Sitting here at the condo in PC, trying to come down after flying back this evening. The flight from New York to Florida can be boring and intense all at the same time. I used to look forward to it, but now it's just a slog that leads to a lonely few weeks down here.
Plus, God rather half-heartedly tried to kill me along the way, as is his wont, with a couple hundred miles of thunderstorms draped between ELM and my fuel stop along the way, Ben Epps Field in Athens, Georgia. I wove a serpentine track through canyons of towering cumulus, the Shenandoah hidden behind a curtain of torrential rain. "There is a rainshower at your eleven to two o'clock, intensity moderate to severe to extreme" the air traffic controller informed me, even as I pondered the rather forbidding radar picture on my panel.
But we picked through it, me with the help of a couple controllers who took the time to vector me left and right to keep me out of the worst of the black, turbulent clouds. There was a time when I wouldn't have risked it, would've stayed home and tried again tomorrow. But my schedule is too crowded, and I had to get here tonight to have any chance at all of working through this week's crush of work.
Which is how folks buy the farm in this exercise--I was a flight safety officer, for Pete's sake, so I'm as well-versed as anyone in the perils of "get-home-itis" when the weather's bad.
When I finally broke out, somewhere near Asheville, I did take a few moments to document the beauty of God's handiwork as the storms gave way to blue skies.
And despite literally the worst landing of my 38 year flying career, porpoising down the runway so badly that after I shut down I crawled around under the plane to make sure I hadn't wrecked the landing gear, I did get a kick out of the decorating theme there at Ben Epps Field.
But I basked in all of that Dawg love with a twinge of sadness. It really isn't as much fun as it once was, is all pretty much just a business. That's always been true, I guess, but having one's illusions stripped away is never without a little pain.
The flight from Athens to ECP was blessedly uneventful, with clear skies and a little bit of a tailwind. My landing stunk here as well--it's been a while since I performed a true night landing, and I flared high--but there were no other planes on the ramp when I pulled up at Sheltair, so I got the princess treatment from the bored line workers.
On the way down to the condo my Amex app informed me of a rather sporty bill for gas when Sheltair filled the tanks, as I directed (leaving your tanks less than full in this hot, humid environment leaves room for condensation, and water in the fuel system has a way of making the propeller stop turning at the most inopportune times). All in, today's little flight south cost over $600 for fuel alone. With the dramatic price increases of the last few weeks, there's simply no way we can keep doing this commute, lest I be forced to go back to macaroni and cheese with cut up hot dogs in it, which would no doubt lead to Peg making a new life far from the joys of Kraft Dinner. She really doesn't like macaroni and cheese with cut up hot dogs in it. It baffles me.
But humor aside, something's got to give. The folks who helped us keep up the farm are moved away or pushing eighty. Commuting to Florida is still a viable model, but the commutes must be pared down pretty dramatically. I need to shed some cases, get some control back over my schedule and my professional life. In Peg's world they're shutting down operating rooms. Maybe it's time to do the same with my practice, and try to attain a volume I can actually handle with the lack of help that's been the hallmark of the last few years for me.
I sorted through all of this in my head as I droned across south Georgia, and thought I'd about convinced myself it's time for us to acknowledge that, at a minimum, we can't keep up the farm anymore, but then my phone unhelpfully flashed this photo as a reminder of what we were doing two years ago today.
We were sitting in the truck bed swimming pool, at the height of the pandemic. The birds always wanted to be where we were, and would just hang around behind the truck bed. They're all dead now, every bird but one goose whose forehead is peeking above the tailgate in that photo, dead because we weren't there to take care of them so a coyote relieved us of the responsibility.
So maybe God or karma or whatever put that photo in front of me at this moment for a reason. We both love Wyldswood, and those six months trapped together by Covid provided the foundation for a marriage that feels now like it's lasted for decades (in a good way). My heart lifts a little, and my burdens drop away whenever I drive through the gate. And yet we can't take care of it, and those now-dead birds looking back at me in that photo are an indictment of my irresponsibility.
But I can feel the adrenaline from the flight fading now, eyelids drooping and settling into the reality of this lonely evening a thousand miles from P, with a flood of unpleasant work spread across my calendar this week. At least on Thursday I think I've figured a way to get back to Wyldswood with a day of remote depositions on Friday. Something to look forward to during an otherwise unpleasant time.
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