For how long has mankind gazed across the water and wondered what lies beyond the horizon? For how many millennia have we listened to the wind blowing off the ocean and thought to harness it, raising sails and pushing off familiar shores for the unknown? It is no accident that many pilots, particularly floatplane pilots, are drawn to sailing, for they belong to the same tradition.
As I sit, swaying softly at anchor in my sailboat, a de Havilland Beaver floatplane passes overhead, low, skirting the green flanks of the Gulf Islands, its R-985 Wasp Junior radial engine growling like a reverberation of the past. This engine, this aircraft, are both relics of the golden age of flying boats. The engine was first built in the 1930’s and along with the Beaver airframe it still plies the length and breadth of British Columbia’s West Coast where I began my flying carrier. I reflect on my days flying the Beaver before I graduated to the DHC3T Turbine Otter and then the Twin Otter, and on the incomparable feeling of transitioning from sea to sky in an airplane. While taxiing, you must think like a sailor, for you must contend with wind and current while docking. While airborne you must be able to read the vagaries of the water and the subtle dialect written on its face by the brush of the wind. It is an intimate thing, as is the slow unfurling of landscapes passing beneath your floats at low altitudes, so unlike cruising high above the Earth in a jet and confined to a network of airways and runways.
There is something unique in the interplay of wind and water that beckons to the nomadic impulse that drives human exploration. It is the muse that drove the pioneers of aviation and it resides in those of us that memorialize them. It is fanned to life every time I feel the staccato of waves slapping floats, accelerating, then attenuating, then ceasing, as the machine lifts skywards.
Floatplane pilots reside in this history, as do sailors. It is a history that grows with each of us, every time we push off of a dock or haul on a halyard, for history is as organic as the air that carries us and the wind that pulls us across the water.
History can be forgotten, but it cannot be escaped. For what is history but the telling of stories that are played out by the forces of human nature. As much as the world may change, as much as aircraft and technology may evolve, human nature remains constant, which is why we will forever see the same patterns repeating. The intrepid men and women who piloted the first flying boats and tested their mettle against the forces of wind and waves left behind a legacy for those of us that follow in their footsteps. But we are all responding to the same call. There is nothing more atavistic in human nature than the call of the horizon, the murmur of the wind blowing off the water from places unknown, whispering of distant shores. This song harmonizes with something as old as humanity. It is in our blood. It is in our bones. It is inescapable. And it breathes meaning into what we do every time we take to the sea, and rise above it, pulled skyward by the power of human ingenuity, chasing the siren song of discovery.
To the restless, to the wayfaring, to the pioneers throughout the ages, I thank you. The echoes of your journeys resound today in the crash of the surf, in the thrum of sails, in the snarl of engines on the sea and in the sky. You survive in the heartbeats of all of us who dream of the unknown.
Comments