CHAPTER 4: FLIGHT PLAN

“…the ocean beyond, covered with a fog near its surface, white, and tossed by the wind into huge billows.”

Brewer, William H., and Francis Peloubet. Farquhar. Up and down California in 1860-1864: the Journal of William H. Brewer, Professor of Agriculture in the Sheffield Scientific School from 1864 to 1903. 4th editions, University of California Press, 2003, p.83

…an aviation term from the 1930s that means going into the sky without much in the way of a plan or helpful instruments, to rely on intuition, to hope for luck.

“Corrigan Flies By The Seat Of His Pants,” The Edwardsville Intelligencer, 19 July 1938

If a windstorm rose in the night, an untethered plane could rise up and fly away.

Robert Atlee, a pilot and the author’s father, is the source for this. Here’s a video of this happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPOtDPHjW-Y

The writer Ellen Meloy once called the Sierra Nevada “the land’s attempt at flight.”

Meloy, Ellen. Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild. Vintage Books, 2006, 274.

“…where meteors shoot, clouds form, / Lightnings are loosened, / Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm.”

“A Grammarian’s Funeral,” poem by Robert Browning, 1855

The Wave rises forty thousand feet above the valley floor.

Powell, D.R., and Klieforth, H. E., edited by Hall, C. A. Jr. Natural History of the White-Inyo Range: Eastern California, Chapter 1, “Weather and Climate,” University of California Press, 1991, p.9

…an F3 tornado turned on its side.

The winds Larry Edgar encountered in the Wave moved at 183mph. Source: Whelan, Robert F. Exploring the Monster: Mountain Lee Waves: the Aerial Elevator. Wind Canyon Books, 2007

This constitutes an F-3 tornado, according to the National Oceanographic Association’s Fujita scale: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/f-scale.html

Through updraft and downdraft, the Wave snaps the wings off planes, shreds cabins, and drops pilots through miles of open air.

Powell, D.R., and Klieforth, H. E., edited by Hall, C. A. Jr. Natural History of the White-Inyo Range: Eastern California, Chapter 1, “Weather and Climate,” University of California Press, 1991

Also:

Whelan, Robert F. Exploring the Monster: Mountain Lee Waves: the Aerial Elevator. Wind Canyon Books, 2007

Pilots who know what they’re dealing with catch its updrafts like hawks and set altitude records.

Whelan, Robert F. Exploring the Monster: Mountain Lee Waves: the Aerial Elevator. Wind Canyon Books, 2007, p.22

Over Owens Valley, small planes called gliders—engineless, their cabins often without pressure control…

ibid.

…climb ten thousand feet above the cruising altitude of passenger jets…

Commercial passenger jets cruise at about 35,000 feet. Edgar, in 1952, without pressure control, set an altitude record in a glider of 44,255 feet. Source: ibid.

At such elevations the fluid inside veins bubbles, and skin crawls with the ghost-legs of a million insects.

Altitude-Induced Decompression Sickness, Federal Aviation Administration brochure, https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media/DCS.pdf

…outside air temperature reaches seventy below…

Whelan, Robert F. Exploring the Monster: Mountain Lee Waves: the Aerial Elevator. Wind Canyon Books, 2007, p.48

…tears freeze at the corners of the eyes.

Weikel, Dan. “Sky Jocks of the Sierra: Riding the Mountain Wave, Glider Pilots Push the Limits of Powerless Flight in the Treacherous Blue Yonder,” Los Angeles Times, 30 Aug. 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-08-30/magazine/tm-8241_1_mountain-wave/5

Frostbite blanches toes.

Whelan, Robert F. Exploring the Monster: Mountain Lee Waves: the Aerial Elevator. Wind Canyon Books, 2007, p.22

If an oxygen system malfunctions at altitude, a pilot loses consciousness in fifteen seconds.

…setting a world record for altitude and landing safely.

Whelan, Robert F. Exploring the Monster: Mountain Lee Waves: the Aerial Elevator. Wind Canyon Books, 2007, p.22

…the Wave gusting at 185 miles per hour…

ibid., p.168-169

…watched the scraps of his glider swirl in the sky.

ibid., p.137-138

Larry Edgar gave his account of his glider crash for Soaring magazine shortly after the event, reproduced in Exploring the Monster.

