My life consists of long periods of boredom, punctuated by short moments of sheer terror.
Gary Garcia; professional pilot
Some people say that life is made up of nothing more than special moments.
Moments that grab ones attention, interest & imagination to blend together into what becomes ones memory....and that is what makes us individuals, they say. Of course some people will say anything given the opportunity but I think this is as good as any saying & I shall run with it.
Some of these stories first appeared in my book An African Road Trip, & my sincere apologies to the four people that actually bought & read the book however I seem to be running out of material so at the risk of being redundant, here goes:
In a four month drive across that magic of all continents Africa, Smiling Mike & I had witnessed many weird & wondrous sights. Buy nothing had prepared us for that night in Zambia.....
"There is a bluff overlooking the Luangawa river...............pg. 65- 66
SIGHTS & SOUNDS PT 2S
By Steve Church
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Elvis Presley
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Voltaire
Cuenca Ecuador teeters on the edge of the 20 century. I mean was arriving by that mode of modern transportation...the airplane....however it being door-less DC 3, & landing only after having circled a dozen times as someone cleared the cows off the runway. It was apparent from miles up, the dichotomy of the place. One or two gleaming high-rises now jutted from a sea of low slung stucco walls & red tile roofs. Ancient cobblestone streets rattled & hummed with oxcarts & black Mercedes. Pinstripes mingled with tattered gunny sack shirts. Stoic & reserved Quechua Indians waddled amongst sleek Spanish business men.
It is a spotless, dirty place, kind of a small, large city, with a hustling, relaxed attitude. The people are both friendly & mysterious, proud but curious. The climate is four seasons in a day, cool spring like mornings, hot dry afternoons, crisp sunsets, & cold dark nights. It sits low in a high mountain valley, openly surrounded by plenty of green wooded grass land.
Some families watch Satellite MTV & dine on frozen dinners while others pick lice & share a greasy Guinea Pig.
Some folks have servants...some folks are servants.
Cuenca sits in the middle of no where, but is the bustling center of a huge area of Ecuador, equally as far from the mountains & the sea. It is certainly a beautiful & agreeable town to visit with a colorful past & a vibrant future. There is one thing about Cuenca however that sets it apart from any other place in the world, & that is this:
People in Cuenca Ecuador consistently live longer than any people, anywhere in the world....except for some place in Russia.....(but lets forget about that place for now.) In a country that considers 50 years a long life, here is a place where scores of people are well into their hundreds, & many well past 120.
And no one seems to know why.
Scientific guys from all over the globe have tested everything from the water to the tortillas. From the air to the earth. Could it be something bubbling up from one of Ecuador's 50 volcano's? Something running down from the 2o,ooo foot Andes. An herb or spice brought in from that eternity of organic, the Amazon jungle? Perhaps a super strain of genes passed from Inca royalty. Perhaps something to do with the many UFO sightings in the area?
The mystery added to the intrigue of an already curious town.
So it was with good reason that I felt oddly out of sorts in the middle of that Saturday morning Indian market in the center of Cuenca.
For here had gathered the descendants of 25,ooo years of evolution. A melting pot, a stew of cultures, slowly stirred & warmed in that town square.
There were fierce & wary Jivaro, a colorful tribe of head-shrinking Amazon people that had continued their mind warping hobby well into the 1960's on any missionary or tourist that stumbled into their territory. They now shyly hawked parrot feather headgear, huge snake skins & extremely real looking human shrunken heads. The tiny heads (shrunk by placing hot sand inside the skull for weeks on end) looked disturbingly real, however I was assured by a Spanish speaking, tattooed, & painted Jivaro, that the heads were actually goat heads. I wasn't to sure & mused on the thought that these fellows might actually be vending actual tourist pin heads, to other tourist pin heads.
