1999
They loaded him at first light, while the ramp was still wet.
I did the weight and balance like it was freight, because that was the only way I could do it at all. The transfer case rode forward of the wing. Three hundred and ten pounds, him and the case together. I wrote the number on the manifest, ran the calculation, and found the center of gravity inside the envelope, near the forward edge, where it should be. The math didn’t care whose body was making the airplane heavy. That was the mercy of the math. I leaned on it.
Eric Akana had taught me to fly these islands. He’d gone down on the south flank four days before, on the cliff above the old trail, in weather, doing what he always told his students never to do: trusting a hole in the clouds. The kūpuna brought him down to the harbor. His daughter was on the mainland and too young to come, and somebody had to carry him to Honolulu to be made ready. On this island, that somebody was me. He’d signed my logbook in 1995, the year I started flying these islands. I’d flown for him four years when he died. You do not let a stranger carry your teacher.
I pulled the chocks myself. Ran the checklist out loud to the empty right seat, because he’d drilled that into me too: say it, don’t think it, the airplane doesn’t read minds. Fuel, both. Trim set. Flaps, ten. Controls free and correct. I taxied to the end and held the brakes and ran the engine up against them. The gauges came alive green. The airplane wanted to go.
The channel was wrong from the first minute, and I didn’t have the room in me to wonder why.
It is the roughest water in the chain. Wind funnels between the islands and stacks the air into low standing waves you can’t see, only feel: a beating you fly through with both hands and a loose stomach. Every pilot who works this route expects to be worked back. I trimmed for the climb and braced for it. It never came. The rate-of-climb needle sat on five hundred feet a minute like it was painted there. Nothing asked anything of my hands. I crossed the shoreline and went out over the deep water, and the air closed around the airplane and went still: not calm, still, and a held breath is different from an empty room.
Then the bird came up off the right wingtip and flew with me.
An ʻiwa. Great frigatebird, black, the long forked tail, the wings that don’t beat so much as lean on the sky. They ride the weather in close to land and read it better than my instruments do. When they go high and inland, you put your boat away. This one was forty miles from land, out over water too deep to fish, holding station off my wing at four thousand feet like it had been assigned the slot. I leveled at altitude. The bird leveled. I came back on the power for cruise and it stayed where it had been, no closer, no farther, bird and wingtip fixed against the horizon.
I flew the whole channel like that. Forty minutes. Glass under me, a bird that should not have been there off my wing, and a dead man forward of the spar. I cried the way you cry when both your hands are full and you can’t wipe your face. I let the tears run and kept the wings level. I told myself it was a tailwind that didn’t exist and a bird that had lost its way. I was thirty-one years old and had buried no one but my grandmother, and the sky was being gentle with me, and I took it. A kindness like that, you don’t interrogate.
Diamond Head came up out of the haze and the bird was gone. I didn’t see it leave. It had been off my wing across all that water, and then there was only the empty blue where it had been. The channel was behind me. Ahead, the air over Oahu had its chop back, the small honest bumps of a working sky. I called the tower, shot the approach, and set him down soft. The men from the mortuary were waiting with the cart. I shook their hands and signed where they pointed and handed my teacher across.
Then I sat in the airplane on the ramp at Honolulu and opened my logbook, because the leg wasn’t done until it was written, and Eric had taught me that too.
Hon. Remains transfer, E. Akana. Ch like glass. One ʻiwa off R wingtip the whole channel — 40 NM out, holding station.
I logged the bird. I did not log the rest of it: nothing in eleven hundred hours over that water had ever flown that smooth; the air had not been empty; something had been out there with me and the box, level and patient, keeping the worst of the world off my wing. There was no column on the page for that. No column for the knowledge that I had not flown him to Honolulu alone.
It would be twenty-eight years before I understood that I hadn’t.
I closed the logbook. Refueled, and flew home into the chop, both hands on it, the way you’re supposed to.
I did not think about the bird again for a very long time.
I woke at four as I’d woken at four for thirty years, except that lately I woke already knowing the weather.
The window was still black, and the trades were doing what the trades do at four in the morning on the south side: air so slight it barely moved the dark. The weather sat in me like my own resting pulse: high pressure heavy out past the channel, a soft ridge of it, a morning that would burn clear by nine and stack fair-weather cumulus over the spine of the island by noon. I had it before I was fully awake. I’d checked it against the forecast for three weeks now, and for three weeks whatever had settled in my chest had been right and the forecast had been a step behind.
