Thanks to Katie (and her temporary gig for Northstar Helicopters), we boarded a helicopter with five other tourists, a guide, and a strikingly gorgeous pilot, who couldn’t start the bird. She radioed back to the office, with no reply, had to walk back and return with a fat guy hobbling along with a heavy gadget to jumpstart us.
When I wasn’t gawking at the pilot, I enjoyed some other mind-bending scenery, from the verdant Montana Creek – Windfall Creek watershed to Herbert Glacier to the massive towers and nunataks of the Juneau ice field.
Something about jumpstarting a helicopter… I don’t know…Seems to be an apt metaphor for how I’m realizing life in middle age. We’ve got our complex corporal technologies… capable of so much when they were built… We’ve got our theories about how life works, how to achieve liftoff, to hover, to bank, and soar to some kind of greatness, maybe… But sooner or later, we need the limping fat guy with the heavy chemical box, to jolt us from failure, from humility, back into competence if not beauty.
Whatever. Cool flight. Precious time spent with lovely Katie during the heart of June. Solstice has come and gone. (It, too, felt a bit like jumpstarting the helicopter.) The word for the moment continues to be LUSH. Our yard is redolent with lilac. Azaleas are ablaze, spruce still sagging with new growth, Devil’s club towering 20 ft or more into the canopy, king salmon jumping into everyone’s boat but mine.
Cedar’s good. Except when she isn’t. She’s testing me/us on recall to the point where I’m considering an e-collar. She knows what she’s supposed to do when I call her. More often than I should, I need to use my stern voice. And sometimes she simply turns from me, trots away, then walks around me in a big circle.
If the helicopter is my aspiration for greatness for either of us, me or Cedar, it definitely calls for a jumpstart from time to time. But once you get that sucker airborne…
She defies gravity. She commands the lush world through a sexy pair of RayBans.
For a while.
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