…the oldest granite in the Sierra.

Barth, A.p. “Birth of the Sierra Nevada Magmatic Arc: Early Mesozoic Plutonism and Volcanism in the East-Central Sierra Nevada of California.” Geosphere, vol. 7, no. 4, 1 Aug. 2011, p. 877., doi:10.1130/ges00661.1.

…a great fire in Montana in 1949 that killed thirteen firefighters.

Maclean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Maclean’s book reproduces Forest Service materials from the time of the fire.

“…for whenever a soul going south sees the soul stick, it knows that it will come back.”

Steward, Julian H. “Autobiography of Two Owens Valley Paiutes.” University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnography , vol. 33, no. 5, 3 Feb. 1934, pp. 423–438., https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/anthpubs/ucb/text/ucp033-006.pdf

“It’s like God holding you up in His hands.”

“…the visible manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void.”

Austin, Mary Hunter. The Land of Little Rain. Modern Library, 2003, p.95

“I will have no other gods before me.”

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: an Unnatural History of Familiy and Place. Vintage, 2001, p. 148

“I kneel to the desert God.”

Interview of Richard Rodriguez by Julie Polter, “‘I kneel to the desert god': faith's roots in a dry land.” Sojourners Magazine, vol. 39, no. 7, July 2010, p. 36, https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2010/extended-interview-richard-rodriguez

“I talk to my power…I talk to the night.”

“…is the best place to hear the voice of the whirlwind.”

Solnit, Rebecca. Savage Dreams: a Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West. University of California Press, 1999, p. 62

…the mystic Meister Eckhart wrote of the “still desert…”

Borchert, Bruno. Mysticism: Its History and Challenge. Weiser, 1994, p.225-226

“…where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself.”

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Kessinger Publishing, 2004, p.376

Eckhart christened his god “Nameless Nothing…”

Borchert, Bruno. Mysticism: Its History and Challenge. Weiser, 1994, p.225-226

“And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from all things.”

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Kessinger Publishing, 2004, p.376

“Whispering silence; teeming desert.”

ibid. p. 379

He feared the absence of meaning, of mystery and love.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Vintage, 1974

The chapter referenced here is “The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness”

“fishing for God.”

Buechner, Frederick. The Season’s Difference. Knopf, 1952

…the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in 1757.

Burke, Edmund, On the Sublime and Beautiful, originally published in 1757

…how a decrease in pressure over curved wings allows a plane to rise.

Babinsky, Holger. “How Wings Really Work.” University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 25 Jan. 2012, http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-wings-really-work

“As surely as any pullet in the yard, I was a target, and I had better respect what had me in its sights.”

Stegner, Wallace Earle, and Tom H. Watkins. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. Modern Library, 2002, p.10

At the geothermal plant, magma heats vapor that spins turbines…

“Ormat's Mammoth Geothermal Complex.” Ormat Technologies, http://www.mammothpacific.com/node/2

An electric arc is five times hotter than the surface of the sun…

“I Read That the Sun's Surface Temperature Is about 6,000 Degrees Celsius but That the Corona--the Sun's Atmosphere--Is Much Hotter, Millions of Degrees. How Does All That Energy Get into the Corona without Heating up the Surface?” Scientific American, Scientific American, 21 Oct. 1999, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-read-that-the-suns-surf/

…one survivor of such a collision felt as if he was inside a firework.

Faulkner, Katherine. “Hot Air Balloon Crashes Into Power Lines,” Daily Mail, 26 Mar. 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2120392/Hot-air-balloon-crashes-power-lines-Northamptonshire-trapping-3-teenagers-5-hours.html

“…nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.”

Austin, Mary Hunter. The Land of Little Rain. Modern Library, 2003, p.71

…hadn’t told a soul where he was going.

Ralston, Aaron. “Trapped .” Outside , 1 Sept. 2004

Em GallagherApril 3, 2020