Above the static hum in my head phones I heard a voice say 'Look down to your left' I glanced over and there it was, 500 feet below and to the left, a perfectly formed circle of brilliant primary colors, sliding majestically across the face of the cloud. At the the epi-center of this marvel was a small triangular shadow! It was the shadow of the Cosmos trike I was piloting, surrounded by the most beautiful rainbow I have ever seen. Suddenly, as I looked on in wonder, the same voice spoke again, this time in slow deep metered baritone.

"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- wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious, burning blue I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace, where never lark, or even eagle flew. And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod the high untresspassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

I was spell-bound! "For Krissakes Ole! I didn't know you were also a poet!" I spoke back into the mike of my headset. "No" came back the reply, "But that is my favorite poem!" It was Ole my instructor, sitting in the back seat of the trike. His boots and the bottom of his flight suit leggings were just visible flapping in the wind as they rested on the bars below and to the sides of my forward seat. "The poem is 'High Flight' and was written in WWI by RCAF Flight-Lieutenant John Gillespie Magee" "He was not even 20 when he was shot down!" Ole continued "They never found his body. But when they cleared out his locker they found this poem pencilled on a scrap of paper." The majesty of the recital and the story, as I watched my shadow cross the face of a cloud shrined in the vortex of this perfect rainbow, made my throat contract with the emotion of the moment. 15 minutes earlier Ole had said " Ok how about us going up to three thousand?" "VFR regulations say we have to keep clear of clouds. Lets see if we can find a hole big enough to go up above" Ole's voice was coming through my earphones as I sat in the front seat of the Cosmos trike. I pushed my foot down on the throttle and the pitch of the engine responded. I let the control bar settle at trim and the trike began to surge upwards at 500 feet a minute. I had only a few hours in the trike at the time and had not yet solo'ed! But what an incredible introduction to this type of flying! I could pitch across the sky by changing the placing of my weight and thereby changing the shape of the wing! This was as close to being a bird as I would ever get. I had taken out my private pilots license a decade earlier and even flown a few hours in three axis controlled ultra lights. But nothing compared to the sensation of the trike! - I was addicted! Thus it was that I found myself that morning at 3500 feet above the Stillaguamish valley with the moisture off the Pacific piling up into clouds against the Cascade Mountains to the east. But it must have been the ghost of Flight-Lieutenant Magee that allowed the break in the clouds large enough for us to slip the bonds of earth for a few brief moments! How his ghost must have rejoiced in that weightless recital! In those moments it seemed I too could lean over and brush my fingers in that pot of light... and almost etch my name on the face of God!

Home