Why I Fly

The year that my marriage begins to fray in earnest, I become obsessed with flight.

I am not a new pilot; I have been flying various aircraft all my life. I’ve always liked to be aloft, but I am not consumed with it, not yet. Then, at 58 years old, I find myself racking up the flying hours in ways I never did with the Cessna I learned on when I was just 20, the paraglider I picked up in my thirties, or the motorized hang glider that I piloted from my forties on. This ardor is new.

I begin to fly a gyrocopter.

The reasons for this aren’t all mysterious. It’s easier to learn a landing than a human heart. It’s easier to check the oil and look for the fill line. You add oil, or not. When the weather is bad, you don’t have to stick it out. You close the hangar door and leave. You’ll fly another day.

But still, it’s a strange decision. My heart has a hole that needs filling and I decide to fill it with a strange looking piece of metal that resembles a tiny helicopter. The hard edges and wires and rotors shouldn’t have fitted, for one. Pilots are often intrigued with the mechanical; they love the bright aluminum and wires and baffles and spark plugs, the additions that promise high speeds and bigger numbers. Not me. I have no engineering mind, have little in common with those who tinker with their plane to make it snazzier. I don’t tinker at all. Sometimes I rue the fact that I must be held up by a structure of any sort and wish I could just fly like the birds. But my marriage is in trouble. I don’t know how to fix it, but I can get better at flying so that is what I do. And I pick a gyrocopter to do it in.

Fifteen years before my wife and I had fallen hard for each other in the way, perhaps, that many in San Francisco do: at an evening reading in a crowded event space, listening to a morose writer of great fame. He intoned about climate change from the stage and I, usually greatly upended by environmental crises, only smiled moronically. I was electrified by the woman sketching in her notebook next to me. For the next many years, we made each other better creatives (she was an illustrator) and much, much better people.

Flying and love do have something in common. For one, they both feel like magic. Yet both are governed by simple science—physics and oxytocin respectively. Still, no one new to either really believes that when you tell them. Even today when I review the Bernoulli effect and Newton’s Third Law of Motion—the natural laws responsible for getting the heaviest of airliners into the sky—it seems that a key ingredient is missing in the explanation, and it includes the word miracle.

Most of us have known how a relationship dissolves, first almost imperceptibly and then catastrophically, like an artery. It’s not that interesting, especially when you still admire, and respect, and yes, love, the other (so much more interesting when two people have betrayed and deceived, been cads or been horrors). Ours was the boring sort of devolvement, of simply growing apart. This may have been why we fought: We were clawing but clinging too. We were trying to mend, but we didn’t want to mend either. We were like those knitters who knit to pass the time in DMV queues and then unwind what they’ve done almost dispassionately, then knit again. We were not dispassionate, though. We were angry at the knitting and at the unwinding. We didn’t know what we wanted, clearly, and so we yelled, then threw up our arms in dramatic resignation, and marched into different rooms. Slowly the day came when my house no longer felt like home, but my hangar did. I would lift my hand and say “Bye. I’m heading to the hangar.” But I didn’t mean heading, I meant fleeing.

Was this a helpful remedy? Truth is, I’ve never been great at grief. When I was a firefighter, I had several tactics, none of them wholly effective. After a difficult day, I might sit in my car alone and cry. A difficult day was this: CPR on a baby. A father who waited for (bad) news of his toddler still inside the fire building, and who tugged on my sleeve as I exited to refill my air pack, wanting to hear of his child’s safe rescue (no). After another fire, the recovery of six bodies: We dug through the detritus and found them in separate rooms, each adult embalmed in a final embrace with two of the children, shielding them until the last.

With little idea how to process all this sadness, tears often just seeped up, like contaminated chemicals bubbling and pooling at a Superfund site. An ad on television might trigger me: anything with a puppy in it, for one. Or even a car commercial, the four-wheel-drive car looping through a stunning cliffside road, ocean glinting behind, all elegance and mettle, no money down, zero percent APR: I’d weep.

“No wonder no one can tell you how to do it,” writes author Alexandra Fuller of mourning her own son’s sudden death. “Clearly no one, no friend, no family, no benign stranger would come to lift this weight off of us, these bulldozers, these tomb boulders. It was up to us, up to me, to find my way out, to melt, thaw, and resolve.”

The loss of a marriage is not the death of a child, let’s be clear. But I too needed to melt, thaw, and resolve. There was some progress, surely; I had moved on from just crying in my car alone. Instead, I flew.

Yes, flying was partly a distraction. Once aloft, my intense focus on terrain, other nearby aircraft, avionics, and navigation meant that I had no room for what was dissolving below. But it was also revelation. As I crested a certain altitude and gazed at the world unfurling below my feet, I understood how small I was, how insignificant my problems were, and how existence marches inexorably onward, no matter what. Flight was at once allowing me to feel in control of my otherwise chaotic life, but it was also wresting control, gently pointing out the great forces at work around me: erosion, subduction, ablation. Surely, it was saying, the landscape of my own heart could repair, despite the battering of proverbial wind, rain, and sun.

And so I step into my hangar with a sigh of relief. I gaze around the disheveled space, willy-nillied by cabinetry and camper chairs and socket sets and flight suits and oil pans. And there, in the middle, shines the little yellow gyrocopter with its buttons that when pressed do exactly as promised, with its manageable challenges, and the certainty that my relationship with it will get better and better. Slowly I become a competent gyrocopter pilot. I excel at flying while letting go of partnership, but in the end, never letting go of life.

Caroline Paul is the author of eight books, including Why Fly: Seeking Awe, Healing, and Our True Selves in the Sky.