i'm writing a book - right here!

[AAC Cadet Leader]

i moved the post that was here to fit chronologically within the story.

[mike_baram]

Guys, this kid can write. And it reminds me of some of Peggy Noonan's stuff.

[AAC Cadet Leader]

October 29, 2007
Taking up this book writing task yet again, is putting me in a deep state of confusion, but I am determined this time to follow it through to completion. Aside from being the best mother I can be to my two children, getting this book done is the other most important task of my life and is still an unfulfilled promise I made twenty years ago.

Why am I so confused? To begin with, I don’t consider myself a writer, I find it to be a boring chore, but I do have one heck of an interesting story to tell. And re-opening the storage bins and revisiting the amount of information I have to pile through to decide what to include, is overwhelming.

I’ve been scratching my brain for the last few days, wondering if writing this secondary, interim book, before completing the original book is really a good idea or if I should just go ahead one more time and rewrite the original book so I never have to write again. I don’t see how I can make an interesting interim book, that has all fresh writings and doesn’t overlap my original writings too much. And I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to do the bigger, meatier version of the journey after spending months writing an abbreviated version, so you can see my dilemma. The task of combing through all of the material, typing and scanning, and deciding which of all of the journal entries, logbook entries, 4500 slides I took and hundreds of other photos and letter bits to include, is mind-boggling to me.

All that, while the same time, creating a new digitally formatted multi-media presentation from the one I had before my kids were born - the one that I used to haul around the country in footlockers, containing an audio system, a dozen slide carousels and a three-stack projection system.

The present tenuous circumstances of not having enough money to buy the three of us food, gasoline and pay the rent, adds the biggest hurdle to cross, while at the same time is a great driving force that spurs me on with optimism that a book and speaking tour will be our ticket out of poverty.

Presently my kids and I live in a small, rental house with no insulation, two roll around oil-filled electric radiators to heat the place, and our water supply comes in through two hoses from the neighbor’s backyard. Even though my landlady hasn’t made the necessary basic improvements to our heat and water in the seven years we’ve lived here, she just sent a letter last week, informing me that she will be raising my rent again, this time adding another $150 per month, starting in January 2008. I've got to learn how to sell more of my paintings. I already pay my landlady 90% of my annual earnings as a full-time high school substitute teacher. I guess she needs all of my wages and more. Excuse me for ranting… and don’t even get me started on the issue of…

[saved for the printed version. maybe.]

When my kids and I moved in here seven years ago, we had to get creative about storage space. We sleep on mattresses that sit atop bed foundations consisting of rectangular, plastic storage bins that hold their old toys and games, our out-of-season clothes, linens, and sewing and craft supplies. Another dozen or so of the bins contain my 1988 materials, including my maps, lists of names and addresses, letters and photos and video news tapes sent to my mother during the journey.

One bin contains my pilot logbook that I created with the help of a book bindery in Orlando, Florida, just for the journey and an incomplete typed up version of the same logbook. The logbook by itself would make a very interesting book. I started typing it into a computer spreadsheet program about five years ago, by examining my tiny cursive handwriting in the comments sections with a magnifying glass. Then my old computer died and the several experts I had look at the old square floppy discs weren't able to transfer the 2.0 programs I used to modern software, so all of that work was in vein...

But I’m going to get this done this time, one way or another!

[ONEALM]

M -

Just write kiddo. You have something of a perfectionist's procrastination running through you *and* a bit of the "who gives a hoot about this but me". But I've read you so far and I like it. It's not a good story - it's a great story. It's got a broad aviation and human appeal and it will be widely read.

If you are worried about the expansiveness of it, go small and chip at it a bit at a time. Having trouble organizing it ? It's chronological....

If working on one project for 30 years has taught me anything, it was that Aesop was right. Slow and steady... it will get done. Don't be in a hurry to reach the finish line, but don't stop moving once you start. Do a little every day - even if it is very little. Treat it like Chinese Water Torture - one drip at a time. Even the single drips drill holes in big rocks....

I know you can do this M - I know it...

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Here's just one open page of my logbook with entries from five flights I had on August 21st at an antique airshow that was going on at Evergreen Field in southern Washington.

