This is an examination of not just an occurrence in my past, but the powerful mood that it invoked, and still invokes whenever I think about it. I’m not sure that I can possibly explain it in such a way that anyone else can come close to the same feeling, though.
It was, I think, 1999, and I was on an extended photography trip to Florida, touring where I pleased with no real itinerary. Several days in, I was staying down in Key Largo, where the evening before I had snagged a dynamic sunset sky out over Florida sound (the section of water between the Keys and mainland Florida, shallow and tussocky.) But that following morning, I had taken advantage of the canoes that were made available by the cottages where I was staying, and was tooling along in the sound under a brilliant clear blue sky among a light breeze and comfortably warm temperatures, about as close to piloting a dugout canoe among Indonesian islands that I was about to get. And hearing the drone of unrecognized engines, I looked out over the sound to see what was likely a tour plane cruising along at low altitude, not a thousand feet above the water.
Curiously, it was a Douglas DC-3, a WWII-era transport plane (though known in the military as the C-47,) one of the workhorses of the war and roughly the following two decades, but virtually unused in the US by that point – a pair of rotary piston engines and a decidedly mid-century design, with flat windscreens and a large rounded tailfin. Seeing one in flight was a little surprising, more so since it was not apparently a restored, commemorative piece but in actual use commercially, and I watched it pass with the sudden desire of being within it, hearing the distinctive drone of the engines and watching the blue waters of the sound roll by only a short distance below – preferably while hanging in the open door restrained only by a cargo net.
There remains in my mind the conditions of the war in the Pacific, where small airbases dotted various islands among the Marianas and Guam, hastily constructed hangars and airstrips among the largely undeveloped tropical islands, this curious mix of the devil-may-care tropics and combat readiness. It was also a golden era of flight, before we had jet airliners that operated at high altitudes with virtually no ‘feel’ to flying; instead, this was low and slow, follow the terrain and feel the shifting air and sways of the aircraft in an unpressurized cabin, listening to the distinctive throaty song of the engines. The rotary piston engine is almost gone now, replaced by turboprops and turbojets for anything larger than a four-seater, and this is probably no bad thing – the maintenance on such was probably quite involved. But I dare anyone to listen to one, or even to walk around any aircraft from that time period, and tell me it’s not evocative.
Though I still can’t place why I find it so compelling – that era was before my time, and there is no experience I can point to that would make me identify so readily with it, but I’m drawn to it nonetheless.