If I Weren’t a Writer…

Hmm. Good question.

Timothy Key tagged me on this the other day. What struck me about his profile was that he harbored, as did I, a desire to pilot fighter jets.

When I was on active duty in the Army, women weren’t allowed. We couldn’t even apply. Rotary-wing was available (helicopters), but that meant giving up my Army career and my journalism.

I later got my ultralight license in Australia in 1985 and went on later to skydive 130 times. But I have never flown in a fighter jet. Got an offer once but I didn’t like the price. I have leapt off bridges and paraglided off huge cliffs in some of the world’s great wild places. I love the air.

I am most fully alive in just two other places, when not playing flying fingers on my computer. One, my greatest love of all loves, is horses in particular, and all animals in general. It is a love so deep and so pure that it goes quite beyond words.

The other, well.

A young man, barely nineteen, who had just received a well-deserved scholarship to Yale, sent his parents a poem that speaks directly to my heart. In the hours I have spent in the cockpit, the many times I have thrown my body out of a plane with utter abandon, and every time I grow wings on the back of a magnificent horse, this poem speaks to and for me.

We lost poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr. in a training flight in 1941, in mid-air. In losing him, we released into the sky what would likely have been one of the great poets of our time. Here, the piece that speaks to what puts the bird in my chest:

High Flight

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence. Hovering there I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.

“Up, up the long delirious burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, where never lark, or even eagle, flew; and, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

Were I not a writer, I would be airborne. Were I not a writer, I would be horseback.

But I am all those and more. Because writing gives me wings.