So Many Stars

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

Marcus Aurelius,

Meditations

*

It's an old story, really. Been told a few times too, I reckon.

About an old man -- well, not really old, not quite yet, anyway -- but an old man who's followed his heart and run into a few potholes along the road more or less traveled. A man you'd have thought was old enough to know better. My story, if you want to know the truth of it. I think I've got the beginning down, maybe even the middle, but it's the end that's got me stumped. And I've been sitting here all night thinking about where this story's headed, but right now I'm clueless.

Actually, I think the last chapter got underway yesterday, but if I start there you'll be more clueless that yours truly, so let me take the snap and drop back in the pocket, hit the rewind button and see if I can get this straight.

A while ago, three months and four days if memory serves (but who's counting), the company I worked for advised a bunch of us that our services would no longer be needed. As a point of reference, that company is an airline and management had decided to retire an entire type of aircraft -- the 747-400, if you're interested in such things -- and that meant Change was headed my way. If I'd been a few years younger I'd have retrained, taken classes for one more type rating, and so would have been able to keep flying for them a few more years. But I had passed the magic number, was a few years too old to warrant the expense and was bought out, given early retirement. Not a bad deal, financially anyway, but the thought of being put out to pasture with a few years of flying still ahead left me feeling a little put out. In short, I wasn't ready to head to the barn just yet and put out a few feelers.

Actually, one was all it took.

My phone chirped as I was walking through the terminal in Minneapolis, and I looked at the screen and stepped out of the stream people dashing madly for their connecting flights, hit the little green button and listened to the proposition.

An outfit based, nominally, in LA, and let's be charitable right here and now and call this company Sheep-Shit Airways, wanted me. Badly. Bad enough to offer me an obscene salary, sight unseen. They needed a chief pilot, one FAA certified to do check-rides. A pilot with at least ten thousand in type, fifteen even better. Someone who wouldn't mind flying the Indian Ocean, back and forth, over and over again.

Someone who wouldn't mind flying sheep, live sheep, from Perth, Western Australia, to Saudi Arabia. Several times a week.

Really, if the recruiter hadn't been talking so fast I'd have hung up before he mentioned salary, but he was and I didn't.

He mentioned a number and I kept my mouth shut, made a non-committal grunt -- and he was off to the races. 'Of course,' he scrambled, 'with your qualifications...' -- and he mentioned another number. I whistled, and we both knew he had me by the short hairs.

On my next block of time off I hopped down to La-La Land -- to Newport Beach, in point of fact -- and met management. The only burning question on their minds was 'when can you start?' and right then and there I should have known better...but...someone kept dangling that number in front of my eyes, pulling on the short hairs and, well, that was all she wrote.

I started with them a few weeks ago. Rented my house to a co-worker, put my car in storage and packed a few things before heading back to LAX, and there I made a connection for Sydney, then another for Perth.

When I left Minnesota it was ten below and there was blowing snow everywhere in Minnesota but the runways and taxiways; when I stepped off the Qantas 737-800 in Perth the sweat that formed (instantly) on my forehead began to boil -- and I was still inside the terminal. I'd never flown into the new airport northeast of the city-center, and the only time I'd been in the city was during what passes for winter down there. Which is to say it was hotter than hell then, too, but nothing like this.

The base manager met me as I walked off the

jetway

and hustled me to their facilities on the far side of the field and, once there

,

introductions got underway. Still, I need to introduce you to Sheep Shit Airways, just so you know what was really up down under.

+++++

Sheep Shit was the brainchild (or brain-fart, depending on your point of view) of one Frank Cordoba. Frank flunked out of Stanford and finished his studies at a small business school just up the road in Menlo Park, almost taking a degree in marketing before becoming seriously interested in racing motorcycles and chasing strippers. Frank's dad owned a few car dealerships around the Bay Area and had made some money along the way dealing narcotics, but I think the old man had always assumed little Frank would take over the family business one day. Well, dad died one day too soon and little Frank had an epiphany: he was suddenly quite a wealthy man. Matter of fact, he was rich as hell, and discovered he really didn't really care about cars or racing -- or even strippers. He looked at FedEx and UPS and was pretty sure he could do better, so with a few friends from Stanford -- and with his sudden millions in hand -- he started an air cargo operation just about the time the first Gulf War got under way. Long story short, he made some serious money renting out old 747s and flying military equipment to and from Saudi Arabia, and he made some new friends in the Kingdom, as well.

