The View From Above

By Rose Hansen, June 12, 2013

We’ve been putting in long hours on the farm lately, which means time is short for the flying.

But when we found ourselves freed up on the prettiest ever Saturday night last weekend, we hopped in the Husky for a quick trip up to the Hangar Kafe, a lovely restaurant at the heels of Kingsley Airfield, a grass strip just thirty flight minutes away.

That’s me, reflected in the prop.

I’d love to tack on some cliche like… “Only in Missouri!” or “Only in the country!” but that’s not true at all. There are hundreds of adorable little cafes waiting for business on airstrips around the country. The fare is pretty general — cheeseburgers and the like — but the food (fried chicken!!!!!) at the Hangar Kafe was pretty dang good.

At the very least, a fun date.

On the subject of flying, it’s old news to me. My dad was a pilot, and his dad, and I got my commercial fixed-wing rating a few years back. And what’s new to say about flying that hasn’t been written? Nothing, it seems, so I rarely write about the wonders of flight itself.

Also, Jon has a lifetime of hours more than me and, conveniently, I much prefer the view from the copilot’s seat. In that position, you don’t have to pay attention the tones of the engine and what the instruments are doing. I like to look at the patterns on the ground, the grids of streets, people’s backyards. Always, everything looks so clean.

While we were flying up to the restaurant I said to Jon, “Everything looks so organized from above.”

He said, “Yeah. But it’s not. It’s a mess.”

“But it looks organized.”

“Yeah. Everything looks better from up here.”

I let him have it. He likes to have the last word, and I suppose that’s one of the concessions of relationships (Lesson One: Let your partner have the last word if it means more to him than it does to you), although I don’t know that I completely agree that the world and life looks better from above, where you don’t have to touch anything.

Once before flying, I heard Jon say, “Thank God, just get me off this earth,” and my gut response was, “But it’s such a beautiful earth.”

That was years ago, and I believed it then. I still believe it now.