Chapter 4

“That’s it?” Carlos asked, raising his eyebrows at the nearly empty U-Haul.

I’d loaded up the truck with all my possessions and driven it to the loading dock of my new apartment in Palo Alto. It wasn’t much. All the furniture in Berkeley belonged to Ben. I’d reserved the freight elevator for four hours that day, but I was only going to need about thirty minutes tops.

I shoved a box against the padded elevator wall and shrugged. “I was couch-surfing for a month in 1979, so I learned to never buy more stuff than I could carry.”

He hefted one of the boxes and rested it on the edge of a potted plant. “You can carry this? It’s sure heavy.”

“Books,” I said. “I collect lots of books. But since I can pack them in small boxes, it’s okay.” I didn’t tell Carlos I still had all my grad school textbooks in those boxes. Sometimes I’d thought about selling them, since the odds of ever returning to the PhD program seemed slim, but the finality of that made me ache. It meant openly admitting my failure. So instead, I lugged them around with me wherever I went.

“And now you own an airplane.”

I grinned. “That’s okay too, because it can carry me.”

It was a Saturday, and we’d taken a break from flying so he could help me move into my new place. Due to our shared fanaticism about flying, Carlos and I had been hanging out together often after work and on the weekends to talk aviation and fly my new plane. My budget could stretch to accommodate a lot more flying now that I didn’t have to pay for aircraft rentals. And the Cessna 150 was significantly cheaper to operate. Sure, it was a little slow for an airplane, topping out at about a hundred miles per hour. But that was fine for now.

It had been a rough couple of weeks with Ben in Berkeley. He hadn’t said a word as I packed up all my clothes in one large box and my stacks of books and notebooks in many small ones. I was secretly hoping he’d come right out and ask me to stay. But he never did. I think now that he was in too much pain to talk. But at the time, I told myself he didn’t care enough to tell me not to go. I hesitated before the final trip out to the U-Haul. “Do you want me to leave my keys?”

He tightened his lips and shook his head.

Maybe that was a signal he wanted to keep a link between us. “Sure you don’t want to find a place halfway between both of our jobs?” I asked one more time.

He scowled. “Who wants to live in Hayward?”

I sighed. It was the same old impasse. I carried the last box out to the U-Haul and started the engine. I wasn’t sure if I was angry or sad, excited or depressed, or maybe all of the above.

My willingness to pack up and move had deep roots. My father thought nothing of packing up the entire family and dragging us halfway across the world to new academic positions, physics conferences, sabbaticals, or lecture series. We moved sixteen times in sixteen years. It was assumed that a physicist with a thriving career would move whenever needed, and his wife and children were supposed to follow along without complaint. But on top of the career-related relocations, my father possessed an internal restlessness. When we’d finally be settled in a town, he’d find fault with each house and uproot us every year or two. From kindergarten in 1965 through my senior year in high school in 1976, I never attended the same school more than two years in a row. I came away with a constant feeling of rootlessness, an inability to belong.

Maybe that was part of why I’d been willing to leave my husband even though I still loved him. While I knew it hurt him. I, too, was restless, driven by the imperative to become the best I could be. Yet that imperative was in direct conflict with my mother’s desire for me to be good, to be small. Not because she wanted less of me, but because she loved me and knew the danger women faced when they tried to take up more space, or in my case, to be brilliant in a male-dominated career like math or science. I desperately wanted a larger life, so in the end I left, but not without feeling guilty.

Ben, unlike me, was rooted in white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant traditionalism. His parents traced their ancestry back through several generations of Americans, through Scottish and German roots. His mother was an Ohio farm girl, his father a Korean War veteran and a general in the Air Force. His father spent long hours at work as an engineer and rocket scientist, returning late at night to his wife and children. His mother quit her job when she married and stayed home as a military wife from then on. Despite his father’s military background, Ben had moved far less frequently than I.

I was attracted to Ben’s nonconformism, but when we got married, his traditional side emerged. He stopped sharing his feelings with me. He arrived home after a long day on the job wanting only to discuss the interesting engineering problems he had solved that day. He stopped asking about my work and my interests. It was as though I was supposed to be quiet, be good, be someone more like his mother.

I wondered if Ben’s interest in me had been a final act of rebellion against his parents. I wasn’t used to living with someone white, someone who preferred silence over conflict, who didn’t speak about feelings. My own family was boisterous and exuberant at home, shouting over each other at the dinner table. Everyone served themselves, reaching right past others’ plates. My mother sang, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” as she pulled dishes out of the oven and plopped them directly onto the kitchen table.

