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From
the New York Times Book Review, September 14, 1997
Trial
By Air
FLIGHT OF THE GIN FIZZ
Midlife at 4,500 Feet.
By Henry Kisor.
Illustrated. 371 pp. New York:
Basic Books. $25.
By Donal Henahan
When Dante Alighieri found himself in the middle of life's journey
wandering in a wood, he had to settle for flights of poetic imagination
to tame his inner monsters. Henry Kisor, a middle-aged newspaper editor
with a wife and two children and an increasingly frustrating job,
decided to face his own midlife crisis by taking up a more modern form
of levitation: though totally deaf and burdened with a paralyzing fear
of falling, he earned a private pilot's license and bought a small
plane. He named the craft Gin Fizz in memory of Vin Fiz, the frail
biplane built by the Wright brothers in which a nearly deaf
Henry
Kisor in
the cockpit of his Cessna 150.
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eccentric
named Cal Rodgers had hopscotched across the United States in 1911,
setting down 73 times during a harrowing six-week marathon marked by
cornfield landings, thrown piston rods, cracked cylinders,
thunderstorms and barely nonfatal crashes.
Kisor somehow concluded that re-enacting the 1911 event was just the
midlife elixir needed by a 53-year-old book editor of The Chicago
Sun-Times, who describes himself as ''short, fat, bald, bespectacled
and deaf'' with ''neither hope nor desire for advancement or
adultery.'' Thus armored in reality, he set out on his own
transcontinental trial by air in a 36-year-old Cessna 150. This
late-life affair with the skies, while appealingly quixotic, is hardly
unique in a period when the air lanes seem clogged with pilots
recapitulating the exploits of Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and
Wiley Post. Nor is midlife derring-do rare in a time when 70-ish former
Presidents go sky diving to recapture youth's illusion of immortality.
Kisor's decision to take up flying was filled with complications: as a
result of meningitis at the age of 3, he had lost his inner-ear
balancing mechanism and much of his depth perception as well as his
hearing (he is a lip reader whose mother taught him to speak). Missing
also was one of the most important
The
Gin Fizz
takes off on her journey.
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assets
any
pilot
can possess: the
ability to hear radio communications. In his retracing of Cal Rodgers's
historic flight, he was therefore restricted to small airfields,
sometimes no more than grass strips, where traffic might be controlled
with hand-held light guns.
These handicaps, which to the normally endowed pilot might seem
insurmountable, lend a continuous thread of suspense to Kisor's
odyssey. But they allow him to identify with Rodgers and to intercut
his own story with contemporary reports on the 4,231-mile flight ofhis
alter ego. All this Kisor wraps together in the lean, fact-driven prose
of a first-class journalist, which can take flight into pilot's poetry
at euphoric moments but is generally sparing of the bleary effusions
that burden so much aviation literature. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery and
his pseudomystical ''Night Flight'' have much to answer for in this
regard.)
The author of two previous books (one recounting a transcontinental
train trip, the other about growing up deaf), Kisor has built this one
around the dozens of remarkable people he seeks out along the way --
characters like Jim Newman, a 70-year-old who lost two legs at the
knees but still flies and is a
Gin
Fizz
cruises past lower Manhattan.
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member
of
the
200-pilot-strong
International Wheelchair Aviators. Or Patrice Washington, the first
black woman to become a captain for a major airline, and her husband,
Ray, a former B-52 pilot now also a commercial airline captain. Or
Clyde Smith, president of the International Deaf Pilots Association,
which has some 140 American and European members.
Kisor's flight in emulation of Cal Rodgers was not a first: in 1986 an
I.B.M. engineer named James R. Lloyd marked the 75th anniversary of the
1911 adventure, flying a near-replica of the Vin Fiz from Long Island
to Pasadena, Calif. Kisor takes pains to visit and pay tribute to a
fellow airman whose ultralight craft, Vin Fiz II, faced far more purely
aeronautic dangers than his comparatively modern Cessna. In fact, it
testifies to Kisor's attention to detail that his own meandering trip
went off with few skin-of-the-teeth
escapes of the sort any pilot
learns to anticipate. Oh, there was the time on a runway in Illinois
when his Cessna passed over a Piper trainer taking off in the opposite
direction. And a scary encounter with a flock of Texas buzzards.
Happily, too, the aerial Ulysses survives such hazards as finding a
nightly bed and fast food in the American outback. The anecdotal fabric
throughout is a tight weave of factual overload and hearty sentiment --
a
Gin
Fizz
arrives in California. (Bob Locher photo.)
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style
somewhere
between Baedeker and Garrison Keillor.
One advantage the midlife pilot enjoys is a naturally acquired caution,
which some might reasonably call fear. Impulsiveness tends to be
replaced by obsession with details and preparation: older pilots become
their own weather experts and at times their own mechanics. Partly
owing to physical limitations but also to a lifetime of meeting
solitary challenges, Kisor came equipped to be a good, safe flier. As
the timeworn admonition to novices has it: ''There are old pilots and
there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.''
However, the
art of flying has evolved almost unrecognizably, placing
the pilot's fate largely in the hands of electronic technologies the
layman can hardly comprehend. While the doughty Cal Rodgers had only a
piece of yarn fastened to a strut to indicate whether he was flying
straight and level, even a frail Cessna now must carry a daunting array
of navigational and other arcane instruments. Kisor also must take
along personal aids: laptop with modem and fax, Internet access, E-mail
and a text telephone (or TTY), which enables the hearing-impaired flier
to communicate through an operator who types out the other party's
responses and transmits them to the deaf person's screen.
''Flight of the Gin Fizz'' might easily be read as an inspirational
tract, but it is not primarily concerned with selling sentimentality to
the politically correct. What Kisor allows us to share is a more
private drama: one man's almost giddy sense of stepping into another
dimension of living, his awareness that he is becoming a hero to
himself. He will never be the same, lucky fellow.
Donal Henahan, a former chief music critic of The
New
York
Times, was a fighter pilot in Europe during World War II.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
(Photos from the author's archive.) |
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