The unending violence perpetuated by humans on animals, rivers, oceans, lakes, the atmosphere and each other was minuscule compared to the ferocity of heat, motion and explosions going on just a few feet from my face. An electric charge ignited a mixture of gasoline and air to 4500 degrees driving pistons in cylinders up and down that rotated a crankshaft attached to a propeller that continuously shoved air molecules all over the airframe, sucking the plane forward. The 10,000 explosions every minute and the propeller's pounding on the atmosphere annoyed residents living near airports but was barely audible on the ground below my altitude of 3500 feet. The engine block, the flimsy engine cowling and the windshield protected me from some of the commotion. Noise cancelling headsets reduced the cacophony to nearly nothing, allowing a relatively calm, quiet discourse with air traffic controllers. The ridiculous mechanical contraption hurled me through the atmosphere whether or not the whole thing was being peppered by rain, snow or glaring sun.

As an instructor, I was aware of the myriad combinations of things that could break, interrupting my bliss and felt inadequate in relating the miracle of flight to my students. Generally, they just wanted to get in and go and worry about the details later. The aviation industry has littered the earth's surface with remains of machines and bodies, victims of airplane drivers who didn't worry enough about the details or appreciate the powerlessness of their machines when pitted against an angry atmosphere. I understood it and took the risk. Why anyone would want to ride with me in these little bitty projectiles baffled me. I had a clean flying history but regardless, for all practical purposes, had an airplane by the tail.

My view from 3500 feet, while southeast bound, leaving Dana Point behind, revealed that both directions of the southern California traffic on I-5 crept along at five to fifteen miles per hour, not bad for late afternoon. My airspeed indicator showed 110, slow by some aviation standards, but normal for me. There were scattered clouds above, part of a marine layer that would thicken as the evening progressed.

An escrow company sent an email, that first summer morning in 2016, saying that the transaction for the sale of the airplane had closed. A different escrow company called two days before, with news that the sale of my second house, located behind me in Newport Beach, had closed. In between those notifications, I gave my old car to a married couple, though they insisted on paying me. The contract with my last and biggest client, a giant electric utility, for whom I managed databases, had ended. The plane's baggage compartment held a folding bicycle and a duffle bag with clothes and toiletries. My laptop stored thousands of journals, only one percent of which were interesting. Various portable electronic gizmos helped me navigate. A half-pound bag of M&M's was open on the dashboard. Ice still floated in my bike bottle that held a gin and tonic.

The plane had one engine, four seats and fixed landing gear. It was built in the late seventies and survived four years of abuse by student pilots at a flight school. Someone bought it saving it from further trauma however that person over estimated his allotted time to fly. The plane sat for a few years, decaying. It cost half of its replacement price when I bought it. After I had it refurbished and flew it for a couple of years, a doctor bought it. The doctor also over estimated his allotted time to fly, so the plane sat for another eight years, decaying. Dissatisfied with renting and wanting to fly more, I talked the doctor into selling it back to me for a quarter of what he paid me. The same mechanic returned it to service. Having a plane allowed me to escape the chaos of Orange County, ride my bike on islands and in forests, burn fossil fuel and look down with impunity at the madness of society.

This time, the risk to reward ratio climbed to infinity as my desire to fly followed its usual sine wave, bottoming out. The next buyer was a starry-eyed kid who hadn't completed his flight training, but his dad, an airline pilot, took over the transaction. Dad appeared to have some sort of replication complex, believing his kid would be like him.

Dad insisted on using an escrow service. Dad provided the funds. Dad would be out of the country and wouldn't return for three weeks leaving me that amount of time to deliver the plane to its new hangar near Seattle.

Without a job or car, flush with money from a sold house and flying someone else's plane, I started in the wrong direction, heading south instead of north, to burn time and visit a few old friends. Ahead, through clouds, rain, haze, smoke, blue sky and red sky, lay an airborne version of the classic American road trip.