Stout, Stoic Quechua's, their thick black braids dangling from Bowler hats & cascading over oxygen gasping high altitude barrel chest's, squatted by huge piles of coca leaves. The leaves could be purchased for about 25 cents a shopping bag full, mixed with a bit of limestone, wadded up & placed between cheek & gum. A mild buzz would ensue, a subtle burst of energy that would suggest the user might now drop & do a couple hundred quick push-ups. No wonder these peoples' ancestors built cites of 300 ton stones without the use of wheels, pulleys, or draft animals. No wonder it was a common sight though out the Andes to see barefoot Indians carrieng 150 lbs loads of grain or skins, running pell mell, bent double straight up hill at 3 miles altitude.
There were even a couple of disc-lipped Suyas, whose entire society had been reduced by half after first contact.
But the square also held a few Japanese tourists. Draped in the latest technological marvels for capturing & storing the moment, they seemed to be thousands of years separating them. German tourists, a tribe evolved to the top of the chain.....(some contend). A spattering of regressing French & American nomads. Hunter-gatherers, scrubbed yuppies, lost lookers, eager beavers, in a melting pot of capitalism.
It was a dichotomy if there ever was one, of peoples & era's mixed in that square.
I was kneeling in front of the witch doctors assortment of wares when I heard it. I had been considering a smoked Llama fetus, for the "fertility of a raging bull" or perhaps a sea star to ward off heart disease, when the music reached me. I had just passed on a dozen cures for lack of memory, impotency, fever, bad eyesight, hexes & foul breath when a sound from heaven itself wafted across the market.
The haunting soft strain of a reed flute floated like a beautiful butterfly above the colorful crowd. The music seemed to embody the entire scene, it
fit so well with that exotic mingling as to not be there at all. The music was the moment & vice versa.
The simple Andes reed flute, made from half a dozen different sized hollowed reeds, lashed side by side & played by lightly blowing over the open ends, creating a sound from heaven itself. It is both melancholy & ecstatic, lonely & peaceful. Those simple 6 pieces of hollow reed, from mother earth herself, seemed to capture every note in the spectrum of note-dom. For here was pure, perfect, simple, sweet music as old as human feelings.
Shirley the music could only be coming from a being of superior grace. A beautiful young woman to be sure......or was she still a girl?....no, definitely a young woman old enough to know life's trials & trilobites, woes & Joe's.
The vision of this mystical, swaying, dark eyed beauty, seemed to draw me like a lizard to the sun. For here I would find spiritual enlightenment, my soul soaring of the music, my eyes feasting hungrily on the musician.
A compact crowd had gathered about the music's source, but with some well placed elbows & rusty Spanish apologies I weasled my way to the front.
Oh my God.....
My next breath, caught like a chicken wing in my throat. For here creating the most beautiful music in the world, was not a raven haired angel, but one of the most retched creature's I'd ever had the horror to gaze upon.
The man, if indeed it was a man, sat rotting on a filthy flour sack. Rotting from leprosy or some other god-awful creeping jungle demise. His legs had already succumbed, reduced to two rag-wrapped stumps, his hands now ulcerated palms held a reed harp to cracked lips. His eyes had exploded into white, sightless orbs. A pathetic wretch swaying slightly, seeming totally unaware of the beautiful music he created or the admiring crowd pressed close around him.
And here ladies & germs was the greatest dichotomy. I was seized by the message, the profundity of the whole thing. For here was a lesson in life if there ever was one.....a very heavy meaning here....
If I could only figure out what it was......
The End
SMELL
It's time to open your parachute when cars look as big as ants. If ants look as big as cars, you've waited to long.
Ernst Luposchainsky
See what will happen if you don't stop biting your fingernails?
Will Rodgers to his niece on seeing the Venus de Milo
The sense of smell can record special moments as no other sense can. A smell can hang in your memory like a dead albatross. A certain whiff of something can bring back a flood of memories more profound than resurrecting an ancient prom dress.
That will explain then, why the smell of a burning aircraft will always jolt the return of special memories for me.
