074: let go, let fly, forget

cumulonimbus clouds v. small aircraft, childhood best friends, leaving a job + Seamus Heany + read to the end for a photo of angelic children

Has it ever struck you as odd that the phrase “talking about the weather” means “talking about something boring?” Weather is one of the most unpredictable and consequential forces in our lives—this is an idiom without an antecedent.

Recently, I learned that clouds are so dangerous to aircraft that aviation regulations require extra training before pilots are allowed to navigate them. Clouds are, at best, airborne potholes caused by contrasts in air density that make a plane bump up and down. At their worst, they can be sources of atmospheric instability strong enough to break its wings.

One of the causes of this “clear air turbulence” is named for the 19th century German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholt, a guy who almost certainly had tobacco stains in his beard and who wrote, extremely poetically, that “every perfect geometrically sharp edge by which a fluid flows must tear it asunder and establish a surface of separation, however slowly the fluid may move” (source). Put more simply: vertical wind shear causes instability in the air, making it flow in waves. And not only is it invisible and destructive, it's tough to predict.

If the turbulent mixing caused by KHI sufficiently weakens the background wind shear, the turbulence will decay and the flow will again become laminar. However, if turbulent mixing strengthens the wind shears near the boundaries of the old turbulence layer then new KHI may develop.

I had to look up “laminar:” it means that the gas or liquid—in this case the air— is flowing smoothly and regularly with “little or no mixing.” So that sometimes, an instance of atmospheric disruption resolves itself quickly and you go about your business. Other times it doesn’t and things can get exponentially worse.

So if you're the pilot of a single-engine airplane, this is a big deal. You can be out there sticking to your flight plan, keeping one eye on your iPad-as-instrument-panel and the other on the horizon, doing everything you know how to do, and it doesn’t matter—you could still hit the kind of turbulence that could break you into pieces.

Last week, I flew (in a very large airplane powerful enough to ascend above the clouds) from Boston to Texas. I started in Dallas, where I got to hang out with my sister and my two childhood best friends, and then went on to do a work thing in Austin. Just like last year, the light-filled southern spring blew my mind. All of nature was arrayed for our pleasure: the phthalo green-yellow leaves that Robert Frost wrote about, the branches “creaming in every blossom” that Zora Neal Hurston wrote about, the elegant limbs of redbud, criss-crossing the lacy green woodlands. I would rather hide in the back of my fetid New England garage than visit Texas in the heat of summer, but spring is a whole other matter.

I was all set for a vitamin-dose of sunshine, tacos and friendship, timed to help mitigate mud season in Vermont. It was a good flight plan, with all of the best intentions.

*

The safest and most comfortable place I can think of to be, is in a room with my sister and our two childhood best friends. I am the oldest, and the youngest of us was born when I was 3. Over the years, we slept in the same beds, sang “Silent Night” while dressed up as angels, rode together in the back of a Ford Pinto, floated on tractor tire inner tubes in snow-fed rivers, criss-crossed Wyoming in yellow school-busses, and drove 95 mph on the Montana autobahn listening to the greatest Christian band of all time.

Then, whole decades went by, with maybe a visit once every three or four years, or even longer. Lately, we’ve managed to meet up more frequently. Whatever the interval, being with them is the perfect balance of interest and trust. We get each other and we have each other’s backs. Forever.

In Dallas, we floated in a salt water pool on a rooftop with a view and ate chips made out of avocado oil and cassava flour, talking and talking and talking, working our way through the lives of our 13 children before moving on to husbands, jobs, politics and hair products. It felt as good to my soul as the sunshine felt on my skin.

But there’s this thing about feeling safe with someone that paradoxically invites emotional turbulence. One minute you’re sitting in a sports bar, sharing a Texas-sized pretzel, giggling about how someone’s college-age kid left a stick of cannabutter in the freezer which then got accidentally got fed to his much younger siblings, and the next you’re plunged into the memory of a traumatic event that happened when you were a teenager.

It’s something that parents of teenagers are especially vulnerable to, I think. You’ve reached the part of parenting that is about letting go—which is terrifying on its face—and you’re in the very weird place of watching very much loved young people have experiences very like the ones that you had when you were their age.

As we all know, some of the things that happen to teenagers are really cool: first kiss, first love, first car, first acceptance letter. Some are not so cool: first problematic experiments with alcohol or drugs, first depression, first big rejection letter, first (or God forbid, worsening) encounters with violence. These are the ones that make the ‘letting go' part so terrifying.

Either way, people who parent or spend time with teenagers are at risk of being plunged back into their own remembering—a bit like a Proustian madeleine for the middle-aged sense of self.

One of my friends hit such a moment when we were in Dallas: a simple story led to a question, which led to a memory, which quite suddenly and abruptly sucked us all in. It was a memory of a trauma—something known and worked on, but still very painful, and maybe a bit more so because we’d all let down our guard.

It came up so quickly that we—all four of us—jumped up from our seats at the same time and walked it outside. It was an emotional lightning strike that we had to contain as a team: it hit, we caught it at the origin, stabilized it, and rolled it up into a radioactive little ball. We took it back to the hotel in that state, tossing it back and forth amongst the four of us, so that nobody got burned while we made sure it didn't blow up into something bigger.

Then, safely in the hotel room, we talked the memory through, carefully working with what each of us knew about it, figuring out what needed to be neutralized, what could still be learned, and what we could heal. There was a brief moment when it seemed bigger than all of us, a helix of partial meanings, threatening to spiral into something that could be newly hurtful. But we are smarter and wiser now than we were back then, less prone to reactivity and childlike narratives, more skilled at adjusting our emotional altitude and angles, more able to wait for the flow to become laminar again.

