line reaching back to Pleistocene catastrophe and forward into ecology and
myth. We are looking for the Laurentian Divide. And we are looking for
something else as well.
Below us the
land is green where crops have sprouted, brown where the plants are still emerging. We’ve
had three days of hard rain, and overland water moves toward the Maple and
Sheyenne and Red Rivers, streams today in depressions you can measure
but never see.
“I am always
amazed by the takeoff,” he says. “When I was a little kid, I used to imagine it was like there
were ropes around the airplane, and you had to break away. And there is
this sense of—I don’t know—elation when you break free.”
There is such a
thing as accidental genius, I think. Hunting for geology, the normal thing would be to
invite a geologist. But the Laurentian Divide in North Dakota is nothing like
the Great Divide running the length of the Rocky Mountains. There is no leap
and swooning of summit and valley here. Subtle at best, invisible at
worst, the Laurentian Divide is more idea than rock, but the evidence of its presence
is overwhelming. I mentioned this in a hallway once, and Roy got interested.
If you are
looking for the invisible, I think, invite a theologian. I level the wings just fifteen hundred feet
over the ground. Traffic on the interstate is light. An egret flies southbound
below us.
“I always felt
there was a bit of a metaphor for spiritual life in that,” Roy continues. “In the sense that
what people always want is a sense of joy or happiness. But there’s always these things
tethering you down to the ground. You can’t get away from it. I have a
friend who’s a pilot, and I’ve gone up with him a few times. I always have this
sense of freedom in flying.”
We’ve begun this
conversation a thousand times. In my office, in his office, in hallways and lunch lines, we
get to talking about flying and about the small insistent sense that something
else is happening beyond the shape of air moving over wings. But then we’ve always
paused.
“In the
airplane,” I’ve said. “I want to hear what you think while we’re actually flying.”
When I told him
I was going to try to find the divide, something huge and historic and mostly invisible
unless you’re looking for it, and even then damn near impossible to fix precisely,
it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We’ve delayed this conversation so
long, it nearly erupts.
“Do you know
what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”
“Transformation,”
I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to
relax—the physics and the math work pretty well.”
“Some people
never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like
some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears;
they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them
from flying. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is
about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is
always a sense of mystery. Like right now, I look over, and you don’t even have
your hands on the controls.”
I smile and
point at the autopilot in the panel.
“Oh,” he says,
laughing. “See? Mystery explained by a higher power.”
I remember a map
I have at home that shows the rock underneath the Dakota soils. Like nearly every
map, it’s an aerial perspective. Archean basement rock, billions of years
old, from the time when continents first formed and life, nonnucleated
single-celled hopes called prokaryotes, first appeared, hides under Fargo.
Heading west, however, the rock quickly becomes Cretaceous. The rock of Tyrannosaurus
rex. The rock of Giganotosaurus and Triceratops. The rock
of Pangaea’s breakup. The rock of the Western Interior Seaway, an ocean in the
middle of the continent. The rock of a meteor falling on the Yucatán and
killing nearly everything. Keep going west and the rock keeps getting
younger. But none of it is visible now. The planet cooled. The glaciers came,
scraped every hilltop, and filled every valley with gravel and sand. An ice sheet
named Laurentide pushed the Missouri River valley into shape. And when the
glaciers moved back, the meltwater Lake Agassiz, the largest inland sea
in North American history, deposited sediment and clay. There are marks in the
North Dakota soil that reveal where icebergs trapped in retreating
pack ice scraped the lake-bottom sediment. You cannot see them from the
ground.
“You know,” I
say, “I have been told that there is not one single description in the Bible of an angel in the
act of landing. There is one scene where a couple of them are zipping around a
living room, but otherwise they are almost always in the air. And if they
are on the ground, they are frequently in disguise, appearing as commonplace humans.
So it would be possible to argue that their true appearance, the
place where they can reveal their true nature, is airborne. It may be forcing
the idea a bit, coming from a pilot, but it does strike me that there is something
intuitive there. Something true about the human character.”
“You can think
of Ezekiel being taken up in the fiery chariot, of Jesus’s ascending into clouds, and it lends itself
to the idea that heaven and the holy are somewhere above.”
“These guys
don’t just dissolve,” I say. “They don’t just fade away into some other state of being. They rise.
They take off. They fly.”
“Saint
Augustine,” Roy says, “in his Confessions has this great line. He says something like ‘Oh, God, are you
the God of the heavens? And if so, are the birds more holy because they fly
closer to you?’ He knows that God is in some type of heavenly place. But the
question is, where is that place?”
“Today,” I say,
“it’s fifteen hundred feet over Dakota farmland.”
“Perhaps not,”
Roy says. “Augustine concludes that the way people need to fly like birds is to go within.”
He looks out the window. “But I will admit, if Augustine had a Cessna, he might have changed his
mind.”
1 comment:
I have had the pleasure and privilege of being in the classrooms of both Scott Olsen and Roy Hammerling and am truly thrilled to see an essay that gives such remarkable voice to two of the most thought-provoking and entertaining educators I've had. I'm so glad that I haven't been taken off the campus mailings yet; I might have missed the release of this book! I can't to get the whole thing and devour every word--perhaps the trek to Moorhead might be in order for a signed copy!
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