At Ben’s parents’ house, on the other hand, food was scooped into formal serving dishes. You never used an oven dish on the dining table. You had to politely ask, “Please pass the pot roast,” and no one ever interrupted. Singing? It was almost a capital offense. Ben became disturbed if I hummed at the table.

Despite my having moved more than thirty times by then, this particular move, at age twenty-five, was the first into my very own place. It was the most beautiful apartment I’d ever lived in. On the fifteenth floor of a brand-new tower in Palo Alto, every window framed a panoramic view of the city and San Francisco Bay. After Carlos finished helping me move in, I stood on the balcony and breathed in the clear air. This perch, this high-up place of my own, felt like something I’d been searching for without ever knowing it.

At last I wasn’t dependent on anyone else, financially or emotionally.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own,” Virginia Woolf had famously said. I finally had both. Nevertheless, it was scary and went against everything I’d been taught. I was supposed to get married and be dependent on a man. As usual, my feelings were a mass of contradictions, and despite my longing for freedom, I felt guilty about the separation from Ben.

Mine was the only signature on the lease, and no one else had a key to my apartment. Going solo was thrilling and scary at the same time.

The prospect of my first solo flight was also on my mind during these early days in my new apartment.

“Is Brad going to solo you soon?” Carlos asked me the next week at work.

Carlos’s comment brought me down to earth like a hard landing, and I resorted to my usual defense mechanisms. Brad hadn’t said anything about letting me fly on my own. “I’m probably not ready yet,” I rationalized.

“You’ve got seventeen hours of flight time. That’s more than enough.”

I’d been looking forward to my first solo with a mixture of dread and anticipation ever since I’d started flying. All the books and magazines I read spoke of it as a milestone.

Carlos talked reverently of his first solo experience. “I took off for the first time alone, and as I reached pattern altitude and saw the world spreading out below me”—he made a sweeping gesture with his arm, eyes fixed on the far distance—“I knew that one day I’d fly everywhere I could see.”

Sometimes I wasn’t sure I’d ever get good enough to solo. Brad’s reluctance to solo me at the usual time was just confirmation of my lack of ability. I’d always seen myself as clumsy at operating mechanical devices. I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was eleven because I was so scared of tipping over that I couldn’t lift my feet onto the pedals. My driver’s education teacher snorted over my attempts at parallel parking. Until I got the job at DEC, I’d resisted driving, taking the bus all over the Bay Area, even though I witnessed gambling, theft, knife fights, and even the attempted murder of a bus driver by a passenger one day.

The irony was that I was more scared of operating a motor vehicle on my own than I was of getting knifed on the bus. I trusted myself less than a knife-wielding stranger. I didn’t believe I was competent enough to drive a car, so how could I possibly manage the complicated task of operating an airplane? A car navigated in two dimensions; an airplane in three—and the complexity of air navigation was unimaginable. I’d need to use both hands and both feet to fly the airplane. To solo, I’d need to be able to land. Up in the air, I was doing well as long as I got it right within fifty or a hundred feet. Landing demanded accuracy within two to five feet.

It wasn’t a problem flying with my instructor beside me. He’d be there to catch any errors, to make sure the plane landed safely. He was my safety net and my security blanket. But someday I’d have to fly without an instructor.

By the time I had twenty hours logged in the airplane, even I could see that I was landing the plane smoothly and correctly every time. Brad never had to touch the controls. During each of our lessons after that magical twenty-hour mark, I half-expected him to suggest that it was time for me to solo. But he never did.

At first, I was grateful Brad wasn’t pushing me, that he was allowing me time to hone my skills to be absolutely sure I’d be safe. But as my twenty-five-hour mark approached, I was getting frustrated seeing my bills mount up as we waited in line for takeoff. Brad whistled as he stared out the window, joked with the air traffic controllers on the radio, and after every lesson eagerly wrote down another hour in his logbook.

When I completed twenty-five hours, I finally broached the subject with him. His eyes flicked away from me. “I’m just waiting until you can land perfectly,” he said.

It was then that I realized Brad had never soloed a student. It’s a big step for an instructor. Maybe he was nervous. Or could it be he was especially nervous about me? He’d been making a lot of jokes recently, even passing around a cartoon that showed two airplanes labeled His and Hers. His was pristine and clean, while Hers was dinged up and dented. I’d laughed obligingly, like the time I had to force a laugh when the male programmers told the math joke about “pretty little Polly Nomial,” who essentially gets raped by “Curly Pi.” In the eighties, women who didn’t laugh at such jokes were called humorless prudes, and the phrase “gender harassment” didn’t exist.

