Amanda Owens

Roller Coasters

I’ve done this dozens of times, but Guy still looks nervous every time I’ve got the controls. We’re stopped at the beginning of the runway. I push the throttle forward, but I can feel him pushing it mentally, farther and faster than I would. The plane vibrates harder and harder as the propeller behind us spins faster and faster.

“A little more power. A little more. There, that’s better. Now let her go, gently, gently.” His left hand is on his thigh, twitching, like it’s all he can do to keep from grabbing the control stick. I release the hand brake and the plane starts moving. It picks up speed quickly.

“Bring it back just a little. Feel the tension. Okay, okay, now pull up and just ease her off the ground. Ease, ease… ease… okay. That was a little close. Next time,” he says, “let’s shoot for a little more space between the plane and the power lines.” There is no response to this. Five hundred feet wouldn’t be enough space for Guy. I adjust my fingers on the control stick, pressing them into the rubber ridges of the handle as I gently pull it back—lift.

Now this, this is nice. Here I am, 500 feet above the whole valley. The ground is burgundy and tan, marbled with rich browns and greens. It seems so alive. I haven’t seen much of the outdoors in a while, but I’ve missed it. The world really is quite splendid from up here. Of course, down there, with your feet cemented to the earth like it owns you, everything is different—harsher, more unforgiving—all dusty brown and covered in tumbleweeds and cactuses.

From up here, though, I can almost forget what it feels like up close—where the mesquite branches scratch at you, and the loose earth filters up, clinging to your jeans, your hair, your lungs, so you can’t help but inhale it.

Everywhere around me are cool shades of blue and green. The mountains are indigo and violet. The turquoise sky fades to dust the horizon, but straight up at my zenith it’s brilliantly blue. Down below me are fields in arrow-straight rows. We keep rising. The rows are becoming muddled as we rise, and now I see only vast expanses of green. The smell of smoke—probably from a burn on one of the farms—reaches me. It smells good—like winter time or camping.

I am 1,500 feet closer to the clouds, but they still look just as far away. They always do until you’re right up underneath them. Then suddenly, the cloud is there, sifting down around you. I’ve only been in a cloud once, and even though it’s nothing like the tangible puff you imagine it to be from the ground, it was more real than anything I’ve ever experienced before or since.

I was ten years old, and my dad took me up in his old sailplane—this was before he started flying ultralights. We caught a strong thermal off the cliffs of the White Mountains. It sucked us up 15,000 feet in a matter of minutes—right through a cumulous cloud. The world went white outside the windows, and we were suddenly flying blind, miles above the ground. At 16,000 feet the air gets thin, and you start to run out of oxygen. We didn’t have any oxygen masks, and I could tell my dad was starting to get worried because he kept telling me everything was fine.

“Everything’s fine. You really don’t need oxygen at 16,000 feet,” he says. “It’s just a suggestion.” Good to know. I stretch my sandaled feet out in front of me, but my legs are too short to reach the foot pedals. I’m sitting behind him in the sailplane. The Blantic—that’s the plane’s name—was originally for instruction, so I have my own controls, but they’re tied to my dad’s. By watching mine I can see what he’s doing on his controls. “Only one way out of a cloud,” he calls back to me.

Suddenly the stick pulls back so far that it hits my knee. The plane lifts immediately. I’m completely sucked into my seat. I can’t even lift my hand up. It’s the strangest feeling. Slowly, the plane noses over. Roller coaster.

I lose my stomach as I float up. The five-point seatbelt that crosses my shoulders and my lap is the only thing holding me down. Some change floats up from somewhere beneath the seat. I reach out and pluck a quarter out of the air. I feel like an astronaut. Dad pulls out of the stall, and up, up, up we go. My arms and legs are heavy as lead again. My rib cage feels like it’s crushing my lungs under the sudden weight. And then one more time… roller coaster. The altitude gauge is dropping quickly.

“Uh, Danni?” Guy is talking to me again.

“What?”

“We’re a little low to be stalling the plane this many times in succession. It’s a little risky, and we’ve lost about half our altitude.”

