Flying

As great a race as the Heck of the North was, even more great and memorable was getting to the race. Being a wholly unworthy but lucky son of a gun, I had the chance to fly – like, in an airplane! – up to the race, thanks to my friend Michael, whom I met a few years ago through the Northfield cycling scene.

In addition, see, to being a great gravel rider, a fatbiker, and an IT entrepreneur (and the parent of a kid the same age as my oldest), Michael is a private pilot. I’ve enjoyed learning from him about this avocation: his desire and efforts to learn to fly, his membership in a flying club based at an airfield near Northfield, his adventures flying to places near (the big Oshkosh air show) and far (the Black Hills in South Dakota).

We’d chatted casually a few times about going up together sometime, but never actually made time for it – until Michael discovered, last week, that the forecast for Heck weekend included perfect flying weather. I was more than game for flying to the race – what a great story, right? – so we made the requisite arrangements, planning to head up on Friday afternoon from tiny little Airlake Airport in Lakeville (a.k.a. KLVN, a half hour or less from Northfield) to big ol’ Duluth International (a.k.a. KDLH).

Interested though I was to go up in a little propeller plane, I was surprised to find myself pretty nervous about the flight. Not because I doubted that Michael was a perfectly capable pilot, but because, you know, scary news stories like this one or major tragedies like this one. My unconscious even served up a vivid nightmare about being in an airplane crash, just to make sure I was cognizant of my unfounded terror reasonable concern.

Friday morning, I literally and figuratively gritted my teeth and said to myself, “Self, nothing bad is going happen. Face your fear. The flights will be fine.” And not only was that very much the case, but both of the flights – Friday afternoon up to Duluth, Sunday morning back home – were marvelous, astounding, indelible experiences.

Michael selected his club’s Piper Archer as the best plane for our trip: roomy enough for our bikes, bags, and selves, and more than capable of the 90-minute flights between KLVN and KDLH.

N8414N
N8414N

Michael did a great job with the pre-flight prep, from doing the mandatory checklists and offering basic facts about the airplane to briefing me on in-air etiquette and answering my questions about being aloft in “Archer 8414 November,” which looked amazingly (and a little disturbingly) like a station wagon. Getting set to go dampened my lingering worries, and participating in some of the pre-flight activities was engaging: turns out, one person can roll the plane out of the hangar – just give it a yank and it follows you like a dog!

Once packed into Archer 8414 November’s front seats, I put on headphones/microphone that muffled the rather incredible engine noise, let me communicate with Michael in the air, and looked, frankly, a little bit cool. I wished I had a long red scarf like Snoopy.

The Incompetent and Nervous First Officer
The Incompetent and Nervous First Officer

We taxied over to the runway, did a few final checks of the airplane’s systems, and then started down the tarmac. I expected the abrupt upward sensation of a jetliner on liftoff, but nope: Archer 814 was just suddenly six, then sixty, then 600 feet off the ground, soaring over Lakeville and points east. I was literally slack jawed – and we weren’t even really flying yet.

Lifting Off at Airlake
Lifting Off at Airlake
Tiny Lakeville Houses
Tiny Lakeville Houses

We headed mostly east first, then turned north and followed the beautiful blue St. Croix River for a ways.

The St. Croix River
The St. Croix River

An easterly wind meant that we could not just head straight north to Duluth, but had to fly over a beautiful swath of western Wisconsin, which was first a patchwork of fields and small cities.

New Richmond, Wisconsin
New Richmond, Wisconsin

About halfway into the flight, though, the farms and towns disappeared and the forests and bogs asserted themselves. Gorgeous.

Wisconsin Forests
Wisconsin Forests

Michael saw Duluth in the distance far before I did, but when I finally did pick out the white-gray smudge of civilization against the green-brown of hills and, behind, the deep blue of the lake, I enjoyed watching the Zenith City approach. Going far slower and far lower than a jet heightened my impression that I was immobile and the ground was moving under me – an exhilarating and fascinating sensation.

Approaching the Twin Ports
Approaching the Twin Ports

A swing to the west brought us around to the runway at Duluth, where Michael touched down without any problem.

Landing at Duluth
Landing at Duluth

On the ground at KDLH, I was amazed to learn of the existence of a whole industry that serves private pilots: guiding their planes to their parking spots, tying the planes down, fueling the planes up, handling baggage (even our bikes – cargo I don’t think our guy had ever seen come out of a tiny little plane), even driving us over to the car-rental counter… This is somewhat how the 1% lives, I suspect.

An hour later, we had finished the first part of our trip with a quick drive up Highway 61 to Two Harbors. I would be lying if I said that I was then anticipating the race on Saturday more than the return flight on Sunday.

Sunday morning, we got our heavy legs to KDLH relatively early. In getting us to the terminal where Archer 8414 November had been waiting, I got to drive our rental car on the tarmac – yet another strange feeling, and impossible to separate from about a hundred action-movie scenes. Reality was far quieter: Michael took care of the pre-flight checks while I loaded the plane and returned the car.