[cfgray]

There is that story about how JK Rowling wrote in a tea or coffee shop, nursing her drink for most of a day, writing her first volume of Harry Potter, living on welfare, one or two babies in the mix.

Let your book lift you up again, Martha, use those wings to fly over the hose water pipes, the lack of insulation, the rent, the flat tires and all the rest of it.

This story is your ticket up and out.

Keep at it... not everyone who kills trees and spills ink for a living has such a great story to tell.

Best,
cfgray

[AAC Cadet Leader]

i moved the post that was here to fit chronologically after the introductory writings.

[AAC Cadet Leader]

Introduction

[My below logbook entry in the remarks column from my flight with John P. Crum in his 1946 Aeronca Champ, halfway through my journey reads:
"More fun & games before departing Brown County. Andy or Aaron putting gas into father, John's plane from a 50 gal. tank on a pick-up truck. Getting late due to my procrastination and media. We depart onward west into the haze & heat and get washed by light showers enroute. Following Des Moines River to Ottumwa, home of AAA. Saw a splash from 1 mile away made in a municipal pool off the high dive in Ottumwa, Iowa. John Crum, Psychologist..." ]





"Tell me. From the Beginning," he said.

“What kind of crazy person would attempt to do what you’re doing?” asked John P. Crum, my 82nd pilot during the 131st leg on my journey. We had just taken off in his Aeronca Champ from a grass strip called Brown County Airpark in Mt. Sterling, Illinois, and were turning west toward Ottumwa, Iowa. We'd be following the Des Moines River into the late afternoon and landing about twenty miles further at another grass strip, Antique Airfield, the home and museum of the Antique Airplane Association.

“Well, I don’t know," I replied, "it just seemed like the natural thing to do I guess, ever since I got the idea.”

After all, I knew I could do it. I had no doubt, whatsoever. I was well versed in airplanes and aeroplanes - and I knew the distinction between the two, the latter being old ones. Also, I love to travel, and had previous experience as an airplane hitchhiker a dozen years ago for one week, right after I graduated from high school.

“You know, John, you’re not the first person to question my sanity.”

He answered, “I make my living as a Psychologist and the only reason I agreed to take you on two legs of your journey was to have enough time to probe your mind. So, please. Tell me. From the beginning. I want to know all the details.

How long have you loved airplanes?...What got you started? ...What ever possessed you to fly with all these pilots? I saw your thirty second answer on the local TV news, but I want the long story.”

“How far is it to Blakesburg?” I asked.

“We’ve got about an hour.”

“Alright…I grew up in Fairview Park, Ohio, near Cleveland. Our house was about a quarter of a mile from Cleveland Hopkins Airport and I remember spending a great deal of time watching the planes fly over our backyard and wondering what it would be like to go up in one. I always wondered what other places looked like away from home.

One of my girlfriends in grade school had been to New York City, and another had been to the Grand Canyon. Another kid had been to the Bahamas, and a couple kids in my high school went to Florida every year during Christmas vacation. They always came back to school in January with suntans when the rest of us were pale. I knew that they’d flown on airliners to get to those places and I wanted to go, too, but my parents never went anywhere.

Also, those friends got to go to beautiful beaches and swim in that warm, clear blue water, and I only got to look at them in magazines and dream about being on a nice beach. The idea that I could get on an airplane and escape the cold, miserable Cleveland winter and be snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico in just a few hours was somehow a fantasy to me, but I knew that it must’ve been possible, because Beth Snyder’s dark tan in January was proof. It made me want all the more to be one of the lucky kids who got to faraway places in airplanes.

For our family vacations, my parents seldom took us more than fifty miles. Sometimes we'd camp at Lake Milton or take a drive up to Marblehead Beach, near Sandusky, Ohio, but we never traveled far enough to require plane tickets. The farthest we ever went was a one day car trip to Niagara Falls and back when I was around thirteen, but that was it.

So, we never flew anywhere. That, and my dad didn't like to fly. He occasionally flew for business trips, but he was always more comfortable on the ground, at home.

My mom had been on a plane once. She told me it was a one-way flight to Detroit when she was pregnant with me. I asked her about it recently and she doesn't recall much about it, but said it was a very short flight and that she and Dad took it to buy a Buick there, then they drove it back home to Fairview Park, Ohio."

