Many people possess stories about how they nearly died. Similar and unique stories regarding near-death encounters are countless—violent accidents, deadly illnesses, grotesque injures, dangerous defects. The horrible stories emphatically describe the frailty of each and every one of us. It seems that death gives no quarter, stalking our race at every turn. My story is similar, but it tells me of a new, better way to exist. It does not tell me to hopelessly exist, to pointlessly exist. My story is of hope, a confirmation of a certain truth. My story begins nearly three-and-a-half years ago.
I stood on a tarmac, proud stare directed across Ephrata's dusty, crusted landscape. Not even possessing a driver's permit, I prepared to take to the air. Fellow comrades, cadets of the United States Air Force's auxiliary, purposefully moved about. We were at flight school, a basic glider encampment program offered through Civil Air Patrol. With the assistance of a few grizzled adults, a jerry-rigged tow truck, a white twelve-passenger van, and an aluminum-framed, canvas-skinned sailplane, we were to conquer the heavens.
Excited cadets moved toward the soaring jalopy and positioned it on the runway. For the next few hours, I, as all the other cadets, alternated between steadying the glider's wings and tail during the takeoff's onset, recovering the dropped tow cable's chute with the truck, ridding in the van to pick up and shade cadets who steadied the glider, and piloting the sailplane with Major McKinnon, our primary flight instructor, as copilot.
As those hours passed, I focused on my labors, sweating freely and sipping gingerly at the somehow sparring water bottles, but my turn came soon enough.
Someone called out, “Cadet Mullins!”
I glanced over, “Yes, Sergeant.”
“You're up,” shrugging off a slap to my back.
I nodded.
“Eh-hm,” he hinted.
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said, smile curving my lips slightly.
He departed with another slap to my back and toothy grin.
I exhaled deeply, depositing my water bottle in the cab of the aged and peeling van, and headed over to the glider as three cadets wheeled it into position. This was not my first time up, nor my second nor my third. It was nothing new. I knew the general routine of the flight and knew—well, almost knew—all of the checklist details. If I forgot something, Major McKinnon would back me up, just as he had reminded us in the classroom, just as he had reminded throughout the day on the tarmac.
We went through the checklist, and as I expected, I fumbled on a few details, and as he said he would do, he briefed me on the missed or confused details. I bobbed my head in understanding.
“You ready, Cadet,” his voice of sixty plus years rasped.
I nodded once again. I may have lied. Though inexcusable, is not lying that which we all do when unsure, proud, or fearful?
As McKinnon watched quietly from the copilot's seat, I strapped on my harness, tested the different flight control surfaces, and communicated the go-ahead to a fellow cadet waiting just outside the cockpit. His muffled voice sent the cadets scrambling into position, leveling wings and tail and cabling the glider to the tow truck. Thumbs up—we were go. I thumbed back an affirmative. The tow truck chugged forward, easing up to takeoff velocity. Quickly, the chaperoning cadets dropped back as I leveled out the aircraft on its mono-wheel landing piece. Faster, faster—we hovered off the ground.
“Let's take her up,” McKinnon said.
Very quickly now, we shot into the air, a thirty-five to forty degree incline that put us at the cable release altitude within a few seconds. At nine hundred feet, I released the cable.
“Release.” Cli-clank.
A sudden up and down motion confirmed the cable's release. Now, remember that this was not my first time up. The novelty of realizing that I was held up by nothing more than air—merely physics, if anyone can ever describe such an awesome thing as flight with such an insensitive phrase—sometimes escaped me, and on this flight, it did. Though the seemingly illogical and amazing reality of many hundreds of pounds of flesh and bone, canvas and aluminum, floating effortlessly through the air avoided me at the time, I did not escape—and if I am so blessed, I shall never forget—the beauty that flight showed to me. Everything was gorgeous. The landscape east of Mt. Rainier, dry and barren, mysterious and martian, exciting and exhilarating, can never be appreciated by the woefully limited minds in our possession. Our minds can only comprehend so much of the beauty that so bountifully carpets the world around us. I was awestruck.
“Beautiful, isn't it,” Major McKinnon spoke, softly.
“Yes, sir” was all I mustered.
McKinnon brought me out of my muse.
“Okay, Cadet, let's bring her around.”
I responded with yoke and rudder pedals. We banked and looked down at the cadets and vehicles far below.
So small and yet so close, I marveled. So close.
Then I remembered how close we actually were, that we were definitely no more than nine hundred feet up—nature dictating that we came down—that we were really ridding in a big, stiff-winged egg shell in a controlled fall. I reacted.
Tacking on over- to reaction better defines my response. I pulled back on the yoke too much, too quickly, or a little of both. Within a few seconds, I lost control. We stalled and dove back toward the earth. My stiff hands continued grasping the yoke as my thoughts drifted to a new reality, one in nearly polar opposition to the beauty of the earth. That reality was death. Death really did seem right there, down there on the ground, opening its mouth. At that moment, I was literally falling to my doom.
But I can remember a voice.
“Let go!”
And I did.
In nearly the same amount of time it took for me to doom myself, he rescued me. From the rear of that cockpit, Major McKinnon pulled me from certain destruction. He saved me.
If I had held on to that yoke, I may not have been here today. Salvation came with trust, offering up control of something I did not know how to control and could not control. To hold on was to damn myself. The pride that I felt while standing on the tarmac could not save me; the hard work that I did while biding my time could not save me; the exhilaration that I felt while taking in the beauty of nature could not save me; the preparation that I had taken beforehand could not save me. I could not save myself. As it turns out, I actually needed to be saved from myself. I needed someone who did not have the same weakness as I did. I needed someone else to save me, and when I took my misplaced trust in self and gave it to him, he saved me, straight away.
