The Start of it All: Andalucia
The Lie I Told
The plane climbed through the gray skies of Amsterdam, through the ever-present low clouds of fall, on the way to Spain. After just a few seconds, this tiny corner of northwestern Europe became a dreamlike white blanket out to the horizon, with a brilliant blue sky that is seldom seen from the ground – at least this time of year.
I had told some others that the trip was for the sun and cheap beer, but that was a lie. It was the kind of lie you tell when the truth feels too desperate, too raw to admit out loud. The truth was I was chasing something – maybe an escape from my former life, the rabbit wheel of corporate America. Maybe just the kind of self-respect that only comes from doing something hard and unforgiving, like learning to fly.
The idea came about one evening, as the rain fogged the windows of our townhouse in Amstelveen and I spoke with Jenn on the phone while she was on her way back from the USA. I was 37 but still inventing who I wanted to be, though I wasn’t sure if there was any time left for invention. Maybe this could work.
Jenn had seen me grasp at straws for months, chasing jobs I had no passion for. So we decided: let’s give this a try. It would take sacrifice, hard work, and Jenn living a single-mom lifestyle while working more than most do at her full-time job – the one that had brought us to Europe in the first place. But we committed.
So I booked the flight, packed light, and left behind everything but the essentials: my notebooks, my doubts, and a dream I had once thought impossible.
An Old Dog in a New Class
And then just like that, here I was – about to learn if an old dog can be taught new tricks. That plane touched down in Malaga, I rented a car, and was off.
The gravel crunched under my tires as I made my way in the falling light to my new home: a campervan set up in a grove of trees on a fruit farm far from what seemed like anything – half my mind excited for this new adventure, the other half wondering what the hell I was getting myself into. I unpacked my things, uncorked a cheap rioja and wondered what the next day may bring, farm dogs darting in and out of the open door and the sound of the wind blowing through the pomegranite, lemon and loquat trees.
My classes the next day resembled those I vaguely recalled at Miami University 15 years ago. Then, as a bright-eyed college freshman, I chose the front seat to stay engaged with the lectures. Now I chose the front seat because it was the only one left, since I’d arrived a day late. The younger kids in class had already formed their cliques. At 37, I was clearly the odd man out among these energetic twenty-somethings.
Day after day, I sat there in an environment that vaguely resembled Top Gun: the young guys looking the part with slick sunglasses and fighter-pilot jackets, talking suavely to the women in class and carrying themselves with a confidence you would have thought meant they were already fighter pilots. Yet they seemed far less suave when attempting to explain Bernoulli’s principle, use a CRP-5 flight computer, or line up a protractor.
A Thirteen-Year-Old’s Dream
My obsession with aviation probably began in 1999, when I was a 13-year-old kid at a local computer store. I picked out a flight simulator and read the thick manual cover to cover before learning it wouldn’t even run on our family computer.
I’d spend hours just reading about flight principles, Cessna checklists, how to communicate with ATC, the rules of the air. I fell in love with aviation just from that dumb book. Maybe that prepared me for what I’m doing today. Maybe those hours with that eventual working simulator did help when I finally sat behind the controls of a real plane. What I know for certain is that it made my imagination come alive in ways that could never truly be satisfied until I had the chance to try it myself.
The First Time the Earth Fell Away
Sitting on the left side of a cockpit, with no one else there – that was something different. The rumble of the engine, the instruments all pointing somewhere in the green (hopefully), the airspeed coming alive, and the earth falling away behind me, it all comes together in a way that is strangely calming. It was clean, simple, and true. I’d dreamed of this as a kid, my hand slicing through the air out of a car window, feeling the wind’s power, pretending to fly. And now, here I was, really flying. This machine, this fragile set of wings and wires, was holding me in the sky, defying everything my instincts told me was impossible.
Believing
Flying hasn’t given me all the answers. It didn’t rewrite who I was overnight or erase the mistakes and false starts. But it did remind me that gravity isn’t always the final word. The thing about learning to fly is that it forces you to believe in what you can’t see yet – the lift you have to trust will be there at 55 knots, or you’re not getting off the ground. Maybe that’s what this season of life is about. Not chasing a dream in the clouds, but simply believing in something worthwile.