I had a feeling about the plane that morning & mentioned it to Smiling Mike.
"Will a plane actually fly, Mike, with it's tail rudder eaten off?"
"It's not completely eaten....damn horse, last week the beast ate the seat off my motorcycle. "
"Have you told Jimbo about this bag of bones .... I mean we can't have this flea hotel wandering around eating planes can we?" Planes we're flying in?"
"Jimbo sez it's his favorite horse...used to be some famous racehorse...."
"Jimbo sezs that about all his horses...."I reminded him. "Why is it, by the way, that every sway-backed hay burner in the valley is hanging around the airport, running all over the runway?"
"I'm not sure but I think the owner, Rouse, is trying to pick up a couple extra bucks renting out the strip as pasture."
"Could idea, Crested Butte Airport: Horses Boarded."
"Anyway," Mike continued, "I got some duct tape that'll fix the rudder."
"Duct Tape?"
"Special 500 mile per hour duct tape." Smiling Mike assured me, but the stuff looked like regular old duct tape to me.
The plane was a 1941 Piper Colt. It had 104 horsepower or slightly smaller than a Volkswagen engine. It had a balsa wood frame, & 'fabric' skin fuselage.
It had three instruments... a speedometer, an altimeter, & a gas gauge. Oh, and a radio that was built two years before they invented the radio.. It had two tiny seats & room for an empty barf bag. But the worst part about a Piper Colt? It is a "Trainer". Which sounds to me like somehow not a real plane yet...just 'training' to be.
Smiling Mike & I flew it for one reason, we were stupid, & it was cheap.
We rented it for $15.oo per hour which in plane rental circles is cheap.
Mike backed his old VW Van under the wing, hooked up a pair of jumper cables & leapt into the cockpit. The Piper's engine turned reluctantly, & finally
exploded in a cloud of blue smoke & flying parts. It settled down into an uneven gasping noise.
"LOVE THAT THROATY ROAR!!" Screamed Mike.
"LIKE A EMPHASEMIC VESPA!!" I agreed.
We disconnected the VW & scrambled into the tiny cockpit. Siamese twins couldn't have been closer. Mike pulled the throttle & the tiny plane shuddered & started a teeth chattering vibration that finally resulted in a slight forward motion. We rattled onto the runway & Mike ran up the engine.
"THIS IS WHEN YOU NORMALLY CHECK THE GAUGES BEFORE TAKE OFF!!"
Screamed Mike in my ear. "THAT'S WHAT I LIKE ABOUT THIS PLANE...THERE AREN'T ANY GAUGES!!! HA!!"
"WHAT ABOUT THAT HERD OF HORSES ON THE RUNWAY?" I Screamed back.
"THEY'LL MOVE!!" Captain Mike assured me.
They didn't move.
And they continued not to move as we bore down on them, bouncing & swerving in the canvas plane.
"WHAT HAPPENS IF WE HIT A HORSE IN THIS PLANE??"
"BUDDY, A SPARROW WOULD GO RIGHT THROUGH THIS PLANE!!" HA!!"
And at the last moment they did move, like the parting of the Red Sea that tiny plane roared through the herd, nothing but flying tails & horses asses visible from the scratched wind screen & suddenly like a geriactic vulture, we were airborne.
"BORN TO FLY!!" Screamed Smiling Mike.
I opened my mouth to respond but nothing came out. It felt like a poodle was lodged in my throat.
Now don't get me wrong, I do love to fly. Why, when your puttering along in a light plane far above the maddening crowd a feeling of great individuality comes over you. You've broken the bounds of gravity & everything mundane about earth bound life. Your out of the herd & soaring solitaire in Gods own heaven....hopefully.
And believe me we had been some places in that under-powered, wooden deathtrap. We'd flown between the spires of the Ohio Creek Castles, two pinnacles of rock so close together we had to put the thing on wing tip to squeak through. We'd landed at night with no lights so that not until the wheels touched did we know where earth was. We'd parked that piece of aerial rubbish right along side John Denver's cream & chrome Lear Jet in Aspen.
