Legacy Darkened by Sept. 11   

“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of.”  --  From High Flight by John Magee   

By Janee Reynolds 

 Thus wrote Pilot Officer John Magee, age 19, son of a Scots/Irish-American father and an English mother.  He was killed soon after, when his Spitfire crashed after a mid-air collision during WWII.  His poetry and his passion, a legacy of ancient Celtic bards, inspire me still.    

When I was a kid, the bonds of earth often seemed surly indeed.  In my imagination I was up there with Magee, soaring high and shouting at the wind.  I remember the clear blue day a friend took me up in his glider.  I never did grasp his speech about air pockets, but with that ride I was hooked. 

On my first airline flight, I pressed my nose to the window as we climbed out of a murky overcast into a shining blue sky.  Later the sun dropped low; heading due west we flew over a perpetual sunset in a sea of navy blue.  My appetite for this exotic view soon required two windows.  Finally my neck craned at such an angle I found myself staring into the face of the passenger behind me. 

Many flights later I got nervous only once.  Somewhere over Nebraska the plane began shaking.  “We’re hitting some turbulence,” came the pilot’s voice, “we’re going to try to get below it.”  In a few minutes the shaking stopped.  I recall my blind faith in the pilot (also memorable was a loud string of expletives from the guy behind me).   

I’m old enough to remember when airplane cockpits were accessible to passengers.  This was nice since I now had an ongoing crush on pilots.  “Have you ever seen an airline pilot who wasn’t good looking?” I asked a friend.  “It’s the uniform,” she snorted.  Once I boldly stepped into the cockpit and asked the flight engineer what he liked best about flying.  “Going up,” he said without hesitation, and I knew we were soul mates. 

Later I would learn that “going up” can be the most dangerous time of a flight.  Yet stats reveal that flying is safer than most modes of travel; certainly safer than driving.  The risks are small; you come to accept them as you accept the intrinsic risk in life itself. 

 I lost no loved ones on Sept. 11.  Still I feel those losses keenly, along with a personal loss that’s harder to define.  That intoxicating freedom of soaring into a wide blue sky is no longer there.  The world’s a nicer place, sang the Fifth Dimension, from their flying air balloon.  Not anymore. 

 It’s not that my generation hasn’t known manifest hatred.  It’s not about America losing her innocence; history tells us otherwise.  Maybe it’s the loss of that elusive “wonder of childhood.”  Most of us retain some of that wonder – perhaps in great art or music or poetry.  My love affair with flying contained a big chunk of it.   

 Pilot Officer Magee, who lived and died so very young, enriches us still with the poetry he left.  I can climb with him “up the long, delirious burning blue.”  I can share his awe when he “put out his hand, and touched the face of God.” 

 In the wake of Sept. 11, I was left with a nagging thought that no such thing was possible in this changed America.  Magee’s legacy reminds me that it is.