This post should be shorter than Vols I and II because I don't like flying, I only owned a toy train set as a girl and remembering some of the treatment I received as a crewmember in the Coast Guard is painful.
So...don't worry about settling in.
My train
When I was about 10-ish I asked for a train set for Christmas and I got a really cool Life-Like kit with a Union Pacific engine.
You could make a mountain out of this paper stuff but I wasn't very good at it and what I created would have baffled any geologist asked to describe it's origins.
I struggled at times because if all pieces of the track weren't connected properly the engine would stop running. None of my trestles were fastened to the board so sometimes the train would derail.
I quickly developed a God complex over the small village I had created and things took a dark turn when I put one of the tiny people on the track and raced the engine toward him whilst cackling maniacally.
Why I Don't Like Flying
The reason is simple. One day in December 1979 my mother and I dropped my father off at a private airport in Louisiana so he could serve as a co-pilot and that was the last time I ever saw him alive.
I was thirteen months old.
Mom says I wandered around our apartment calling for him and all I can remember is that every time I heard the drone of an engine flying overhead I would go into a sort of trance and feel like there was something I was supposed to remember.
My grandfather owned a Cessna and let me fly it once when I was about 10 so I actually have about 45 seconds of flying time under my belt. Don't be jealous, it's not like I'm instrument rated.
My fondest memory of an aircraft was playing in the blue and yellow Stearman my cousins' maternal grandparents kept in a hangar near their home in Florida. I remember standing on the wing and crawling into the cockpit.
The design of the Stearman is amazing. Minus the engine and wheels it's just basically wood and canvas.
It's so light that you can pick it up at the tail and move it around.
Around age 12, I got super neurotic and became convinced I was going to die in a crash like my father.
Anytime I had to fly anywhere I would make sure I had made peace with everyone in my family and I would get a sickening dread the whole time I was on the plane.
The worst was when I went to China and we flew over Siberia. I remember looking down into row after row of snowy mountains and thinking, "they'll never find our bodies in there." I had brought sleeping pills so I could knock myself out on the flight but I never took them. I decided I wanted to see death coming instead.
In 2012 I outgrew my flying anxiety.
I still won't get in an airplane "for fun." I need to be going somewhere important and flight needs to be inevitable, not voluntary.
My grandfather, uncle, father and several of my male cousins are all pilots. I call it the Phillips sickness and I don't really understand the obsession.
Sometimes though, when I see a small plane taking off, just for a minute, something in my heart soars with it.
Boats
We had a ski boat when I was growing up and dad always controlled it.
Me and my sisters weren't allowed to drive it because our caustic estrogen might have somehow ruined it's performance capabilities.
I lifted up the cover over the motor well once to check out the setup and I later got a lecture about how I could have broken something (with my eyes apparently).
In 2007 I joined the U.S. Coast Guard and was sent to a god forsaken surf station where the Pacific Ocean was often at its nastiest.
I was forced into indentured servitude aboard a 47-foot motor life boat and had to teach myself how to perform as a qualified crew member.
It involved learning about chart navigation, the boat specs, knot tying, first aid and search and rescue procedures.
I have nothing against the boat. It was incredibly bad ass.
It was made to go out into the worst sea conditions and take a beating. It had hidden buoyancy chambers that made it self righting within eight seconds of capsizing.
When the sea was particularly rough we had to wear special belts and clip ourselves to the D rings found on the upper deck of the boat to keep from being washed overboard.
No, it wasn't the boat I hated- it was the tyrannical sadists I had to go out with.
I got assigned a mentor who once made the coxswain feign death at sea in total darkness just so he could force me to take us back in.
He wouldn't let me use the computer to plot our route back. I had to navigate by sight.
This wasn't a requirement of our crew qualifications, in fact, it was dangerous and completely unnecessary. My mentor was being a dickwad because he could.
Even Jeff the dying coxswain admitted he couldn't really tell where the jetty was under those conditions. In response my mentor told him to "continue dying."
The mentor and I had a pretty intense stare down before I put the boat in clutch ahead (the boat's lowest power setting). It took us an hour to get back to pier but I got us there safely.
Then there were the exercises in futility.
Eel grass is a protected plant species in California and it is found in abundance in Humboldt Bay where we would do our practice exercises.
We'd be going along and all the sudden a warning alarm would go off because the engines were overheating.
I'd have to go below, put on headphones go into the engine room and pull a mass of eel grass out of the sea strainer. The eel grass would be thrown overboard where it would team up with another floating mass of the stuff and five minutes later we'd suck it back up and the engines would start to overheat.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
We had a major inspection one year so I spent a lot of quality time wedged in the auxillary space scraping a strange green substance off the aluminum fittings with a tiny wire brush. Most of the boat's dirty work was left to the low ranking rabble like me. At least I got left in peace during these times.
Sometimes we would go out to sea to do joint training exercises with the Dolphin helicopters from Group Humboldt Bay.
The first time this happened the guys didn't see any need to explain procedures to me.
Thanks to this method of teaching I nearly got a shock from the rescue basket and I was almost pulled overboard because they told me to grab the trail line attached to the helicopter and pull with all my might. I was halfway over the fantail when I first heard them screaming for me to let go over the roar of the helo.
Dicks.
