This time every year i'm hit with an urge to get out of town. i know its because after suffering through winters in new england for most of your life you develop coping mechanisms to stay sane and reaffirm why life is worth living. For me, that usually means traveling somewhere that is warm and sunny and not frozen and gray and dull and boring and blah.
Around this time last year i went to california to visit my best friend and his wife who were then living in san francisco. The plan was to spend some time in san francisco, seeing the city, road tripping around the area, and then renting a car and driving to where i used to live when i was a kid. My mother and i lived in sacramento until i was 8 when we moved out east, but i still visited my dad in santa rosa every summer and every other christmas vacation until he died when i was 12. I went out there the summer after i graduated college, which was my first visit in 10 years, but except for a quick pass by my dads grave i didnt spend all that much time in the places i knew when i was younger. I'm currently (and was at this time last year) working on a project exploring my relationship with my dad, how it effected me growing up and how it now effects me as a dad myself. Part of this involved going to document those childhood places to see how much they differed from my memory and to see if they stirred loose any other memories i'd temporarily forgotten. For the trip i brought my rangefinder and a bag of color neg and slide film. I was pretty fired up because although i don't use it that often its
by far my favorite camera and all too often shelved due to the convenience and commercial necessity of shooting digital.
Life got pretty crazy as soon as i returned from the trip last may and between work, parenting and life in general i haven't had as much time as i'd liked to go over what i shot. Getting that seasonal wanderlust now i'm wondering where the hell my light table is while i'm reaching for my film binders and firing up my scanner. The next best thing to feeling sunshine on your back is at least looking at it so thats what i've been doing a lot of lately.
I've been scanning and editing the following pictures over the past few days. The story of how i took them is slightly to moderately ridiculous.
I had just finished visiting my dads grave in santa rosa and was driving up the 101 to windsor which is where my dad was living when he passed away 16 years ago. Its a pretty short ride between the two places, but a 10 minute drive was becoming exponentially longer as i sat in construction related traffic. This turned out to be a good thing as i had about 5 minutes to look at sign that i would have passed in 10 seconds had i been driving my regular speed. This sign was for the Charles M Schultz Sonoma County Airport. Looking at it i clicked that this was where i went to go flying with my dad when i was younger. Flying was my dads greatest passion and was one of the activities i did with him that i genuinely enjoyed doing. Probably the most enchanting moment of my young life was flying through a cloudbank when my dad told me to lower the glass flap on the window next to me and to touch the cloud we were flying through.
I took the exit off the freeway, followed the signs and arrived at an airport that was really different from what i remembered, completely fenced in and locked down per TSA and post 9/11 rules. I remembered going to this airport with my dad on a quiet sunday morning, passing a gate with minimal security and driving right on to the tarmac up to his plane. One of those mornings my dad took me to one of the runways that had just been completed but not yet open. He had me sit in his lap in the drivers seat of his maseratti and floored the accelerator as we blasted through the gears and on up to speeds that were certainly not legal on any state or local roadways. I think doing that these days at your regional airport would probably scramble f/a-18's to your location and at the very least get you thrown in jail.
After a few minutes of driving around the perimeter of the airport arousing as much suspicion as possible i pulled over to the side of the road when i saw something that caught my eye. It was an old plane, faded paint, rusted out, missing propellers, fuselage covered with a tarp like someone who had quietly passed away in their sleep. Jutting out from under the tarp was the planes tail number, which could easily be seen through the windshield of my rental car as i sat parked on the side of the road. This could have been any other forgotten aeronautical relic but there was something about this plane, specifically its off white with green and red stripe paint scheme that made me stop for a second. I called my mother who was at work back in boston to ask if she remembered any of my dads old planes knowing that the one i used to fly in with him was one they flew in together before they divorced. Without hesitating she said " sure, a 1958 beechcraft Travel Air" she then rattled off the tail number, all of which matched what was peeking out at me from under the tarp on the plane across the road and beyond the fence. "why?" she asked. I told her i'd explain later and hung up, my hand shaking. I thought about scaling the fence in front of me, but then thought better of it. Instead i opted to go to the airport managers office and ask whos plane it was. Once given the tail number and hearing my story the woman in the office was surprisingly accommodating, giving me a printout of who the plane was registered to , including name address and phone number.