I lacked a word for it. They’d tried to give me one on Lani’s porch, the lot of them, and I’d sat there with my hands around a cup of tea I left cooling and let the words go past me like traffic.
I got up. Made the coffee. Filled the thermos.
It was Gil’s thermos: green, dented, the gasket gone hard, old enough to have been thrown out the year he died and as untouchable as my own hand. Eight years he’d been gone. The grief had worn down to something I could carry in a side pocket, which is where the thermos rode. In the left side pocket of the cockpit, every run, every day, so that I drank my coffee at altitude out of the same steel my husband had drunk his off the back of the harbor boats. The marriage had been a good one and an ordinary one. I have only gratitude for it. I got the steady kind of love, and then I got the quiet.
The house sat a quarter mile off the end of the strip, close enough that I’d stopped hearing the airplanes years ago. There was a footlocker in the corner of the back room. It had been my grandmother’s. It held her logbooks, every leg she ever flew for Hawaiian and after. Since 1987, I’d left it closed. That morning, I left it closed again.
On the kitchen table, next to the coffee, was a different book. Spiral-bound, the cheap kind from the cooperative in town, and on the cover in my own hand it said WX. Weather. I’d started it six weeks ago, the first morning the air broke its own rules, and I’d been writing in it since, dates and times and what the sky had done, in the flat shorthand I’d use for a squawk on the airframe. April 2. Fog off the strip lifted 0640, my ETA, ceiling came up 800 ft in under four minutes, front absent, wind steady. April 4. Mares’ tails over the channel held all afternoon, high system absent. A maintenance log for weather I could feel only by its errors.
I put the WX book in my flight bag. Habit had started before reason. I’d been doing that for a week too.
By the time the coffee had gone into the thermos and the kitchen light was off behind me, the last of the dark had thinned over the strip. The Caravan sat where I’d left her, nose into the trades. I walked out to her with the thermos under my arm and the bag on my shoulder, and I did the only liturgy I’ve ever kept.
Preflight is the same every time. You keep every step because you’ve done it ten thousand times. You do it because you have. I started at the cabin door and worked the airframe as Eric taught me and I taught the ones who came after, clockwise around the airplane so your body remembers the order while your head is somewhere else. Pitot cover off. Static ports clear. I ran my hand down the leading edge of the wing and felt for the dents you miss in bad light, the hangar rash, the bird strike you took and learned about later. Fuel sumps, both, into the clear cup. Water sits heavier than jet fuel and shows as a bead at the bottom, and you check because the skipped morning is the morning it’s there. Tires. Brakes. The prop, each blade, my thumb along the edge for nicks. The tail. The control surfaces, free and correct, the cables doing what cables are supposed to do.
A walkaround is the part of my life I trust most. Marriage you take on faith. Children stayed outside my life. But an airplane will tell you the truth about itself every morning, if you put your hands on it in the cold and ask.
The trades crossed the strip and moved the loose hem of my shirt and went on. I finished at the cabin door where I’d started and signed the inspection into muscle instead of paper. The walkaround goes in you.
Davey Kaiwi’s pickup came down the access road while I was loading. He’d flown for me before he flew for the company, my best student in twenty years of teaching them, and he lifted a hand off the wheel and I lifted one back. That was the conversation, which is how I like them. He was hauling for the new outfit now. Everybody had to haul for somebody. I wished him hours and clean landings. The job market was the job market, and a young pilot takes the hours where they are.
I had the mail, two cases of clinic supplies for Pāhaku, and one passenger: old Mr. Souza, going up to the clinic to have his eyes looked at, who’d flown with me so many times he buckled himself in and put his hat over his face before I had the door latched. I did the weight and balance. I always do the weight and balance. Souza weighs what a sparrow weighs now and I ran his number anyway, because the day you guess is the day you’re wrong, and because my grandmother ran every number in the books in that footlocker and the running of numbers is the one thing on this earth I know came down to me through the blood.
I’ve carried Souza a couple hundred times. The books have his name down every leg, thirty years of it: up to the clinic and back, over to Honolulu the year his wife was dying and back alone, across to his brother’s funeral on the next island and home again the same night.