And sexist jokes weren’t the only ones Brad found funny. After my lesson one day, he and a couple of other instructors in the flight lounge were chuckling about the foibles of another student. “I’d be careful with Rajiv,” one said. “Every time I’ve flown with guys from his neck of the woods, I found they just can’t seem to pick up the skills very well. I don’t know what it is. Maybe because they’re only used to riding camels or something.”

Watching the three blond men laughing together reminded me of Don Schwartz and his friends. I shook myself in irritation. That was crazy. They were nothing alike.

When I passed thirty hours in my logbook, and still no solo, I knew I had to take action. If I didn’t speak up, I might never move forward. I steeled myself, my mouth dry. “Brad,” I said, “I think I’m ready to solo.” Inside, I felt lousy. It wasn’t the magical solo experience so many pilots spoke of.

Brad looked away. “Um, let’s see how you do today, and we’ll see.”

That day, we spent over two hours in the air going through all the maneuvers one more time, doing landing after landing. Brad could find no fault with anything I did.

“I’m ready, Brad,” I said confidently.

Finally, after spending about five minutes on the taxiway with the engine idling, while he repeated that the plane would fly differently without his two hundred pounds in the right seat, he finally got out.

After he closed the door, I glanced all around the cockpit. There was no one to rely on but me. My breath quickened more from excitement than fear. Then I took off in a plane alone for the first time—in the plane I alone owned.

As I climbed into the air, the plane felt light and vibrant. The sun glittered on the waves of the bay, and shimmered in the haze to the north, toward San Francisco. At last, I was taking the first step into a wider world. Sure, I could use the plane to travel to distant places, but what mattered more was that I was flying, dancing in the air, despite what everyone had told me, despite what I had told myself. I gently caressed the control yoke and the rudders, making a small secret turn to the left and then one to the right, too small to be detected by the tower, and I grinned.

But trusting my own abilities was only the first step. I didn’t want to be like the thousands of pilots who stopped at first solo, never to complete their license. I wanted to get my private pilot license, which was a daunting task. There was a long road from first solo to private pilot flight test, and it didn’t look like Brad was going to get me there. So despite agonizing over hurting his feelings, I had to switch instructors. When I finally informed Brad of my decision, I heard my mother’s voice in my head. “Cecilia, a woman needs to be nice. Aren’t you being selfish?”

If I stayed “good,” I would never get my license. Statistics show that women drop out of pilot training at a significantly higher rate than men. When I heard that, I decided, once again, that I had no use for being good.

I found another instructor—an experienced, salty pilot named Janet Michaels. She’d accumulated over five thousand hours and managed another flying club on the field. I was eager to fly with a woman pilot. Unfortunately, because of her job as club manager, she could only fly on weekends.

Everyone at the airport knew Janet. She bragged about having the keys to “over fifty airplanes on the field.” She informed me she used to teach aerobatics. Intrigued, I asked her for more stories. She shrugged. “I quit because I got tired of washing vomit out of my hair.”

I kept after her until she agreed to take me on as her student.

One Saturday in January 1986, I flew with Janet for the first time in One Niner Seven. Looking back, I think she only agreed because she was hoping that I would lease the Cessna 150 to her flight school. She was full of praise for my tattered airplane, but not so much for my flying.

“Flying is more than the rote memorization of numbers,” Janet said as we taxied in after our flight. “You have to understand how the pressures in the control yoke and the rudders change as your airspeed changes. Basically, you need a direct feedback loop between the controls and your brain. You don’t have that,” she said bluntly.

I knew she was right. I flew mechanically. I knew how to apply delicate touches to the controls so the instruments read exactly right, and I had memorized all the rules and guidelines and airspeeds. The indicator needle never deviated. I flew all the recommended speeds for takeoff, cruise, slow flight, and landing. In short, I had a lot of book learning about the airplane, but I still hadn’t connected it to my body: I had no “feel” for the aerodynamics of flight. And without that feel, even a few seconds of distraction while flying could prove dangerous.

After the lesson with Janet, I was shaking and sweating as I shut down the engine. As she walked away, leaving me to tie down the airplane, tears leaked out of my eyes. Maybe I just didn’t have the talent it took to be a pilot. Maybe I should give up after all.