"Keep going. Tell me more," urged my flying Psychologist, John, "What about your first airplane ride?"

[AAC Cadet Leader]

"Okay...When I was fourteen during Christmas vacation, my school friend, Pam Curtis invited me to go up with her family to Middle Bass Island, in Lake Erie. We got there by flying over the frozen lake in a 1926 Ford Tri-motor - a 'Tin Goose.' I remember looking at the weird-looking airplane from outside the fence at Port Clinton Airport thinking that it looked like it was put together with rain gutters and wondered how the odd-looking thing was going to get us off the ground. Tickets were cheap. Mine was only $9.00 as I recall, and I remember everyone standing in line to board the plane took turns getting weighed on a scale and a man wrote down the numbers on a pad of paper.



The inside of the plane wasn't much fancier than the outside. There were two single-seat rows of wooden chairs on either side of the center aisle the inside sloped up steeply toward the cockpit. My seat was in the back, on the left side and I had my own little window.

On the way to the runway, one of the pilots was reading things aloud to the other from a piece of cardboard. I thought that was odd, and worried that maybe he was reading him directions how to fly. Then one of them started winding up a crank that was sticking out of the ceiling above their heads. I wondered what he was doing, and figured that maybe he was winding up a giant rubber band, somehow attached to the propellers. Of course, later, when I started flying lessons, I realized that he was cranking in elevator trim and that list was their preflight checklist.

When we took off, I got at butterfly feeling in my stomach that was the same feeling I got on the big swings at the playground. The street patterns below suddenly made sense and seemed simple and logical as I had never seen them that way before. And the white, frozen Lake Erie grew a hundred times larger than I had ever imagined it was.

Before this, the highest I'd ever been was on the top floor of the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. From the air I could see miles and miles in all directions and being above the Earth gave me a sense of freedom like never before, and an unexpected feeling of power! I felt I possesed some new magic by my ability to see so far and so much.”

"Then what?"

I continued, “Well then, when I was a Senior in high school, I read a book mentioning airplane hitching and that turned on a bright light in my head. I took that book to my lifeguard job at an indoor pool where on an average evening, three people came to swim, so I had a lot of time to read that passage over and over again until I felt like I owned it. And I started making plans that I was going to do just that. I was dying to see the world and broaden my horizons.

In a few months my turn was coming and nothing was going to get in my way of finally seeing what was beyond the outskirts of Cleveland.”

“Weren’t you scared?” he asked.

“Well, only a little. I wasn’t comfortable with the thought of thumbing car rides, but to me, the idea to hitchhike airplane rides sounded safer, faster, and a much more exciting way to get somewhere. I figured the average pilot was smarter than the average car driver. And I wouldn't actually be standing out on the runways, holding my thumb out, I'd be asking the pilots face to face for a ride before they got in their planes. This way, I'd be picking them out - not the other way around.

And although I read that passage in print, I had never heard of such a thing—which gave me all the more reason to want to try it. I loved the very idea of it for its uniqueness.”

“What did your parents think?"

“My parents were skeptical. And no-doubt, fearful about my idea, although they never let on, so we avoided the subject. And I was about to be the last one to leave the nest. They wanted me to go directly into college, but I wanted to choose my own path. It wasn't that I was a rebellious teenager, it was just some weird driving force inside of me, telling me that I had to do this airplane hitchhiking thing."

[crankcase]

dear martha
i am fascinated by this thread...
in past years i recall reading a book about a guy's journey with his son around the world in a stearman. i pulled this off a paperback stand at an airport and couldn't put it down. another great read was a history of imperial airways flying boats in the 30's, from london to asia -- the pilots had to fly over the intended landing "strip" of water first to make sure there were no fishing boats or floatin debris in the way.

i look forward to your book in the same spirit. it is a compelling story, national geographic stuff! the previous posts rightly state: you can't incorporate all the pilots into the body of your story -- all writers have to be selective. but the idea of contacting some of them is good: as you show, they can remind you of stories and anecdotes you may have forgotten.

good luck and i am looking forward to the finished book.
CC (aka marc)