Sheep don't graze well on sand, but the Kingdom's growing population, and growing surplus of cash, presented lands of opportunity and Frank was all over it. Kind of like a wet blanket, if you know what I mean. On one side of the equation, millions of people with billions of petrodollars were hungry for a supply of fresh sheep, Australian sheep at that, and Frank stood ready to balance the equation with an idea -- and stepped in to fill the emerging need. Sheep Shit Airways was born, and had been marginally profitable from day one by following Frank's Simple Formula for Air Cargo Success: lease the oldest aircraft at the cheapest possible price, pack the cargo to unsafe (oh? legal?) levels and fly the aircraft until they was no longer economically viable to maintain -- then dump 'em and get more run-down -- but cheaply serviceable -- aircraft at bargain basement prices.

As these old 747s were near the end of their service lives, and as they weren't carrying human cargo anymore (because, hey, pilots don't count), the interiors were stripped to bare metal, fumigated, then reassembled to allow palletized sheep pens to be loaded on both the cargo and passenger decks as rapidly as possible.

So why, you ask, was this outfit known far and wide as Sheep Shit Airways?

Well, sheep aren't exactly world travelers, but they are, by and large, nervous sorts. When you pack more than a few nervous herbivores into a tight metal tube and fire up those four engines out there on the wings? Yup, they get excited.

My first flight to Saudi-A was instructive, so let me digress.

Pull out onto the active and begin your dash down the runway, rotate and start your climb-out and all is right in your little world. You've been flying people for three decades and things feel pretty much like, well, normal. The way things should, I guess I'm trying to say.

Then something is odd, something unsettling: a new smell wafts through the airplane and hits.

You see, those one or two sheep back there are taking their very first airplane ride. Their first experience. In an aircraft. With all the sound deadening insulation humans expect -- REMOVED.

The aircraft rotates and climbs into the sky, and several thousand now very agitated, very well fed herbivores rotate too, and this being their first airplane ride and all they, well, a bunch of them manage to fall down. Then they start thrashing around, or trying to anyway, because they're packed in tighter than sardines in olive oil -- so can hardly move.

That's when, I suspect, the real panic sets in, and when deep sheep panic sets in the floodgates open. In a matter of seconds several thousand sheep let go, and the aroma is noticeable.

Andy Ainley, my first officer that first flight, reached down and pulled a giant economy sized can of air freshener from his flight bag -- and flipped up the landing gear lever with one hand while spritzing Country Cinnamon Apple shit into the cockpit, and I gagged. I gagged, you see, because I was still clueless.

"What the fuck is that smell?" I barked. "Are we on fire? Did you shit your shorts?"

Ainley looked away, but I could see he was trying not to laugh. "Welcome," he said, "to Sheep Shit Airways."

I rolled my eyes, once they stopped watering, that is.

It's about 6000 miles from Perth to central Saudi Arabia

,

so depending on winds anywhere from ten to fourteen hours. That's ten-to-fourteen hours with a bandana tied over your mouth and nose

;

a couple of spritzes of cologne on the bandana helps -- for a while, anyway. I say helps advisedly because nothing, and I mean nothing, completely gets rid of the stench let off thousands of rounds of sheep shit. Even after you crawl on your hands and knees out of the cockpit (gagging, gasping for air) -- the stench remains -- but by that point it's in your clothing, your hair, and it never leaves your mind.

A crew comes in after the furry little shit-bags are hauled off and, wearing gas masks, they sanitize the interior as best they can -- which turns out to be a pretty good thing for all concerned. All the sheep shit falls, by the way, into stainless steel trays under the pens so there's usually not too much of the muck on the decks and walls, and what little there is remaining is dealt with summarily, given a decent send-off, then the interior is fumigated, once again, and the aircraft's ready to go again.