The Captain Does the Pre-Flight Checks
The Captain Does the Pre-Flight Checks
How to Fly with Bikes
How to Fly with Bikes

As on Friday, takeoff was seemingly effortless, but Michael had the brilliant idea of flying further east, over Duluth and above the lake, before turning south toward home. The views were incredible. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on the shores of Lake Superior, and some dozens of hours on the water, but I don’t think I’d ever been above the Big Lake. It was worth the wait – especially with the bonus of seeing Duluth from the air.

The Big Lake, Just East of the Twin Ports
The Big Lake, Just East of the Twin Ports
Duluth Harbor from 3,000 Feet
Duluth Harbor from 3,000 Feet

Heading back south, we retraced some of Friday’s flight path, flying over the St. Louis River south of Duluth, the massive forests and bogs on both sides of the state line, and finally the St. Croix again.

The St. Louis River, Meandering Toward Us
The St. Louis River, Meandering Toward Us
More Wisconsin Forests
More Wisconsin Forests
Northern Wisconsin Boglands
Northern Wisconsin Boglands
The St. Croix: Minnesota to the Right, Wisconsin to the Left
The St. Croix: Minnesota to the Right, Wisconsin to the Left

At one point somewhere over Wisconsin, Michael let me operate Archer 8414 November’s controls, which I did very, very, very gingerly. Again: astounding. Turn the yoke to the right, and the plane turns right! To the left, it goes left. Pull back on the yoke and the goddamn plane goes up. Push the yoke in, and ohmygod there’s the ground in front of us! I didn’t have the stomach to do much more of this “flying” and happily let Michael take the plane back.

Puffy Clouds
Puffy Clouds

As we approached home, Michael asked for permission to fly through the restricted “Class Bravo” airspace over Minneapolis. Since it was a quiet Sunday morning in the sky, ground control granted this request, and we flew right over Minneapolis, just to the east of downtown – you know, for the views. Which were amazing.

Minneapolis!
Minneapolis!

Just a few minutes later, we were back over Airlake, and then back on the ground, and then back in the car, headed home. I think I’m still a little high from the incredible experiences of those flights – and very grateful to have a generous and skilled friend like Michael. Should I even mention that I can’t wait for next time?

Best of May 2010

Best reportage
James Fallows, “Living With a Computer,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1982
This article from 28 years ago was meant as a kind of primer on acquiring – assembling, really – a personal computer avant la lettre, but serves now as an astonishing window into what we know now to have been the earliest dawn of the Internet revolution. Fallows is as amazingly right about many things as he is understandably wrong about some other things.

Best video
Sean Stiegemeier, “Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010”

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull – May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Best non-fiction essay
“A Mind in the Water: The dolphin as our beast of burden,” by D. Graham Burnett

Tursiops truncatus—a slate-gray, slick-skinned net thief, which coastal fishermen of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic sometimes called the “herring hog” in disgust—would, by the 1970s, leap in the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius, enjoying an improbable secular canonization as the superintelligent, ultrapeaceful, erotically uninhibited totem of the counterculture. And to this day, for many, the bottlenose—mainstay of aquatic ecotourism, beloved water-park performer, smiling incarnation of soulful holism—represents a cetacean version of our better selves.

Best Music
Ametsub, “The Nothings of the North” – hypnotic electronic music that sounds like what would happen if Brad Mehldau got ahold of stray tracks from Radiohead’s Kid A sessions

Ametsub – Repeatedly from lucio arese on Vimeo.

Best of April 2010

Best blog post: Mary Walters, “In Praise of Revision, or the Four Fails of Trying to Write the Last Draft First” – an excellent essay which expands on the hoary but oh-so-true idea that “writing is revision.” That the piece is superbly written shows, as much as a redlined printout might, that is has been superbly revised.

Best (worst) news story: Eileen Biernat, “Mary Stauffer stalked by former math student Ming Shiue” (City Pages [Minneapolis]) – the astounding true-crime story of a 1980 kidnapping case in the Twin Cities, now back in the news because the kidnapper – who was also a murderer and rapist – is up for parole.

Best rock song: Vampire Weekend, “Horchata”

Best jazz: Brad Mehldau, Highway Rider, including great stuff like “Don’t Be Sad”

Best photo: the ash plume from that volcano in Iceland

Volcano Plume
Volcano Plume

Best TV: The Wire

Best of March 2010

1. Things I Read
A. Online Article
“Blogging, Now and Then” by Robert Darnton, in the New York Review of BooksNYRBlog

How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet…

Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.

To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names.

B. Book
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell, a powerbroker in Henry VIII’s England. This novel has it all: an incredible (and historically-grounded, if not “true”) plot, fascinating characters, ridiculously good writing at every level from the sentence to the chapter, and the an ending that both closed the book and didn’t. Incredible stuff.

