Early Starts

Southward Sojourn
Costa Rica to Roatan
February 2012


Beginning, always the hardest thing to do, especially when preceded by a healthy portion of procrastination.
Yet, here we are again. On the road to Central America and wondering why. All the usual reasons; flight from the rains and snows of the Pacific North West winter.
With this our third time to Central America all pre departure preparations were on time or ahead of schedule. Shots and meds taken care of. The usual packing and editing and lists of just in case while we are gone; things like generators ready for our tenants in case of power outages for the remainder of the winter months, Mail, banking, bills, phones and electronic gear etc., etc. It seems like the beginning does't start until the final landing at your next pause.
The trials of airplane travel and airports I have spoken of often enough that suffice it to say, here my opinion has not changed in that other than the five minutes of take off and landing, it's still a bore. I think back to Paine Field in Everette WA. where at the age of twenty I took my flying lessons from Willard's Flying Service. Darryl Williard was a slight bespectacled and shambling man with a tuft of thinning blond bangs always hanging over one top edge of his glasses. Behind those glasses his eyes held you directly but not invasively. I have had several flight instructors since but something more than his talent made him my favorite. His demeanor in the seat behind me was calming from the start. And his taps on the shoulder to point out another plane or bird in some distant quadrant made me sit more attentive to know the skys were not an infinite and empty ocean and to look everywhere even though, more than not, other denizens will turn out to be no larger than a reflective speck. But its the knowing that sharpens the edge.
How glorious were those first solos. The Kent Valley was farmland back then and the Green River below lazily wound like a silver thread undisturbed by present day industrial warehouses of mega block upon mega block. Memories untrampeled by civilization stubbornly fade away in all of us except when we take the time to sit still.
I had talked my girlfriend into taking lessons with me and we both soloed only 50 feet apart side by side smiles a mile wide and eye to eye in a pair of Willard's Aeronca Chieftans, those tail dragging high wingers one had to taxi along snaking side to side in order to be able to see forward first to the left then to right, back and forth like a slow drunken weave.
And those grassy airfields of Arlington planted seeds deep.
I had a friend in college one David MacNeil, tall, gangly, an irrepressible Scotchman who could call up a Scottish brogue that could rattle your ears. Such was his enthusiasm and zest for life that he could practically talk me into anything. Even taking out a student loan to buy an old 1958 British Morgan open sports car. It had a long tubular bonnet with a double row of louvers down its entire length ending in a low and graceful rounded grill. And the whole front end sandwiched between a pair of swooping fenders proud at the front with headlights sculpted forward and fairing downward to the rear and along the sides and below the doors to join up with similar rear fenders. A swooping and continuous curve.
After an accident I decided to rebuild it from the ground up. As a destitute student I had no choice. In my tiny garage on 40th Street there in Seattle I scraped the dollars together doing part time work as a janitor or a cook in the dorms at the UW campus. The day came to reinstall the engine. It actually stormed and thundered as I slid the hoist suspended motor into the bay. Shades of Frankenstein! It lives !! Eventually, with the help of my Dad, which I treasure, on the upholstery, we finished. The paint scheme was suggested by another good lady friend, deep chocolate body and glossy black wings (fenders.) It corkscrewed my head every time I saw it. It flew over the roads of Washington.
"Tony! Lets go up to Arlington and go flying!?" I bent over my drafting board for Cedar Homes in Bellevue working late one afternoon with MacNeil. "MacNeil, what are you talking about? I can't fly and neither can you." Ah but Dave among his inexhaustible store of friends had one who did. A young pilot who flew for Rheem airlines in Alaska who had his own low wing open cockpit hangered at Arlington. Northward we roared in Dave's Morgan a white one with red leather interior which when I saw for the first time dramatically unveiled from beneath a cover, sealed my deal and said student loan. Arlington had a grass airstrip in the 60s. You could smell it just after cutting. There in the waning light was the Ryan trainer just taxiing in from a flight as Dave ran up to his friend yelling above the engine to "Take Tony up, Take him up and give it to him". Give it to him? "Sure climb on up and put this leather helmet and goggles and scarf on." Scarf and goggles...really? Buckled into the front open cockpit with the silver mono wing beneath me and only endless sky above I stayed in front of the "Is this really happening" question. The next thing I noticed was the huge radial engine with it's massive black cylinder "jugs" not more than 5 feet away from my nose! As we taxied to the end of the aromatic grass and reved up, I felt an unstoppable smile begin to crease my face. "Is this really happening?" Slowly forward movement was jerked by each blast of a cylinder. The explosions came faster and faster and with bang my body was pulled forward against the safety harness. I was literally being jerked into the sky! The balloon tires rumbled over the tufts of grass sending up newly crushed smells of sun warmed clover and the freedom of climbing air. I settled in to the ackety pop of the big radial in its circular firing and tried to relieve my facial muscles of its stretched and frozen smile. Over the ear phones I hear, "Are you ready Tony?" I nod. And we dive and the force presses me back as the earth covers all my fields of vision. Then more pressure as the horizon rolls back down from above only to disappear under the nose. Pressure now moves to my shoulders as I realize I am upside down and look above me t see the earth! Slowly and gracefully terra firma rolls from behind my head, down my forehead and back underneath me as the horizon again takes its rightful place in front. God that was a loop 5000 feet in suspension. So began my first experience with aerobatics in an open cockpit. We moved on to stalls, spins, hammer heads, rolls until the grass fields below began to dim in the dusk and it was time to settle down with the waning light. Returning to the airfield we flared down to a three point landing to the smell of grass and pasture. After the engine shut down and the only sound was the ticks of mettalic cooling. I could only sit wordlessly until MacNeil came running up wanting to know, wanting to hear all about it. Later that night we sat outside an empty hanger with a half dozen other elderly pilots talking hanger stories drinking beer and eating clams and oil from tin cans. The next week I went down to Willard's Flying Service to sign up.

Flying has never been the same. Commercial flying is not even close. Perhaps it was for a little while during the age of the Flying China Clippers but now its your basic bus ride with screaming babies, fighting for that elbow rest between the seats and re breathing that recirculated air full of hacks, coughs and sneezes and ankle swollen feet. One prays for the flight to be over sooner than later. There is no jaw aching smile about being in this air. Don't we all pray that this pilot was not so bored that he is alert enough to land? So finally we have landed in San Jose Costa Rica and we trudge from one line to another; baggage, customs, security, immigration, taxi hawkers and car rentals. Our car rental guy meets us at the airport and takes us into the dark garage to show us the car. It is 10 years old, scratched, dented, bondo falling off and a re paint job that tried to cover crusts and rust. Five minutes down the road to our airport hotel, LaAdventura Inn, we discover the right side windows, front and rear do not work. Try that in the tropical heat. We e-mail Diego and demand another rental that works. Surprisingly he brings us another one in the morning. Somewhat soothed we next drive off to the town of Puntarenas and the ferry across the Nicoya Peninsula to the West Pacific coast and our eventual destination, a private home near Samara we have rented for the month of February.



The unpaved beach roads are as bad as we remember but at least it is the dry season so the three streams we ford are low and slow.
Before reaching Samarra we need to spend two nights in a little fishing town called Montezuma.