So one more point: if you recall your aircraft, 747s have a big hump in front, and that funky spiral staircase that leads to a second (really, a third) floor, sometimes called the upper deck. This lofty perch is where the front office, aka the cockpit is located and, and lets be frank here, the cockpit is the one place I've called home most of my life. The upper deck on a -400 is relatively large, as these things go, and there's a head up there (you know, a place to wash up?) and, on some variants, a small bedroom with a couple of bunks in it. Sheep Shit Airways had these and had (graciously, cheaply?) left the upper deck accommodations intact, too, so there were seats up there. Big, fat, wide first class seats -- a few dozen or so -- and seats that, according to my first FO (Andy Ainley) remained empty most flights. Still, he told me that on occasion we hauled people, and that bothered me.

There are no flight attendants needed to haul sheep, thus no working galley, no beverage service, and worst of all, no 'Mile High Club' -- so, who the hell would fly with us? And after a few minutes of the enduring biological attack right after take off, who the devil would stay onboard for ten-plus hours -- unless out of pure, unadulterated desperation? I guess you could start an IV drip of morphine and LSD and settle in with movies on your phone, but really, why bother? Do the words

Flight From Prosecution

come to mind...?

+++++

So, I guess we all have expiration dates stamped on us somewhere, a 'Best If Used By' date that lets the world know we're just another commodity destined to used up and sent to the dump. It's not a very flattering view of life, but the reality is that once we humans hit a certain point our expiration dates roll around, our 'shelf life' is up and it's time to move out of the way, let fresher produce take our place on the shelves.

I grew up in a small town, and, as luck would have it, a town Deep in the Heart of Texas. A railroad town, and I grew up in a railroad family. A town where everything was movement, where nothing stayed the same from one day to the next, where life was lived moment to moment, and life turned on the whim of a vast machine you never saw and rarely heard. The landscape I remember was an foliage of rust and steel, shifting colors as fast freights and slow locals rolled through on their way to someplace, anyplace else but my hometown.

There was a small depot in the center of town, a simple one-story building, wood frame construction painted pale yellow, gray trim around the windows and along the soffit, all wrapped up under a tin roof painted a hopeful shade of red. When I was a kid

,

passenger trains stopped there several times a day; by the time I left the passenger trains were a fading memory, and even then it felt like the good ole days were destined to never return. By the early 70s

,

hopeful was a word that had slipped from the town's vocabulary, but change is change and besides, the roof was all faded and chipped by then. You meet change head-on or it rolls over you, and leaves you for dead -- in the middle of the road.

There was a small diner in the center of town, right across from the depot and with a white sign over the door, the sign framed by two red dots at each end. Drink Coke! -- it read inside the red bookends -- and in between, in the middle of the sign it read "Spring Street Cafe -- Home of the Best Food -- and the Slowest Service -- in the World." Hamburgers were a dime there when I was a spud, cheeseburgers fifteen cents, while homemade root beer was a nickel and an ice-cold glass of Coke a little more.

There was a high school in town, not very big but big enough to have a football team, and I quarterbacked the last team the school fielded, right before the school was closed -- due to declining enrollment. I was pretty good, too. Good enough to attract a few scouts, good enough to land a scholarship to play in Austin, nowhere near good enough to make a career out of it so I joined an ROTC program and went into the Navy. I learned to fly, became good enough to make a career out of that, and so the worm turned.

I think it was the railroad, really, and growing up around trains, that left me with the desire to move people around. Our house

--

the house I grew up in, the railroad built, the railroad sold to my grandfather and which was financed by the railroad

--

was on the southwest corner of Baldwin Street and Pullman Avenue. Tree lined streets with gas lights scattered on the corners, the pecan trees around our neighborhood providing broad shady pools to fuss away our summer afternoons and

,

as mom made red Kool-Aid and oatmeal cookies almost every day

, we

bounced through life on a sugar-high. And I have to say that the girl next door wouldn't have been my first choice, but Nancy-Sue Travis turned out to be my playmate of the mouth when it mattered most, a sweet soul who opened up the world of possibilities only a girl can show a boy.