The real sticking point here was that the U.S. government had no problem giving me control of one of its million-dollar assets while back home, my father still believed I wasn't competent enough to drive his ski boat.
Ah, family.
So...don't worry about settling in.
My train
When I was about 10-ish I asked for a train set for Christmas and I got a really cool Life-Like kit with a Union Pacific engine.
You could make a mountain out of this paper stuff but I wasn't very good at it and what I created would have baffled any geologist asked to describe it's origins.
I struggled at times because if all pieces of the track weren't connected properly the engine would stop running. None of my trestles were fastened to the board so sometimes the train would derail.
I quickly developed a God complex over the small village I had created and things took a dark turn when I put one of the tiny people on the track and raced the engine toward him whilst cackling maniacally.
Why I Don't Like Flying
The reason is simple. One day in December 1979 my mother and I dropped my father off at a private airport in Louisiana so he could serve as a co-pilot and that was the last time I ever saw him alive.
I was thirteen months old.
Mom says I wandered around our apartment calling for him and all I can remember is that every time I heard the drone of an engine flying overhead I would go into a sort of trance and feel like there was something I was supposed to remember.
My grandfather owned a Cessna and let me fly it once when I was about 10 so I actually have about 45 seconds of flying time under my belt. Don't be jealous, it's not like I'm instrument rated.
My fondest memory of an aircraft was playing in the blue and yellow Stearman my cousins' maternal grandparents kept in a hangar near their home in Florida. I remember standing on the wing and crawling into the cockpit.
The design of the Stearman is amazing. Minus the engine and wheels it's just basically wood and canvas.
It's so light that you can pick it up at the tail and move it around.
Around age 12, I got super neurotic and became convinced I was going to die in a crash like my father.
Anytime I had to fly anywhere I would make sure I had made peace with everyone in my family and I would get a sickening dread the whole time I was on the plane.
The worst was when I went to China and we flew over Siberia. I remember looking down into row after row of snowy mountains and thinking, "they'll never find our bodies in there." I had brought sleeping pills so I could knock myself out on the flight but I never took them. I decided I wanted to see death coming instead.
In 2012 I outgrew my flying anxiety.
I still won't get in an airplane "for fun." I need to be going somewhere important and flight needs to be inevitable, not voluntary.
My grandfather, uncle, father and several of my male cousins are all pilots. I call it the Phillips sickness and I don't really understand the obsession.
Sometimes though, when I see a small plane taking off, just for a minute, something in my heart soars with it.
Boats
We had a ski boat when I was growing up and dad always controlled it.
Me and my sisters weren't allowed to drive it because our caustic estrogen might have somehow ruined it's performance capabilities.
I lifted up the cover over the motor well once to check out the setup and I later got a lecture about how I could have broken something (with my eyes apparently).
In 2007 I joined the U.S. Coast Guard and was sent to a god forsaken surf station where the Pacific Ocean was often at its nastiest.
 |
| I'm squinting into the sun at the center of the front row. |
I was forced into indentured servitude aboard a 47-foot motor life boat and had to teach myself how to perform as a qualified crew member.
It involved learning about chart navigation, the boat specs, knot tying, first aid and search and rescue procedures.
I have nothing against the boat. It was incredibly bad ass.
It was made to go out into the worst sea conditions and take a beating. It had hidden buoyancy chambers that made it self righting within eight seconds of capsizing.
When the sea was particularly rough we had to wear special belts and clip ourselves to the D rings found on the upper deck of the boat to keep from being washed overboard.
 |
| Weeeee. |
No, it wasn't the boat I hated- it was the tyrannical sadists I had to go out with.
I got assigned a mentor who once made the coxswain feign death at sea in total darkness just so he could force me to take us back in.
He wouldn't let me use the computer to plot our route back. I had to navigate by sight.
This wasn't a requirement of our crew qualifications, in fact, it was dangerous and completely unnecessary. My mentor was being a dickwad because he could.
Even Jeff the dying coxswain admitted he couldn't really tell where the jetty was under those conditions. In response my mentor told him to "continue dying."
The mentor and I had a pretty intense stare down before I put the boat in clutch ahead (the boat's lowest power setting). It took us an hour to get back to pier but I got us there safely.
Then there were the exercises in futility.
Eel grass is a protected plant species in California and it is found in abundance in Humboldt Bay where we would do our practice exercises.
We'd be going along and all the sudden a warning alarm would go off because the engines were overheating.
I'd have to go below, put on headphones go into the engine room and pull a mass of eel grass out of the sea strainer. The eel grass would be thrown overboard where it would team up with another floating mass of the stuff and five minutes later we'd suck it back up and the engines would start to overheat.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
 |
| I had some mad boat hook skills. |
Sometimes we would go out to sea to do joint training exercises with the Dolphin helicopters from Group Humboldt Bay.
The first time this happened the guys didn't see any need to explain procedures to me.
Thanks to this method of teaching I nearly got a shock from the rescue basket and I was almost pulled overboard because they told me to grab the trail line attached to the helicopter and pull with all my might. I was halfway over the fantail when I first heard them screaming for me to let go over the roar of the helo.
Dicks.
 |
| I pioneered the search and rescue selfie. |
The real sticking point here was that the U.S. government had no problem giving me control of one of its million-dollar assets while back home, my father still believed I wasn't competent enough to drive his ski boat.
Ah, family.
No comments:
Post a Comment