Ashes in the Wind

I took ashes of my old friend Dusty to scatter in the Santa Catalina Mountains yesterday, flying with his son-in-law John as copilot. John let them go as we flew up the canyon separating the front range from the core complex of the mountains. When we landed and went to the office to settle for the plane rental, I mentioned our errand to the owner/mechanic and an old pilot who teaches flying there. “Ah, yes,” they said, no strangers to the rite we’d just performed, and the stories started coming: the wife who watched in dismay as her husband’s ashes, instead of settling gently over the sacred peak of Baboquivari, were instead sucked into one of the engines of the Piper twin she was riding in; the daughter who burst into tears when she looked back to see her dad’s ashes forming two perfect spirals in the wing vortex of the airplane.

            I had a story of my own. Before I became a pilot, my step-dad’s widow and I hired a plane to take up his ashes. He would have preferred the Catalinas, too, but they were on fire that day, so we flew into Madera Canyon in the Santa Ritas. I was in the right seat with the ashes in a paper bag, cinched with a cord long enough to let it a yard or two out the slightly opened door into the slipstream, which would then tear it apart. This delicate operation went off without a hitch, surprisingly, and then the pilot, who was about nineteen, suggested I fly the plane as we turned back toward the airport. I experimented with the controls a little, and then he suggested we slow the airplane and practice the landing procedure. We did that, and then he coached me as I landed the airplane myself! That was the day I decided to learn to fly.