A Better, Vanished Time

When I was 15, half a lifetime ago at the present moment, my uncle Ted took me on a flight in a World War 2-vintage observation aircraft that was kept in flying condition by the museum where he and my grandfather, his father, volunteered. He decided to execute a tight turn onto final approach and it felt like he flipped the airplane on its side as we lined up. The senses humans evolved with are not well suited to understanding the dynamics of flight, and we probably didn’t bank any more than 45 degrees, but it felt like we were about to go over with only a few hundred feet of altitude beneath us. “Whoa!” I shouted, and pushed the stick back toward center, evening out the bank to something more comfortable.

Looking back, this was a singularly bizarre moment in my life. Like my grandfather, Ted flew for the Air Force (Army Air Force in Grandpa’s time) during a time of war. Unlike my grandfather he repeatedly flew into combat in unarmed aircraft. During his service in the Vietnam War Ted earned an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross for his technical skill and devotion to duty. He also became proficient in the supersonic jet trainers that killed the astronauts Ted Freeman, Elliot See, Charlie Basset, and CC Williams in training accidents. Now here I was, a punk teenager with about 10 hours of dual instruction in gliders, correcting his flying with tactile force. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed. On the other hand, he didn’t dress me down for it after the flight. Perhaps Ted understood more than most pilots that experience and skill don’t prevent you from occasionally forgetting that an Aeronca can’t be made to handle like a T-38.

On Saturday I made the drive from my family’s new home in Seattle to Ted’s house in Richland, Oregon, a speck of a town in about as remote of a location as you can find in the contiguous 48 states. The drive took me through Snoqualmie Pass, through the deserts and farmlands of eastern Washington, across the wide blue churn of the Columbia River, and along the home stretch of the Oregon Trail so worn down in the middle of the 19^th Century. It’s as perfect of a 400 mile drive as I’ve ever been on, and I’d recommend it as the best possible introduction to the Pacific Northwest. Ted’s immune system and his doctors had been fighting cancer for the last several years and I knew that this was likely to be the last time I would see him.

We spoke to each other a few times that afternoon. I told Ted about my children and about the work I’ve recently begun at Blue Origin. I told my son that I was visiting my uncle, who was sick, to try to cheer him up, and he asked me to show Ted a heart that he made in preschool to help him feel better. I showed that to Ted and he seemed amused. It was good to hear his voice, though it was clearly hard for him to say much and I did most of the talking. I sat and looked at the southern reach of the Wallowa Mountains, listening to the rustle of wind through the leaves, watching the swallows and magpies dive and dart for insects, trying to contemplate life and mostly just settling for breathing. Early the following morning Ted died at the age of 74.

Maybe that doesn’t seem like much of a climax to a life intensely lived, but life doesn’t follow the neat narrative structure of our stories. The true narrative of living is more of a drunkard’s walk from event to event, sometimes in misery, sometimes in joy, hopefully in love. Roger Ebert had it about right in his review of O Brother, Where Art Thou! It’s like The Odyssey, in the sense that it’s one thing after another.

Between the bookends of his life Ted found plenty of drama and tragedy and comedy to fill that narrative space. Besides rooming with a future Space Shuttle astronaut at the Air Force Academy and serving in Vietnam he raised three children and went through the infernal microcosm of medical school and residency that my wife has just surfaced from. He found love and companionship late in life much like the ideal love of youth. So many lives were cut short by that insanity in southeast Asia, but he was one of the ones who got to come home, and he made the life he lived here, in California and in Oregon, worth living. You’re catching me at the wrong time to say anything positive about the medical establishment, but surely his service here, helping so many lives over the decades in little and big ways, merits some kind of meaning to the chaos of life in general and his life in particular.

I won’t pretend that I was one of the most important people in Ted’s life. In Richland this weekend I saw his children and grandchildren, his wife, and his brothers (my father among them). But when I saw him he was always welcoming and joyful and loving. He put up with my crap when I complained about finding parking in downtown Seattle. We rode four-wheelers (reminding me a bit of the setup to Rush's "Red Barchetta") and shot at targets and drank beer and watched a total solar eclipse in Richland. Before that I have so many wonderful memories of seeing him during my visits to California and his visits to Arizona. I consoled him when his father died, and he consoled me when my brother died. So much and yet, at the end, never enough.

Jeremy Frampton was one of the 12 killed during the collapse of the Aggie bonfire pile in 1999. Part of his memorial is this poem he left behind:

If I stare long enough

If I talk hard enough

If I touch soft enough

If I love deep enough

Will I live long enough

To love life enough

I am haunted by the question, which is sort of another way of saying that I don’t understand the human condition. I suppose no one really does and my desire to want to own this and understand it completely is an occasion of the sin of pride. Still, unlike the trees and the magpies and the locusts and the fungi, we can see the roadmap from birth to maturity to reproduction (if we’re lucky) to death, and we want to make sense of something that nature has given us nothing to make sense of.

The point isn’t that a life well lived and death well planned, in a home surrounded by beauty and love and family, makes death easy. It’s still awful, though less awful than anything else. I’m glad at least that Ted took what was out of his control with grace and masterfully crafted what was in his control to the life he wanted, to his last day. I’m so glad that I got to have him in my life for my first three decades.