| Monday, January 12, 2004 |
09:53 - For the record
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Know what rules?
Flying.
Particularly in a Cessna; particularly up the coast to Ukiah, where I grew up, to meet my parents on the tarmac for lunch before turning around and making the leisurely 90-minute return journey to the South Bay. Particularly when you get to 6,000 feet, and can see every landmark between the Golden Gate Bridge and Ukiah, including Snow Mountain, Mt. Konocti, Clear Lake, Mt. St. Helena and its geysers right up close, and the whole snowcapped line of the Sierras off to the east, beyond the impenetrable sea of fog that is the Central Valley. And particularly when you can see Ukiah's whole geographical shape from the air by the time you're over Healdsburg-- a town that seemed exotically distant when Ukiah's hills were the boundary of my life-- which makes the whole area seem eerily miniscule when you land. (I'd always thought Snow Mountain was terribly far away-- you can see it from the Ukiahi campus, the only snow-covered eminence on the horizon during the winter, and endearingly forthrightly named. But when you can see it lurking in the northeast all the way up from San Jose, and it's so close you can reach out and touch it by the time you start the final approach, it makes the whole region feel like... a model of a landscape, or something. Every hill is now a foothill. Every ridge is a step and a hop away.)
Know what else rules?
Having a roommate who just got his private pilot's license, and is looking for any excuse to put it to good use.
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Brian Tiemann