But still, I went back the next week and the week after that. I might not be talented, but I was persistent. I absorbed more from Janet in a couple of flights than I’d learned in many hours with Brad. I admired her so much that I developed a secret fascination with aerobatics. Of course, that kind of flying was so far beyond my abilities that I knew I could never even try it. But I admired from afar the pilots who flew loops and spins and rolls, who soared straight up into the air and then dove back down to the earth at startling speeds. I tried to book as many lessons as possible with Janet, but she was so busy that I couldn’t fly with her often enough to complete my license.

To finish the training, I’d need to find another instructor. Hank Kendall was a former commuter airline pilot who realized that flight instruction paid better than flying commuter jets. “You can’t live on eight hundred dollars a month, especially when they want you to be available to fly seven days a week,” he told me as we waited for the fuel truck after preflighting one morning.

Hank took being an instructor seriously. He charged twenty-five dollars an hour, significantly higher than Brad’s eighteen per hour, and charged based on “block time.” This meant that he looked at his watch the moment he sat down with me in one of the little classrooms at the flight school, and again at the end of the “block,” or lesson, when he closed my logbook. The difference between the two was the amount of time he charged. It didn’t matter if we were chatting or using the bathroom; he charged for all his time.

At first, I balked. At that time it was conventional for instructors to charge only for time in the plane. But after I had flown with him just once, I could see the difference. Hank explained everything thoroughly on the ground before we went up in the air. “The cockpit is a lousy classroom,” he said.

He was right. His explanations on the ground translated into easier comprehension in the air. I began to understand how aerodynamics and flying really worked, although I was still lacking the “feel” of the airplane.

Hank owned an intercom and a pair of high-quality headsets he insisted we use on every flight. Not only did my headaches and the ringing in my ears subside, but I could actually hear Hank’s directions. It was also easier to understand the tower. Plus, I found that without the constant battering of engine noise on my ears, I felt calmer on the flights.

All told, I’d fly only eleven flights with Hank, far fewer than the thirty-­four I flew with Brad, but Hank was the one who really prepared me to become a private pilot.

From Hank, I learned the value of quality teaching. He taught people how to fly, rather than leaving them to figure it out themselves. Up until then, I’d believed that books were often better teachers than humans and that teachers frequently got in the way of learning. But Hank’s thorough ground explanations led to rapid progress in the air, and maybe more importantly, Hank expected me to excel, unlike Brad, who always assumed I’d struggle.

* * *

During my sophomore year in high school, I learned firsthand that a teacher’s expectations matter, regardless of subject area or student age. Our family had accompanied my father on sabbatical to Germany, where I didn’t know the language. One of my teachers assumed I’d never master the material and simply told me to sit in the back and be quiet. But my French teacher insisted I do all the work, found me a tutor, and graded all my exams. All tenth graders in this German school took the same classes, so I was placed in fourth-year French even though I didn’t know a word of the language. It was laughable when my teacher handed back German-to-French translations covered with red ink. How could she possibly expect a girl who barely spoke German and had never studied French to learn anything in her class?

Yet, goaded by her relentless encouragement, I did begin to learn. At the start of the second semester, she actually congratulated me when she handed back my test. I’d gotten the equivalent of a D-minus. My first passing grade in that class.

By the end of the school year, I’d not only caught up with the rest of the class, I was one of the top three students in French. My dad told me his buttons were popping. I’d picked up four years of high school French in a single year—in a class taught entirely in German.

As for the other teacher’s class, I don’t even remember what we covered that year. The teacher never bothered to grade my work, and I failed. It was a perfect laboratory experiment: all variables were held the same, except for one. I was the same person in both classes, and the only difference was what the teachers expected of me.

It was like a math formula. Low expectations produced low results. In the mathematical theory of complex systems, one teacher created a closed system, and the other an open system. My French teacher encouraged me to create complex structures in order to grow. She poured energy into her teaching, and I couldn’t help but respond. Could I apply those same principles of complex systems to overcome my fears and get my pilot’s license?

* * *

One major hurdle still remained, however. The private pilot certificate required twenty hours of solo flight time. But every time I drove to the Palo Alto airport, past the tiny building that housed the start-up Adobe Systems, and saw a Cessna coming in for a landing, my hands clenched on the steering wheel, and part of me hoped that my instructor would be sick or the airplane would be down for maintenance so that I wouldn’t have to fly that day.

Yet each time I landed, I was so exhilarated that I’d eagerly schedule another lesson. I couldn’t cancel it without disappointing my instructor or getting charged for the flight. These were powerful incentives to help me get over my fear. Research has shown that this kind of technique can be very effective. Facing my fear might be painful, but it was the only way I would become the person I wanted to be. I had to deliberately set up structures—what I called “scaffolds”—that would force me to keep flying.