That’s flying these islands, underneath the mail and the propane and the cargo manifests. I carry people to the places where the island has run out of fixes. Babies out to the hospital with the good incubators. Old men to the eye doctor. The hurt and the laboring and the scared, and a few times, you remember those, the dead. I’ve flown half this island somewhere that mattered at least once, and the other half knows it, and that makes an intimacy everybody carries quietly: I’m the woman who had your frightened family in the back of her airplane on the worst morning of your life and got you there.
I knew Souza’s eyes were going before his doctor did, because I’d watched him stop being able to find my airplane on the ramp. You learn people, carrying them. In thirty-four years of being the one who carries, I had learned the first thing about being carried myself only lately.
We went off the south strip into a clean sky and turned up the coast, and the island ran through its morning: the wet windward side green to the waterline, the dry leeward flank going gold already, and the channel out past the western point lying there the color of a gun. Souza slept. The trades held us on the nose and I let the airplane climb at its own pace and watched the spine of the island for the cloud that would come later.
Pāhaku has a strip you’d call generous if you were being kind. It runs uphill toward the cliff and you land into the rise and take off downhill toward the water and you get one opinion about it once you’ve committed.
I flew the approach I’ve flown a thousand times, came over the macadamia trees, put her down on the numbers and let the upslope do the braking, and taxied up to the shed where the clinic boy was waiting with the cart.
Souza woke up like old men do, all at once and offended about it. The supplies came off. The mail came off. A woman I half-knew loaded two empty propane tanks for the run back and pressed a folded twenty into my shirt pocket that I’d give back to her sister at church, because that’s how the economy of this works. Then I was empty and turned around and pointed downhill at the water, alone.
That was when it happened. It came only when I was alone.
I lifted off the downhill numbers and the water came up to meet me and I made my turn south for home, and over the channel, off my right side, a single tower of cumulus stood up out of the haze.
The sky had built it out of stable air. The system was high and dry, the lift absent, and a fair-weather cloud has a lifespan you can read off a watch. It builds, it ripens, it falls apart. Five minutes, ten, and the same air that made it tears it to rags, a parcel of warm air that has used itself up.
This one held.
It built to a clean white shoulder and then it held. As I came abeam of it, it stayed upwind of where any channel cloud belonged, steady against the drift that had worked that water since the island came up out of the sea. It sat. I had a quartering wind on the tail that should have pushed it away from me at fifteen knots, and it stayed off my wing, the white of it and the gun-metal water and the horizon all stacked and still. I flew four miles down the channel with it pacing me and the air around the airplane gone smooth as poured glass.
I knew that smoothness. I’d felt it once before, twenty-eight years ago, on a longer flight, carrying something painful I kept folded away inside. And here it was again off my right wing in the ordinary morning, holding station, keeping the channel flat beyond anything a chart would give.
I flew the airplane, because that is what I know to do with a feeling too big to hold, and I kept the cloud in the corner of my eye, as you’d watch weather that has started watching you back. Around the western point, it let me go. The wind got the cloud like it’s supposed to, and it sheared off and frayed and was gone, and the channel chopped up into its honest self under me. My hands had something to do again.
I crossed the point and called my position into empty air, and brought her home down the south strip and rolled out to the hangar with my heart running high at idle power.
I sat in the airplane a while after I shut down.
Then I got the logbook out of the bag. My logbook, rather than the spiral one. The real one, the green book the FAA cares about, where for thirty-four years I have written the truth about where I have been. Date. Aircraft. Route. Times, out and off and on and in. And then the last column, the narrow one, the one they call remarks, where most pilots leave their whole lives blank.
I’d been writing in mine for six weeks.
Pāhaku and ret. Souza + freight up, empty down. CAVU. One cu. on the channel held station 4 mi against a 15 kt tailwind, air dead smooth underneath. Cloud behavior outside limits.
I looked at it. Then I added one line under it, smaller, like you’d note a discrepancy that could wait until morning.
Felt like 1999.
I closed the book before I could think any more about it, and put it in the bag, and got the thermos, and walked the quarter mile home in a wind emptied down to weather. Only wind. Still the loneliest air I’d flown through all day.
Three weeks since the porch. Six weeks since the sky started keeping me company. Fifty-eight years old, the last of a line that had gone silent at my grandmother and stayed silent through my mother, and I went up the steps to a dark house carrying two facts I would keep to myself.
The first was that I had been right.
The second was that whatever was out there over the channel had recognized me.
It had been waiting.
Patient as weather. Patient as something that had done this before.