He’s tapping the glass that covers the altimeter. I don’t know why he does this. It’s not as if the gauge is faulty. He knows the stalls made us lose our altitude.

“I was doing roller coasters,” I say.

“Oh…. Well, they’re making me a little sick.”

“Hmm. Well, then I’ll stop.” There’s a pause.

“Thank you,” he says. He’s twitching again. Too bad this ultralight has side-by-side seats. If we were in a sailplane, he’d be behind me, and I wouldn’t see his hands fluttering about restlessly. At times like these I think peripheral vision is a bad thing.

So, I look somewhere else—up. I can see a cloud that doesn’t look too high—maybe 8,000 feet. The record for an ultralight like this one is 10,400—at least around here. I don’t need to go that high.

The wing above me partly obscures my vision. It’s orange with brown and yellow stripes — sort of like 60’s wallpaper. I hate it. My dad’s ultralight was mostly white—almost blinding when the sun was glancing off it. The front edge, though, was bright purple. I always liked the contrast.

I keep the throttle at about 5,900 rpm’s. I can still hear the constant, whirring hum of the propeller behind me. I hold the stick back. Cloud, here we come—slowly. Guy doesn’t like sudden moves. Honestly, I don’t know why he ever became a pilot.

I think I always wanted to be one. My dad said I was born to fly. My mom hates that I fly. She doesn’t like small aircraft, doesn’t trust them. When I left the house this morning, she sat in the big green chair in our living room—the one with the armrests that are about to fall off.

“Mom,” I say. “I’m leaving. I’ll be back in an hour or two.” I wait for her to respond, watching the chair rock back and forth almost imperceptibly.

She’s staring at the mantle, imagining that it needs to be dusted, I’m sure. It doesn’t. Our house is spotless. “Oh, I hope you have a nice time,” she says.

I sigh. This is my first flight in four months. I walk over and brush her forehead with my lips. “Bye. I’ll be back.”

I’m at 5,000 feet. Guy taps the altimeter again. I’m this close to pushing the release button on his seatbelt and turning on a dime. Now that’d give him something to be paranoid about.

My dad would laugh at that. He always thought Guy was a bit of an idiot. Then again, everyone does. But if I do decide to push Guy out of the plane, I’ll to do it closer to the ground. He should at least have a sporting chance.

“Uh, Danni, Danni,… Danielle?”

I roll my eyes. “What?”

“I just noticed that we’re at about 7,500 feet.”

Just noticed it, huh? “Hmm, maybe the gauge is faulty. You never can trust those altimeters.” Note to self: get a new flight instructor. I’m gonna need one when Guy falls out of this plane. We’re almost to the cloud. It’s right above us and bigger than I thought it would be. It looks deceptively solid, like I could lie right on top of it, and it would hold me; I could float away on it and watch the world drift past beneath me. I shift my feet on the rudder controls and apply a little more pressure. I give a tug on the control stick, and using my ailerons now, too, I bank the wings to the left, sliding into the thermal as it revolves just below the cloud. It pulls us up as I look down. I can see far; I can see the earth curve down on every side. I feel suddenly very aware of the world below me, but it feels so far away—like some foreign planet from space. Maybe I’m just visiting; that’s what I’m thinking as the thermal pulls the plane into the cloud and the world fades away.

Goosebumps are prickling across my arms, and my hair is standing up on end, all fuzzy and filled with static. I shudder involuntarily as a light, white mist hovers around me. It gets thicker. I can taste the frost on my lips—it feels feathery, like snowflakes. Most of the wing is obscured in a blanket of frozen air. Guy looks like he’s sitting on the opposite side of a gauzy curtain, but he is fading, too.

“Danni, I don’t think this plane can fly through clouds!” Guy is lying, of course. All planes can fly through clouds. He just suffers from extreme paranoia. I ignore him. I feel like a thick, white quilt is being wrapped around me, but it’s cold, not like a quilt at all, and it’s a bit damp. I shiver and as soon I do this, I feel warm. I can almost imagine that I’m with my dad in this cloud and not Guy. My skin tingles. The cloud is getting wispy again. We’re nearing the top of it.