2. Things I Watched
A. Movie
The September Issue, the 2009 documentary about the production of Vogue‘s mammoth and influential September issue. I expected to like it okay, but I found it engrossing. Watching the magazine’s staff put together the magazine was interesting enough, but the politics at Vogue specifically and in fashion generally were gripping. Anna Wintour makes Thomas Cromwell look like a doofus.

B. Presentation
Designer Kacie Kinzer talking about her fascinating “Tweenbot” project, in which humans help a dumb but cute little robot navigate a New York City park. The idea is simple, but her execution of it and her exposition of it are brilliant.

C. Sports Video
The first 15 seconds are literally jaw-dropping. (We could have ski flying right here in the Upper Midwest, if Copper Peak near Ironwood, Michigan, were refurbished.)

3. Things I Saw
A. Stupidest Picture
“No Excetions,” in the “Teabonics” photoset on Flickr, a collection of misspelling or just dumb signs from Tea Party rallies.

No Excetions
No Excetions

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/pargon/ / CC BY 2.0)

B. Sports Picture
From Boston.com‘s “Big Picture” set on the 2010 Winter Paralympics:
Haitao Du #5 of China competes in the men’s standing 20km free cross-country skiing race during Day 4 of the Winter Paralympics on March 15, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)”

Haitao Du #5 of China (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
Haitao Du #5 of China (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)

Best of February 2010

In five (or six) units…

1. Articles I Read:

A. Popular
“God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever” (Joseph Berger, New York Times, February 18, 2010)

When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.

B. Geek
“Ski Switching and Waxing in the 30km Classic” (Topher Sabot, Fasterskier.com, February 28th, 2010)
A great, if technical examination of an interesting new twist to cross-country ski racing: allowing athletes to change skis in the middle of certain long races so as to find a faster or otherwise better pair. Ski switching builds in new tactical element, since athletes have to carefully choose when to take the 10 to 20 seconds needed to change, as well as an element of luck, since they (and their technicians) might choose the wrong skis, and thus ruin a good race.

2. Book I Started
At a friend’s recommendation, I started Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell, a power behind the throne of Henry VIII. I’m going to dole this book out to myself in very, very small doses, because – as signified by winning the Man Booker prize last year – this is a fantastic work of art. The writing is superb, but even more impressive than the prose style is the intellectual power deployed by Mantel in making someone like Cromwell both comprehensible and admirable. (Here’s a laudatory review of the book, which mentions a sequel.)

3. Photo I Saw
Shot by Al Bello and seen in the “Big Picture” photo series of the Boston Globe. (The first and second “Big Pictures” from the Olympic Games are both incredible.)

Vancouver Ski Jumper (Al Bello/Getty Images)
Vancouver Ski Jumper (Al Bello/Getty Images)

4. Video I Watched:
“Demong sprints away” | NBC Olympics – the “raw feed” of Billy Demong attacking from the front of the last nordic combined race, dropping Bernhard Gruber of Austria and Johnny Spillane (USA), and surging to America’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in a nordic discipline.

5. Music I Enjoyed
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Shirley Bassey (composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein). Ignore the goofball sentimentalism of the commercial and enjoy the goofball sentimentalism of the song.

Best of January 2010

The best five things in January:

1. Article I read: John Ed Bradley, “Hang ’em High,” Sports Illustrated (December 21, 2009)

Statistics suggest that this is the golden age of NFL punting. During the first 12 weeks of the season, the average punt went 44.3 yards, a half yard farther than the record set last year. Punters were on pace to drop 868 balls inside their opponents’ 20-yard lines, 103 more than the league mark set in 2007. And the Raiders’ Shane Lechler was on course to equal or break the season record of 51.40 yards per punt set 69 years ago by Sammy Baugh. Yet among fans, the punter may be the least appreciated man in the game. Even when he does his job well, placing the ball as close as possible to the opponent’s goal line, he exits the field to tepid applause. More often than not, when he faces scrutiny, it is unwelcome, coming after a fumbled snap or a badly kicked ball that lands out-of-bounds just yards past the line of scrimmage…

But punters’ recent successes, rather than their disappointments, should be examined before somebody at a year-end banquet hands a punter a trophy engraved with MOST VALUABLE PLAYER. Punters (yes, punters!) have become what coaches call difference makers, and the difference they’re making has observers of the game wondering if the punter is a defensive weapon every bit the equal of a shutdown cover corner or a run-stuffing middle linebacker.

2. Book I finished: Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Highsmith, "Ripley Under Ground"
Highsmith, "Ripley Under Ground"

3. Photo I saw, shot by Doug Bratland at Carleton, January 19, 2010

Arb Trees (by Doug Bratlander)
Arb Trees (by Doug Bratlander)

4. Video I saw:

5. Music I enjoyed (part of an inspired three-song shuffle that started with Uncle Tupelo, “Before I Break” and continued with Local H, “High-Fiving MF”)