But today felt different. Something was wrong today.
Crested Butte looked like an ant farm below as we vibrated past the ski area & pointed toward East Maroon Pass. Although the planes altimeter went to 15,000 feet that was an optimistic dream for the little Piper & only on the third try were we able to coax the 11,800 needed to clear the 11,790 foot pass. I could see marmots & titmice running for cover 10 feet below us.
"AIR TO SPARE!!!" Screamed Mike & pointed to Denver.
Mike & I have spent so much time jammed together in planes, trains, boats & automobiles that communication now is subliminal. He new I was skittish without even looking at me.
"HEY, HAVE I EVER SHOWN YOU THE CIGARETTE TRICK??" He yelled.
"NO!"
Smiling Mike then placed a Marlbrough in the ashtray & pointed the nose of the plane at the earth. That's right...into a straight down nose dive we went as the tiny plane started to scream & shake like a caged Gorilla. The cigarette however, started to slowly rise from the tray. But so did the beer from a open bottle of Bud clenched between my legs. The cigarette rose toward Smiling Mikes face, the beer rose in a perfect stream & started to spread itself out along the ceiling. The ground was approaching at an alarming rate.
"I GET THE POINT!!" I was screaming as Mike feathered the controls, floating the cigarette this way & that until that coffin nail finally floated right into Mikes mouth. At this point he leaned back hard on the stick & with enough G forces to make sandwiches into tortillas, we swept level 100 feet from the earth. And it was exactly at that moment the loose Budwiser came pelting down soaking the plane & occupants in foamy suds.
" THERE!! YOU MORE RELAXED NOW??" Screamed Mike.
"OH YES I FEEL MUCH BETTER NOW!!" THANK YOU!!!" I yelled back.
But it was on approuch to Stapleton that things really started to heat up.
"DO...YOU...SMELL...SMOKE??" I asked very carefully.
"YES!!"
"ARE... WE.... GOING.... TO.... DIE?"
"OH I DON'T THINK SO, IT SMELLS LIKE AN ELECTRICAL FIRE!!!"
"AND THAT IS GOOD??" I asked , as the cockpit started to fill with acrid smoke.
"WELL THE GAS TANKS ARE IN THE WINGS, THE FIRE IS UNDER THE DASH!!"
"OH GOOD I FEEL MUCH BETTER." I assured him.
The tower had just cleared us to land behind United Flight 747, in front of Delta 409 when the radio exploded in a shower of sparks.
"SHOULD WE START WORRYING NOW??" I asked.
"NAW.....BUT WE BETTER OPEN THE DOORS TO SEE !!"
Mike started slipping the Piper sideways as we held the tiny doors open against the 100 mile per hour wind. I wasn't sure if the smoke was being sucked out, or if the fire was being fanned.
"NOW WOULD BE A SWELL TIME FOR A PARACHUTE!!" After all Mike was a frigging parachute instructor....
"NO ROOM!!" He said.
At 5000 feet my eyes were streaming I was convinced we would explode at any moment. At 3000 feet I knew we would tumble from the sky like a ignited Mallard. At 100 feet the runway only occasionally appeared through the smoke.
After what seemed an eternity the Piper touched down & we taxied to the private sector known as Combs Gate.
After a semi careful search it was determined that only the radio had burnt & later that afternoon we found ourselves standing in a phone booth at Combs Gate waving up at Stapleton tower asking permission to depart.
"DOWN HERE DOWN HERE!!" Mike was yelling into the phone & waving frantically.
"DEPART ON RUNWAY 4, & NEVER...I REPEAT, NEVER BRING THAT PIECE OF GARBAGE BACK TO THIS AIRPORT!" A voice screamed over the phone.
And we never did.
The End
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