I can hear my dad’s voice: “Only one way out of a cloud.” I pull up hard. The ultralight rises just above the cloud, and I sink deeper into the seat, heavy and stiff. I let the control stick slip gradually back to the center. The nose of the plane rolls down in response, but so slowly that for a minute we seem to be suspended in mid-air, just hanging there, resting on top of the cloud. It’s a very limbo-like feeling, but it doesn’t last long. As the plane finally levels, I push the stick forward, and we plunge back through the cloud. The mist soars past us, then the milky center, and then we’re beneath it once more. I pull up again, we dip back up into it, and I nudge the nose over. Guy looks nauseated. But we’re out of it. We sink farther than I want to, so I pull up again, letting us soar up, but away from the cloud this time. Everything is clear again. I wish I could show this to my mom. Maybe it would help her understand what I love about it. My dad used to try to get her up in a plane. She never went with him.

“You told me yourself that plane flies like a rock,” she objects.

“Not with the engine running. Right, Danni?” He turns to me and I nod my head, trying to look convincing before I turn back to my magazine. Right now I’m investigating a motorized hang glider that you can take off in just by running fifty feet or so. The Mosquito. I like the sound of that.

“Right, Danni?” my dad says again.

“Right, Dad.” For my part, it’s just a matter of reflex to look up and nod at the right times. I don’t need to pay attention to a conversation I could quote verbatim. Besides, every time it ends the same way: after arguing for twenty minutes about it, my dad and I will go flying, and my mom will scrub the baseboards to keep her mind off of us in a two-seater plane without sides or a floor or shoulder restraints. She didn’t like the sailplane either, but at least it had all those things.

“Danni! Danni! Nose over! We’re losing the engine!” Guy is trying to grab the stick, but in his state of nervousness, he doesn’t have enough control over his appendages to do anything constructive. I feel remarkably calm. I look down at the control stick; my knuckles are pale and my fingers are wrapped tightly around it. The stick is pulled far back. The prop is making a dull, chugging sound. It sputters to a stop. Everything feels impossibly slow.

“Too late, Guy. We lost it.” The nose is still in the air, but the plane is sinking backwards. He’s tapping the altimeter again. “Calm down. We’re at 8,200 feet, and we’re only five, maybe six miles from the runway. Trust me, we’ll make it.”

He looks over at me. “Are you insane? Are you trying to get us both killed?”

I give it some thought. “No… no.” I look back at the altimeter: 7,400.

We’re dropping faster than I thought we would. Fly the plane. Fly the plane. That’s the first thing you have to remember—fly the plane. I drop the nose to get my airspeed back and the needle passes the seven, then the six. I can see the shadow of our ultralight moving across the ground, its shape sort of flickering, wavering in the sunlight. My airspeed is almost sixty miles per hour. That’s how fast we’re plummeting toward the ground. It feels faster. The minutes pass. I check the altimeter: 4,000 feet and then 3,000. The rush is incredible—and almost more than I can take. I watch our shadow on the ground, but then I’m distracted by the shadow of another plane, another day, the same descent. One thousand feet.

The geography is becoming more distinct. There is a river, yellow trees on its banks, and green shrubs growing sparsely around the fields. The mountains are getting bigger on the horizon. Their shadows are starting to cover up our shadow as we fly closer—towards the A-shaped landing strip. Half a mile maybe. I can see a bare spot over the slight ridge at the edge of an empty field just below me. There used to be farm equipment there. It’s gone now, but I can still see it, the gleaming metal mixing with a flash of white and purple. The only color left down there now is brown. I have about 500 feet of altitude. It might not be enough. There’s a cotton gin and a highway between the runway and this field. If we don’t have enough altitude, we won’t make it. I know I could land in this field, but I don’t seriously consider it. Guy doesn’t even move next to me. He’s gone rigid and I can hear his rapid breathing through the intercom. We’re over the highway now. One hundred feet. Eighty. Sixty. This plane really does fly like a rock. We just miss the cotton gin. I didn’t realize the ridges on the roof were so rough and wide. They look smooth when you’re looking up at them from the ground.