I went outside and leaned against the warm hood of the rental car as i dialed the number of the man listed on the sheet given to me by the woman inside the office. A woman answered the phone and almost without even thinking about it i told her who i was and why i was calling , figuring she would surely think i was nuts and hang up. She went on to tell me that her husband, who was an aviation mechanic employed by the forestry service and currently in LA helping service planes battling forest fires, had bought the plane approximately 15 years ago. Apparently this plane was a bit of a collectors item, the kind of thing people spend time/effort seeking because they are so rare. She told me that a long time ago her husband had contacted my dad asking to buy his plane as an agent found it to be one of the few ones in operation in that part of california. At the time my dad had told him no way would he part with it so her husband went on with his life and forgot about it. A few years later , after my father had died with most of his assets going through probate court to be sold off by lawyers due to an incomplete will, the plane was on the market and he heard about it and subsequently bought it. The plane had been grounded along with my dad after his quadruple bypass surgery a couple years prior to his death and remained at the airport just wasting away. When this womans husband purchased it it was his intention was to restore it and fly it , which he started , but hadn't finished all these years later. "thats your dads plane" she went on to say. I then realized that the plane was probably in the same place it had been left at by my dad all those years ago. I began shaking just trying to comprehend it all. I had asked if there was any way i could see the plane up close , telling her that it had sentimental value to me and would mean a lot. She asked for my number and said she'd call back in 5 minutes. A few minutes later she called telling me to go to a nearby office and ask for a friend of hers who worked there. I did and was greeted by a woman who asked me to go wait at a security gate nearby and that she would meet me when she was done with her work. She did and after excitedly telling her my story she said "thats incredible" as she typed in the security code and opened the gate. Seeing my first unobstructed view of the tarmac i realized that the airport hadn't really changed at all from what i remembered as a kid.
Just to the right of the gate we entered was my dads plane and I stood there for a moment trying to take it all in. Even though i had been staring at it through the fence for the better part of an hour having it right in front of me confirmed that it really was my dads plane and not some type of hallucination.
I started to walk around it , inspecting it as if i was looking for more confirmation that this was the same airplane i used to fly in with my dad all those years ago.
I approached the passenger side of the plane, and the same wing i climbed up on with a step stool when i was younger.
"do you want to take a look inside?" asked the woman , who i completely forgot existed at that point, as she began to unfasten the cover on the cockpit. I asked if she needed a hand and as she said yes i climbed up on the wing to help her remove the dirty old cover.
At first look the cockpit was nothing as i remembered as all the seats had been removed revealing a tangle of avionics that lined the floor. I then recalled the woman on the phone had said her husband had started to restore the plane. Apparently he had not gotten very far with the process. It wasn't until i looked at the instrument panel that it all came flooding back to me. Flying with my dad , this mass of dials and switches and gauges in front of me, looking so much bigger then than it did now. I remembered how the yolk could flip over from one side of the cabin to the other so either person sitting up front could control the plane. I remembered how one time my dad flipped the controls in front of me and told me to fly the plane and i did for what was probably 20 seconds, but at the time must have seemed like an hour. I then realized my hand was on the same glass panel i had flipped down that one day when flying through the cloud bank. I stood there for a minute just staring at it, trying to comprehend how much bigger my hand is now then it was on that day and how how this small piece of glass might as well been the size of an oven door when my little hand last opened it.
At that point i realized that the woman who had let me through the gate had just finished work and while she had been gracious to be the gatekeeper for my trip down memory lane she probably had a home and family and life to go to after her workday. I grabbed a few more pictures, thanked her for her time and left. Back in the car i called the wife of the owner of the plane and thanked her profusely for allowing me to visit my dads old plane. She told me to write down her husbands cell phone and to call him while he was out of town and i dutifully recorded it, knowing that i wasn't about to call him as he serviced the aircraft battling the worst forest fires in southern californias recent history. I still have his number and will call him some day to introduce myself and ask how the restoration is going.
Labels: childhood, personal projects