Approaching it rationally, I knew my fears were mostly groundless. I studied the aviation accident statistics. Most of them were caused by pilot error, and 30 percent were alcohol related. So, if I always followed the law of “eight hours from bottle to throttle,” my chances of surviving instantly leaped.

I calculated the ratio between joy and risk. It might have been safer for me to stay at home. But a colleague’s neighbor in the Oakland Hills had been killed lying in bed one night when a tree blew over and fell on his house. So a safe life could kill me just as surely as flying.

I had a deep longing to grow. This longing resonated with a fundamental thermodynamic principle I’d studied as an undergraduate at Caltech, for which a physical chemist named Ilya Prigogine had won the Nobel Prize. Essentially, open systems which exchange energy with their environment, of which living organisms are a prime example, will create ever more complex structures, known as “dissipative structures,” in order to grow. It’s a defining element of the nature of the universe, like poet Dylan Thomas’s “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Just as a plant builds cellular structures that can grow through rock, or as mathematics creates structures to shape thought, I was building mental structures to help me escape my cage of fear. Scheduling flights with an instructor was an important part of that process.

To hold myself accountable, I promised Hank I’d fly solo the day after each lesson. He wrote out the maneuvers for me to practice. One that particularly petrified me was known as a “stall.” This didn’t mean that the engine quits, but that the wing ceases to produce lift and the airplane stops flying. Learning how to handle a plane in a stall is crucial to flying at slow speeds in preparation for landing. I was also required to demonstrate stalls and recovery from stalls for the private pilot flight test. Book learning wouldn’t get me out of this one.

Stalls were absolutely terrifying. I had only recently learned to trust that the long and elegant wings of my airplane would smoothly glide on their cushion of air and keep me aloft. Now I was going to deliberately induce them to stop doing that?

“I want you to practice steep turns, slow flight, and most importantly, stalls,” Hank told me one day at the end of a lesson. “Next time I see you, I want you to report to me what you’ve done.”

The next day, just as I had promised, I went up for a solo flight. In the practice area, I did some careful clearing turns. The California hills were green at this time of year after the wet winter, and the pale sun shone over their soft undulations. Everything smelled fresh and new with approaching spring. Acacia trees blossomed bright yellow, daffodils lined the fields, and forests shone in light-green swathes.

Okay, steep turns. I could do that. Carefully scanning the instrument that measured pitch attitude and bank angle, I banked so the little dial read 45 degrees, pulled back on the yoke just enough to keep my altitude, and completed a full 360. Now to the right. Slow flight. I could do that too by going through the procedure mechanically, reducing power, and then increasing it. Okay, done. More clearing turns. It’s important to know if there’s another aircraft in the practice area. I’m just being safe by making three or four clearing turns.

Now, time to do a stall.

Better do a few more clearing turns first. That’s really important.

Now it’s definitely time for a stall.

I gritted my teeth, reduced the throttle, and gradually raised the nose, my palms slick with sweat on the black plastic handgrips. It suddenly got way too quiet in the cockpit as the airflow past the fuselage diminished. I pulled the yoke nearly all the way back to the stop, and my biceps trembled from the exertion. The plane rattled. I smelled gasoline in the cockpit. The stall warning horn blared like an omen of imminent peril. The stall was about to happen … about to happen.

Finally, I felt a sickening lurch in my stomach that meant the plane had stopped flying. The nose dropped, and I immediately shoved the yoke forward, pointing the plane at the ground.

The controls stopped shuddering, and I added throttle and gained airspeed. Air whooshed past the wings, and the wind and engine noise built back up into a roar. I dove at the ground thousands of feet below, trying not to think about smashing into the earth beneath me.

Then I pulled up into a climb to regain the lost altitude.

My heart pounded furiously. I’d done it. I’d completed my first solo stall.

I breathed deeply, shivering a little.

Time to head back to the airport and recover. Yes, at last.

Oh, but wait. If I went back now, I’d have to admit to Hank that I’d only done one stall. He’d said stalls—plural.

I argued with myself for a couple of minutes and did a few more clearing turns, just to be safe.

Finally I steeled myself, went through the process one more time, and did another very gentle stall.

Done!

I flew back to the airport in triumph. The next day, I was able to look Hank straight in the eyes and say that, yes, I had done steep turns, slow flight, and stalls. Plural.