Oh, my aching back
You never feel as old as when you’re thrown into a situation that parallels something from your youth. Pick up a bat and swing at a fastball for the first time in 20 years and your back will quickly announce its age. Have you been to a water park with your kids? Not the same experience as it was when you were 15.
Twenty-four years ago, I set off in my uncle’s Piper Cub from its base outside Memphis to another uncle’s house outside Atlanta. My best friend was sitting in the front seat. He was always up for an adventure, and sitting in the front seat of a Cub bouncing along for hours in the summer heat is most certainly an adventure. It was a memorable flight, in part because our rations of beef jerky and orange vending machine crackers ended up all over the side of the airplane and me in the back seat after the summer bumps got a little too sporty in the afternoon.
I remember flying low along the Tennessee River, skirting Atlanta to the north, and trying to deal with a grumpy controller at Lawrenceville when the handheld radio didn’t work as well as I expected. What I don’t remember is any back pain, sore legs, or hesitation at launching off on a 300-mile flight at a blistering 60 knots.
Fast-forward to last week when I was facing a 320-mile round-trip flight in my own Cub from my base in southern Maryland to central North Carolina and back. I was worried that the preceding 24 years had done a number on my body. Age is a construct, they say, and I’ve constructed mine to be an out-of-shape 44-year-old with the stress of kids and a mortgage. I now lack the confidence, or maybe ignorance of my youth. There was no doubt I was mentally capable of the flight. My body’s ability to do the same? There was only one way to find out.
The plan was to launch at a respectable time in the morning, get to North Carolina early enough to have some lunch, have a quick meeting with a mechanic, and then hurry home before sunset. With no electrical system, the Cub turns into a pumpkin the second the sun dips below the horizon. My wife asked why I was leaving so early if my meeting was at 4 in the afternoon. How could I explain that I was worried about the return, and needed a few hours to sit at the FBO to recharge before turning around and coming back?
I opted for Goldfish instead of orange FBO crackers and loaded up on Advil in advance. Thankfully, the weather was beautiful, and the winds were light. Despite heat indices being about 110 degrees, the open door made for a comfortable day aloft. Headwinds aren’t to be trifled with when you’re only going 60 knots, so I watched the forecast carefully. The angels were looking out for me because I never saw groundspeeds below 45 on the way down, and never below 80 on the way back.
The intervening years made the flight equal parts more challenging physically and easier operationally. Experience helps, but everything from notams to weather to navigation was orders of magnitude less complicated now than it was nearly a quarter of a century ago.
Spending nearly seven hours in the seat gave me the confidence to know that I could do more, go farther.
Handling a sectional chart in a Cub with an open door takes careful hands. Planning on an app, having ready access to traffic and weather, and following along on a moving map the entire way was incredibly easy. And the current generation of handheld radio and headset made communicating safer and more efficient. The hours even ticked by faster because I had music in my headset. I can’t imagine what the pilot who delivered the Cub from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, to South Carolina, in 1940 would have thought about that.
I may have had to take pre-emptive Advil, sit on a special cushion, and plan a few potential bathroom breaks along the way, but spending nearly seven hours in the seat gave me the confidence to know that I could do more, go farther, and push myself beyond what I had worried was possible. Whether I want to is another story.
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