She took me places in my mind I never knew existed, and we walked hand in hand under summer stars, always ready to explore the new terrain she constantly seemed to invent. I knew every inch of her, memorized her landscapes with my fingers and oh, how I loved her lips. I found my humanity within the warmth of those lips, began to see a world of possibilities beyond the contours of need, and we would sit out there under the dome of the sky -- counting stars, I think -- wondering what was out there in all that empty space. Realizing how small we were, yet how impossibly big life was.

When I left for Austin, Nancy-Sue had just started to work at the café, waiting the counter and, I guess, waiting for her expiration date to roll around. I heard from her once my freshman year, but didn't even open the letter. Change, you see, had come calling and I was already on that train, disappearing into the night as fast as I could -- and while I never heard from her again, I'm not sure I even once looked back.

+++++

I've already mentioned Andy. As in Andy Ainley, the First Officer during my first month at Sheep Shit. He was, prior to his own meeting in Newport Beach, an FO for Qantas -- until he displayed an attitude, an unofficially unapproved attitude, one day on the flight deck. His crime, according to his version of events, was finding that the captain had staggered to work while three sheets to the wind, and then reporting this little gem of information to the office. I never checked out his version of events, but I know the folks at Qantas reasonably well and I'd like to hear both sides before making a decision. That said, I commiserated but doubted the hell out of his story; beyond that I didn't really give a rat's ass. He was a born natural in the cockpit, his instincts were spot on and he had a soft hand on the stick. Pleasant to be around and proficient...what more is there?

As our flights were so long, and

over water

, we were required to carry a third crew member, and on my first few flights we were joined by one André Dufour, late of Air France and a veteran of an even more storied carrier than Sheep Shit: Air Afrique. He flew Caravelles and the 742M from Paris to Dakar for decades, but after 11 September he moved back to France and went to work for Air France, started flying the -400 freighter. Until he broke their age barrier, that is, and had to retire. With more than a few years flying cargo available to him, in short order he found himself in Newport Beach, too. He'd been in Perth a few months when I arrived, and was quite a character: our very own Mr Mystery Man...

Flying sheep didn't bother André, not really. While flying commercial traffic in equatorial Africa, he ran across more than a few hygiene challenged passengers -- and their cargo -- so much so that the first wave of sheep shit to wash over his

Gallic

nose didn't elicit much more than a shrug. And André didn't like flying people as much as cargo, because passengers griped about his flying style, which was, well, in a word: rough. Commercial pilots (and their autopilots) are trained to fly with a soft hand, to make gentle corrections -- so as not to scare the everlovin' do-do out of little old ladies knitting back in coach. To put things in perspective, André did not care about these little old ladies. André liked to fly. He lived to fly. If he ever had an opportunity to do barrel rolls in a 747 he surely would have -- with a shit-eating grin on his face, too. I might have called André a man's man, or a pilot's pilot, but he was as gay as they come, the worst kind of overtly effeminate, in-your-face gay I'd ever run across. Then Ainley whispered in my ear: "He likes to dress up...you know...like a dame. Like he's some kind of 1940's Hollywood starlet..."

Uh-huh. Okay. Sure. Whatever you say, Andy. On my third flight to SA I saw André in the head trying on mascara, checking his face in the old mirror.

"Well, what do you think?" he asked, and yeah, more than a little coquettishly.

I stopped and looked at him, appraised the look for a moment. "Depends on what you're going for," I said, trying my best not to bust out laughing.

"Like a whore on the Place Pigalle, about to get on my knees," he shot back -- and a little too defiantly, I thought.

"Well then, a little more eyeliner and I think you're there."

He smiled at my response and, having made his point -- that things between us were out in the open now -- I guess he was happy. André didn't like closets, didn't like hiding in them or living in one, so what the hell...more power to 'em, ya know? C'est la vie and all that. As long as he didn't try to fly in those six inch heels...?

At any rate, yesterday we put down at King Khalid and taxied to the cargo ramps on the north side of the field, and after we shut down trucks moved up and our sheep were escorted off the aircraft. Soon the disinfecting crew was working through the cabin and, as it was now safe to pull bandanas from noses, we wrapped up paperwork and were just getting ready to leave for the Marriott when there came a knock on the door.