The air traffic controller in El Toro had me call a different controller, who in turn, had me change frequencies again to contact the tower at Palomar Airport. The controller there, a lady named Madra, dropped the official language of the FAA, saying instead, "Hi, Ian. Cleared to land runway two-four, taxi to parking four six Alpha." That she said the name of my old parking space meant that she was using codified instructions for me to park my plane, unfold my bike, ride to her house and have dinner, music and a comfortable make-out session. All went as planned except that she complained about canker sores so we didn't make out, no loss. Her husband's home office became my room as he was in Brussels on a business trip. Madra pumped up the inflatable queen, added sheets and a blanket before saying goodnight.

Few things in the world were as consistent and predictable as Madra. Nothing had changed over the years, though she might have gained a few pounds. She cooked a delightful dinner for us. We listened to the same old music from the a cassette I made for her in the nineties. I offered to at least make her a CD. She said she'd let me know if something broke.

We first met thirty-five years before, under similar circumstances when I first learned to fly and she had started her career as an air traffic controller. After earning my pilot's certificate, I bought the plane for the first time, and moved farther away from work so that I could fly to and from, accumulating the flight hours required for an instrument rating. Madra received my radio calls every evening. The repetition led to an after-work drink and so on.

The years slid by. Madra married and had three children. She was happy as a controller in her tower, a second home to her, but she also advanced her career through various levels of FAA bureaucracy.

More years slid by. My heart abruptly informed me that it was missing a leaf in its aortic valve, a defect inherited from one of my parents. One day, after climbing a mere fifteen-foot hill, I stopped my bicycle, short of breath and fell over, dead. My cardiologist speculated that impact with the ground restarted my heart. Regardless, a medical magician sawed my sternum, pried open my rib cage, cut out the old valve and installed a porcine bioprosthesis. The FAA usually clears pilots to fly after that type of procedure, but something leftover called "wide complex tachycardia," derailed that plan. The FAA denied my medical certificate, grounding me.

In 1972, at age seventeen, while sequestered in the high school's janitor's closet, I hit the Return key on a IBM 2741 that was connected to a Bell 103 acoustic modem that caused a request for login credentials from a DEC System 10 mainframe located 2.17 miles away to be printed on paper. So began a lucrative career during which I provided reams of data that went unread by mismanagers who constructed monuments of printouts against their office walls, a form of art to me. Various people, starting with pre-med students in college who wanted to endlessly edit papers on a computer terminal, and ending with powerful (so they thought) corporate executives addicted to gigabytes of information, paid me enough to stay a lap or two ahead of my peers.

To circumvent the FAA, I built a web page with aerial photos for Madra that also dropped key-logging software on her computer. That spread to other machines within the FAA that I chose based on her emails within the agency. Only four databases needed modifying. Records of pilots who had been approved, served as a sample. I modified the same fields in my own records, flagged them as approved and waited. Eight days later the required permission to obtain a medical certificate arrived in my regular mail, no one the wiser. Meanwhile, no one ever asked to see my earlier computer generated fake.

Madra went to work the next morning and left me alone in her house. I updated the key-logging software, just in case. My next flight, to Warner Springs, would take thirty minutes if I waited for the marine layer to burn off. It would take ninety if I flew on instruments. I waited.

Encouraged by the holes in the marine layer revealing blue sky, I rode back to my plane. Being so familiar with the area, I had no plan for this flight and after a few minutes aloft there would be no one worth talking to on the radio. Madra, parked in her control tower, handled my requests for taxi and take-off. Once clear of Palomar's airspace to the northeast, I said goodbye to her, possibly forever. Ahead lay Pauma Valley, a haven in southern California with room for cows and agriculture that featured roads with so few cars that I could see the asphalt. I considered landing at their little airport but instead continued to the field farther along where I spent some time in the early nineties earning my glider rating.

I climbed to 5500 feet and flew east, taking a few sips from my gin and tonic, flat and warm from the day before, illegally flying a plane that now belonged to someone else.