THE PASSAGE
by
Todd Parkhurst

Delivered to The Fortnightly of Chicago and The Chicago Literary Club
March 3, 2000

As at least half of you know, the Chicago Literary Club meets every Monday night during its season. At each meeting, a selected member reads verbatim a paper which he or she has prepared for the evening. Last Monday evening, Dr. Philip Robert Liebson read his paper entitled How sweet It Is, a commentary on the lives and work of three British poets who wrote just before, during and after the First World War. Dr. Liebson showed quite clearly how the attitude of the public and the poets toward war, toward patriotism, and toward poetry itself changed during that terrible conflict.

Here's another poem, written by another British poet, during the next world war. It was written by one John Gillespie McGee, a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Mr. McGee was shot down over England and killed in action on December 11, 1940, just a few weeks after he wrote:

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
Hung 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 wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew -
And while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Well, it sounded like God. It sounded like James Earl Jones when he is very serious. It was actually Ed Prime, a retired Air Force officer who lives in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Ed said, "Parkhurst, this is Ed Prime, Lifeline Pilots. I need a fast, good, deiced airplane to fly a mission from Fort Wayne Indiana to Rochester Minnesota on Sunday. Our passenger will be arriving in Fort Wayne from Greenbrier, West Virginia, and he has bone cancer. He needs to get to the Mayo Clinic promptly. Can you do it?"

I'm proud to be a number of Lifeline Pilots, a charitable organization of about 300 general aviation pilots who provide air transportation passage, free of charge, to medical patients and others in need. Our members include doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, businesswomen, storekeepers, city governments officials, and an ecsaydist. We were founded about 20 year ago by Wanda Whitsett, a banker's wife and pilot, in Champaign Illinois. At our Board meetings, Wanda still watches over us like the grandmother she is. Our passengers must be ambulatory, must have a need to get to treatment promptly, and must have economic circumstances which would keep them from getting to the hospital or treatment facility they require if we did not provide our passage flights to them.

And I'm proud to know Ed Prime. Ed is one of our mission coordinators. When a patient in need, or a hospital social worker, or a doctor calls our 800 number, it is Ed or someone like him who answers. In his previous life, Ed was a Strategic Air Command bomber dispatcher. When Ed told someone to go fly an airplane, that pilot saluted and flew the airplane.

But Ed is working for my charity and for me now. I'm a civilian, with my own life. I began to tell Ed about the Super Bowl party my wife and I were to attend. There was a long, uncomfortable silence from Ed, and from God. I realized what a lame excuse this was. I told Ed I'd take the mission if the weather permitted. Ed said not to worry, the flight would be early on Sunday and I'd be home for the game.

So Sunday morning found me humming along over Lake Michigan and collecting just a little ice on the approach into Fort Wayne. The linking flight from Greenbrier into Fort Wayne was delayed by bad weather, and the patient and his wife had had nothing to eat since early morning. So a long, filling lunch in the Fort Wayne air terminal was in order. Forgotten was the quick flight and early return to home in order to catch the big game.

We took off into a low ceiling, but were soon atop a 6000 foot cloud deck which gave way to clear, hazy skies over Central Illinois and southern Iowa. Everything was rosy, when the right alternator warning light popped on. Now what? Should I stop in Moline, abandon the flight, have the generator repaired sometime Monday and take the patient and his wife to Rochester a day or so late? Nope. That's why the airplane has two of everything. The left alternator was working fine, and it could handle the whole load. Besides, how bad could Rochester's weather be?

One hundred miles out, Rochester's airport was reporting reasonably good weather. But at 75 miles out, rain and sleet began, and the outside air temperature wandered between just above and just below freezing. At 31.9 degrees, ice formed on the wings and collected on the windshield. At 32.1 degrees, the ice on the windshield and wings slid off and cracked into the tail with a resounding bang. Here we were, with a sick patient, a sick airplane making banging noises, and bad weather. But the patient's wife, who had never been in an airplane before, was unflustered. She did, though, shyly get out her rosary as we started down toward the airport runway. The landing was uneventful.