Our altitude is almost gone. We’re going so fast I can barely control the wing. It’s tipping from side to side. The wind isn’t helping. I pull up a little to slow us down and level out. I’m trying to keep the rudder steady as I crab the plane into the crosswind. I pull up a little more as the shrubs and spindly mesquite trees in front of the runway reach towards us. I feel a slight tug at my left wing where a branch has caught us, but our speed pulls us free the next instant. I coast over the rest—barely—and pull back on the stick just a little. The back wheels hit with a shudder and a low bounce before making good contact; I drop the nose. The front wheel touches down, and I pull hard on the hand brake. We skid on the dry, caked dirt for fifty feet before the plane stops at a slight angle.

For a moment both Guy and I just sit there. We’re not moving. With my helmet on, the only thing I can hear is a dull buzzing sound. I push the tinted face mask up. The sun is shining. The brightness hurts my eyes. The plane is solid beneath me, but it doesn’t feel good. I fumble with the seatbelt buckle and it snaps open. I push forward, ducking my head under the wing and clambering around the guide wires as I climb out of the plane. My legs are shaking, but somehow I run all the way back to the hangar, undoing my helmet with numb fingers.

By the time I reach it, I’m out of breath. I stop to get some air back into my lungs and then walk inside. I let the helmet slide from my fingers by the strap until it drops, hitting the floor. The soft whirring sound echoes in the hangar as the helmet spins for a moment, rocking back and forth as it comes to a stop.

Going from the bright outdoors to the dimly lit building steals my sight for a moment. The hangar starts to come into focus, but everything is still covered in a hazy film. The marked-out spaces for planes blur together. The sweat is running down my face, mingling with my tears. I didn’t realize I was crying. I wrap my arms around myself, trying to stop the shaking feeling, and I feel nothing. I’m not really shaking outside—just inside.

I close my eyes and breathe, then open them again. It’s so strange, but I can almost feel my dad there, almost see him, a middle-aged man with graying dark hair, standing there in the hangar, waiting for me to finish my lesson with Guy so that we can go up in his plane. He has a helmet with a tinted face-shield to match mine under one arm, and he wears a leather flight jacket. He’s standing next to an ultralight with a bright purple and white wing—just like always.

A loud bark from behind startles me, and I turn around. The light helps me focus better. Jinny, Guy’s grass-eating dog, barks at me as she paces, her right hind leg twitching on every other step. Nervous dog. I can see Guy coming towards me. I turn around again and wipe my face with my sleeve. The image of my dad is gone. A concrete space stares back at me—empty—as it has been for the last four months and three days. But I still feel him. I wonder what he was feeling, just at that last moment—when he suddenly knew he wouldn’t make it. I can’t bear to think of that, so I think of my mom at home, scrubbing the baseboards with a frayed toothbrush, trying to stay calm. I wish she wouldn’t do that. She shouldn’t have to do that.

I hear Guy come into the hangar, his boots clicking methodically, slowly on the concrete. Then the sound stops. “Danni…. Danni, are you all right?” His voice is quiet, concerned. Apparently the plane is fine.

I turn back to stare at Jinny, who has ceased barking but keeps jolting around the entrance to the hangar, every now and then stopping to munch on a bush. The herbivore seems more disturbed than Guy. It always amazes me how calm he is once he’s back on the ground.

“Danni—” Guy starts.

I break in so that he won’t say it. “I’m all right, Guy.” And I am. I will be. Guy taps the toe of one boot on an old blue paint drip on the floor. Then he walks past me to the desk in the corner. I watch him as he puts on his hat, adjusts the brim, and returns. He walks to the opening and stops by my side, reaching out a hand to rest it on my shoulder, but he doesn’t look at me.

I stare at the hangar, taking in the familiar details—the high fluorescent lights above, the corrugated sheet metal on the walls, and the planes all in their numbered spaces, each with one wing tipped down. Even with the lights, the planes cast shadows over so much that the room still seems dark. I turn around to look outside, and Guy lets his hand slip off my shoulder. I can see the shadow of another plane as it passes the hangar, coming in for a landing. I watch it till it enters the U-pattern. Then it disappears in the shadow of the hangar, but I can hear its engine, low and rumbling, so I know it’s still there.

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