It was an extraordinary thing to have experienced—four women, all of whom have done plenty of time mending the wounds on our souls, working together to mitigate and release the pain of the type of sharp-edged memory that can break apart even the hardiest human.

*

While I was in Austin, a friend flew in to town by way of a Cessna 182 Skylane, which is why I now know that if you are the pilot of a single-engine aircraft, it is important to avoid flying into clouds. You have to wait hours and even days for the right weather for take-off. You have to take detours which can lead to extra stops for fuel. If worse comes to worst, you might even have to do a quick, controlled turn or series of turns to drop below an area of unexpected turbulence.

It turns out you can keep track of airplanes by putting their tail number into sites like Flight-Aware, which is why I know what it looks like when a Cessna has to drop altitude extremely quickly.

My friend described his experience of this 👆🏻 as being very bored for a long time and then, for a few seconds, being very sure he was going to die.

Tracking a helix in a single-engine aircraft is difficult. When I was reading about all of this stuff online, I learned that the risk is of slipping into a “graveyard spiral,” which is a term that is self-explanatory.

When pilots find themselves in “IMC” (Instrument Meteorological Conditions) instead of VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions), they have to keep a clear head and trust their training so that they don’t over-correct. If you can manage this (which my friend and his co-pilot clearly did, or this would be a very different Substack) the next thing you do is land and wait for clearer skies. Then, you take off and try again, repeating the process again (and again) if needed, until you get where you are going.

It’s hours and hours of training, practice and patience, combined with a cultivated ability to handle sudden, dynamic atmospheric events. Which is a really stunning metaphor for life when you think about it.

*

Do you ever get that weird kind of double vision where you watch yourself being normal on the outside?

I had this weirdness when I was in Austin. On one channel I was walking around with my official-looking SXSW badge, annotating talking points, calmly ordering Ubers, and making small talk about taco trucks. In that world, I was the kind of person who remembered to apply sunscreen and to take some “me time” to drop into an independent bookstore. I was “circling back.” I was “closing the loop.” I was earning a five-star VRBO review for taking out my own recycling.

Inside my mind, it was more like the emotional love child of Babylon Berlin and and the moment before the mycelium pandemic from The Last Of Us. Or, maybe a bit like Aella from

Knowingless

:

The world feels like it’s turning and turning in the widening gyre, spinning off technicolor chaos that feels like potential or doom, depending on the moment.

There was the glittering tower of Babel that is the SXSW monument to technology, money and media, which was somehow sexy-exhilarating and horrifying-excessive at the exact same time. There was the sweet, flower-scented Texas spring which didn’t cover up the trash-choked creeks and the burned remains of homeless encampments. There were expensive craft cocktails garnished with locally sourced stone fruit that all tasted like the same kind of cough syrup. There were people hunched over laptops, frantically moving money one day, then popping champagne to celebrate a federal bank bailout the next.

I keep thinking about the roaring '20s and New York City in 2008 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. I keep wanting to buy Bitcoin. Or cigarettes and whiskey. Or both. I keep daydreaming about throwing an enormous week-long party, so I can see all of the people I love once more before we can no longer get a vaccine passport, or afford the carbon offsets, or whatever else hurdle we are probably going to have to go through in order to travel.

On the normie Courtney channel, I was (mostly) thinking about work. I was doing the thing I do every time I leave a job, which is focus extra hard. I file email that I think is important, just like I always do, even though I won’t have access to the account for much longer. I take that one last meeting with anyone who asks for it. I tie up loose ends on projects, carefully documenting the work so that it’s easier for the next person to take over. If there was an award for off-boarding, I would definitely get one. It’s the opposite of quiet quitting; I throw myself into the job that I already resigned from.

On the technicolor Courtney channel, there is a steadily increasing urgency to do brave and beautiful things with my life in whatever ways I can. I don’t want to sit around waiting for the world to get eaten by AI, or destroyed in a climate apocalypse, or run aground from ordinary bureaucratic malpractice.

The channel doubling is because I’m about to quit my job and go out on my own.

When I tell people the news, 50 percent congratulate me, and 50 percent ask me if I'm crazy. It feels like that's the right indicator of my chance of success.

Even though I know it’s the right decision, it still makes my stomach flip over every time I think about my last day and my last steady paycheck. Every perfect geometrically sharp edge by which a fluid flows must tear it asunder and establish a surface of separation, however slowly the fluid may move. The laws of physics and the Twitter prognosticators agree: volatility is everywhere. I both fear and celebrate this. I know the risks, but I also have a pretty good sense of where the glory is.

So what I’ve been doing since I got home from Texas has been the equivalent of sitting in a hangar somewhere, waiting for the best possible forecast. Soon enough, the timing is going to be right for me to do something like these lines from Seamus Heaney's “Station Island:"

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.

I’ve felt like this off and on for my whole life, but for the first time in a really long time, I’m not afraid of the risks.

Are you with me?

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My Favorite Oscars Moment

“Everything Everywhere All At Once” is a vertigo-inducing movie that is hard to parse, but super fun. I wouldn’t call it a perfect film, but it goes whole-heartedly into its encounter with the crazy amounts of resilience, courage and love that are needed to get through this world. I’m glad it won Best Picture and, I freaking loved Ke Huy Quan’s acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor.

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A Good TBR #BookStack

My “to be read” pile grows and shrinks depending on how neurotic I am feeling about having stacks of unread, actually printed books around. This one's looking real good right now though, amirite?

Please share your thoughts about any of these in the comments! And, does anyone want to do a read-along of Palo Alto? I’m just getting started on it and am already working up a libertarian-leaning, meta-Marxist critique—could be fun? We could use Substack’s new web-based chat. Email me or drop a note below.

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An Angelic Photo

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