As we turned off the runway, however, the tower happily announced that the taxiways and ramp were covered with ice, which we could not see through the two inches of snow cover. We slipped and slid across the parking ramp toward a huge gray and red private jet, bearing a large golden crown upon its tail. The fuselage carried the legend The Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan. King Hussein was at the Mayo clinic, too, for treatment of his cancer. His pilots were standing in front of his airplane, frantically waving warnings at us in their shirts sleeves. Obviously the King had not equipped them with parkas for a Minnesota winter. We slid to a stop very, very, very close to the King's airplane.

I explained to the airport personnel that my patient needed to get to the Mayo clinic promptly; that I needed to fix my airplane's alternator promptly; that I needed to buy gas; and that I needed to melt the ice off my airplane and depart within twenty minutes. The airport personnel decided that the King could wait; I had priority. I taxied out for takeoff with the faintest glimmer of winter twilight remaining.

The air traffic controllers obligingly steered me around the ice and sleet which had so tormented us during the inbound flight. Ninety minutes later I made an uneventful arrival in Chicago. I parked the airplane and climbed into my car. But I could not see out the car windshield, because a thick coating of glycol from a nearby aircraft deicing station had coated everything. I spent the next 20 minutes cleaning off the gunk.

As I drove away from the airport, I could see only reasonably well. But it made little difference. There was no traffic on the road, because everyone was watching the Super Bowl.

When I arrived at home, I was met with massive preoccupation. Never mind the aviation stories. Would the last pass be caught or intercepted? I still have no idea what happened during the first 56 minutes of the game.

Two weeks later, the patient's wife wrote me a thank you note, and reported that the doctors had told her that if her husband had not arrived at the Mayo clinic within hours, he would have died. Everything was in perspective then. As the old Haiku poem says, the passage of life is short and delicate.

Most missions are much less eventful than this. On a number of occasions, we have flown kids we call the Chernobyl Children from their arrival points in New York and Boston to cancer treatment centers. These flights and passages are often filled with made-up Russian words, odd joy and laughter.

One of our pilots in Virginia has flown sick kids our of Havana, Cuba for treatments in Atlanta. Mr. Castro does not care to publicly mention these passages, and they do not always go when they are planned.

Not all missions are successful. On one occasion I flew a teenage girl and her mom to Iowa for a cancer treatment. Two weeks later I was dispatched to bring home her mother - and her belongings.

The hardest and best stories involve the littlest people. Two-year-old Sara was born with badly deformed feet - so badly deformed that, when she began to walk, she repeatedly broke her ankles. Courageously, she and her young single mom kept trying, and kept trying to find a miracle. But every doctor we took them to came to the same conclusion: Sarah's feet must be amputated.

Desperate, Sarah's mom finally agreed, and we flew them to a distant hospital where the operations were performed. Sara's mom was herself very nearly hospitalized, so great was her anguish. Sara's courage was that of a little lion, but when she saw her mom so frightened and distraught, she too fell apart. The next weeks of recovery were filled with hospital visits, airplane rides, and many tears.

The day came when little Sara was to be fitted with her tiny prosthetic feet, inside small running shoes. Again, her mom could not bear to watch. The doctors and nurses put her feet on Sara, and put Sara on small training bars, so that she could learn to walk again. Terrified, Sarah refused to take even a tiny step. Everything the doctors and nurses tried produced only greater and greater fears and tears.

Finally a doctor opened the hospital room door, and in came a small Labrador retriever puppy. The dog slowly approached Sara, and gently kissed her cheek. The puppy then turned and walked away, and looked over his shoulder at Sara. Sara dropped the bars, ran to the dog, and gave him a hug. For the next week, Sarah and the dog were inseparable. Sara has not used horizontal bars or crutches ever again.

As our veteran Jimmy Svec says, I can't remember all the names, but I'll never forget the faces and the stories. We haven't touched God. But we've seen Him in these passages.