I get a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather.
-10,000 Maniacs
In 1986 I cemented my reputation as the eccentric of the cadet corps at USC when I filled out my "dream sheet" listing the places I'd like to attend pilot training. Most choices the Air Force provided were bases in the bleak southern plains or the desert Southwest. Everyone wanted to go to UPT at Williams Air Force Base, right outside of Phoenix, because, well, you were right outside of Phoenix, and not in Del Rio or Enid.
But I chose Columbus, Mississippi, most folks' last choice as a pilot training venue. Admittedly, part of the attraction was a chance to return to the deep South, and to be right down the road from Water Valley and my father's unruly clan. I always knew if I could slip away for a couple hours some weekend to Aunt Alice and Uncle Happy's house, I'd be up to my elbows in fried chicken, greens, blackeyes, and cornbread that would curl your toes. That's all hard to find in Los Angeles.
However, my real reason for choosing Columbus AFB, a choice the Air Force happily granted, was the very thing that made most budding jet pilots dread the place.
"Don't they get a lot of weather there?" my tan, angular California friends would ask.
Exactly. More weather days than any other base.
You get really proficient at flying in lousy weather by flying in lousy weather. Columbus promised fog and a little icing in the winter, massive thunderstorms from March through September, low ceiling many mornings. I spent those eleven months flying approaches down to minimums in the soup, picking through nocturnal thunderstorms with no weather radar, avoiding the towering cumulonimbus clouds by altering course whenever one would suddenly illuminate with internal lightning. Looking back, the trials of dealing with the mostly poor weather east of the Mississippi probably made me a much better pilot than those candy asses flying around under cobalt blue skies day after day.
But I should have remembered all that when I came up with this brilliant idea of having a place in New York. Sure, my well-off friends were all building second homes in the North Carolina mountains, a seven-plus hour car ride from the Gulf Coast. That's all well-and-good for them; we would buy a place in the mountains of upstate New York, our magic carpet an airplane that could transport us between venues in maybe five hours.
The flaw in that plan becomes manifest on mornings like this one.
Today I had hoped to finish my hearing here at noon, and take advantage of the strong tailwinds to be back in Corning for supper. But that blob of badness on the radar is supposed to arrive between one and two, maybe earlier, maybe a little later. I have a chance if I am airborne by one; if I miss my window, today is out and tomorrow is iffy because the same system will be draped along the route back up north. I may be trapped alone in our condo for the weekend with no furniture, no kitchen faucet, no Peg.
The sad fact is that it's impossible to plan for the weather in the eastern U.S. We've already had a couple brushes with extreme danger picking through thunderstorms around Perry. Heading north I've watched the wings start to freeze over with ice in the clouds and the dark over Pennsylvania, monitoring the situation outside with my flashlight as I punch the de-icer button and hope for the best. Taken together, the stretch from New York to Florida may have the worst flying weather in the world--Europe has low ceilings much of the year, but no thunderstorms. Equatorial reaches may see a lot of pop-up thunderstorms, but not these front-driven walls of lightning and hail that sweep across the entire southern half of the eastern U.S. every few days.
There is a reason that, if you put together a map of small aircraft crash sites across the U.S., most of the bent metal would almost certainly be east of the Mississippi.
The constant threat of bad weather means a lot more time apart from P as this dual residency lifestyle develops. I'll be stuck here for an extra day-or-two with some regularity--it happened when we were down here together a month ago, in fact, and it may happen again today. Heading the other direction, I'll be leaving NY a couple days early if there's any chance of weather preventing me from making an in-person appearance in court, something I can't beg off because I didn't plan for it. The weather's always there. The weather's no excuse for not showing up.
So I guess we'll see what happens today. I have a big, nasty in-person hearing in three hours in a case that is not my favorite by any stretch. The client wants a long talk afterwards about strategy and the like. I've had to tell her that can't happen if I have a shot at getting out of here that will go away in the time it would take to have that billable conversation. Another casualty of the weather.
And so it goes.
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