Steve West: A window on the world

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, August 18th, and this is WORLD Radio. Thanks for listening! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Today’s WORLD commentator recently took a short plane trip with his son, a pilot. Steve West says those trips always help him see the world in a new way.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: North Carolina’s small Lake Ridge airfield is quiet today, a breeze whistling through the open hangers by the single grass strip. But it won’t be for long. We just pushed my son’s 1947 Piper Super Cub out of the hanger, the red two-seater readied for flight.

SOUND: [Airplane]

I was 10 the first time I flew. My friend and I boarded an Eastern Airlines DC-3 en route to Washington, D.C. We took turns by the window, faces pressed to cold glass, propellers whirring, our seats vibrating. It was 1968. As we rose above the earth for the first time I sensed the expanse of place, beyond neighborhood and city, beyond home. I lost all bearing there in the air, didn’t know how to make sense of what I saw but wondered at its beauty.

In his book, Skyfaring, 747 pilot Mark Vanhoenacker is a poet of flight, using finely crafted language to capture the feel of seeing the earth from above. He says, “Flight is the cartographic, planetary equivalent of hearing a song covered by a singer you love, or meeting for the first time a relative whose features or mannerisms are already familiar. We know the song but not like this; we have never met the person and yet we have never in our lives been strangers.”

I haven’t felt this, but my son has. He told me once that he is most relaxed when he is in the air, his hand on the stick, feet on the rudder pedals, eyes scanning the horizon and the cross stitch pattern of farmland, the roads snaking their way confidently across the terrain.

For those who fly, the sky must be like coming home. You already know the song. Maybe the tug of elevation was buried deep in some gene, activated when your father tossed you in the air, primed by the helicoptering swings from an adult’s arms, was nurtured by the flight of stories, by high buildings and roller-coaster tracks to the sky, even by watching a balloon float high above.

The first flight must carry some sense of deja vu for these pilots-to-be, some echoing memory of soaring. And when you rise, when wheels are up and the ground falls away, you poke through the clouds and float over a bed of air, an ocean of billowing cloud-sea just below.

Earth-bound non-pilot that I am, all I can think is that it must be like hearing a favorite music album for the first time, like those first chords of The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Hearing it, I'm soaring.

I think, too, of a refugee from then-Communist Poland I once heard testify. When she first heard the Gospel in an Austrian refugee camp, she believed but then said, “It was what I had always believed.” Salvation was new, but it tapped something deep inside. She knew the song, but not like this; had met her Lord, but not like this.

Back with my son now, it’s time to fly.

SOUND: [Airplane]

We strap in, taxi to the runway end. Wheels up, we raise a window on the world.

BEACH BOYS: ["Wouldn't It Be Nice"]

I’m Steve West.

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