4 - Plymouth, Massachusetts
The white glider banked steeply, its forty-five foot long carbon fiber right wing pointing down at Plymouth Rock, six thousand feet below. Ben Shapiro lay under the blue-tinted canopy nearly flat on his back, craning his head for the telltale wisp of newly forming cloud that indicated a thermal, warm air rushing upward, that would float his engineless aircraft higher yet.
Good lift over the shore would make this flight a special one. Shapiro needed a special flight to take his mind off the events in Israel.
I was born on Israel’s Independence Day, he thought. I never dreamed I would outlive the country itself.
He’d spent the morning sitting in front of the High Definition plasma television monitor in the conference room in his law office in Boston, staring at the coverage of refugee ships forced out of harbors in Greece, Italy and Albania, none of which permitted the desperate people to come ashore. None wanted the burden of caring for tens of thousands of destitute Jews unlikely to leave because they had no place else to go.
From Israel itself there was no coverage. Newscasters only speculated about what was happening when a million vengeful Palestinians backed by three armies swarmed over the sick and dying remnant of those Jews who had neither the will to resist nor the strength to flee. The total ban on foreign journalists - for their own safety - by the occupying powers only fueled the worst fears. Aljazeera’s stark coverage of Damascus showed children’s burned corpses, block after block of leveled buildings, demolished schools and hospitals. In contrast, it reported, bomb damage to Tel Aviv, although serious, was miraculously limited to Jewish neighborhoods. Neighboring troops were providing relief aid to the Jews who had wisely chosen to remain in Palestine.
Shapiro’s preparation for a deposition the next day of a Raytheon sales manager who’d fired his administrative assistant after she refused to go to a motel with him seemed silly in contrast to the news from the Mediterranean. And I never even visited there, never will now, Shapiro thought. Maybe a million Jews dead. Maybe two million. Another million in the camps and tens of thousands more in the ships. Must every generation have its Holocaust, he wondered. Then the thought crossed his mind that here he was thinking of himself again. Millions dead and homeless and I’m upset that I kept putting off a trip to Israel.
Shapiro knew he had to do something to take his mind off the news, something that would take all his concentration. That’s what his sailplane was for. No matter how much a next day’s jury argument consumed his thinking, so he could not take a shower without the words of his closing argument forming silently in the back of his throat, he knew that once he strapped himself into the sailplane and wiggled the rudder to signal the tow plane pilot he was ready to be pulled into the sky, his mind would focus on nothing except the aircraft and what was happening to the air around it.
“Good to see you down here again, Ben,” Willy (last name unknown to Shapiro), the glider club’s towplane pilot, said when Shapiro pulled up to the club hanger in his four-wheel drive Mercedes. Willy was a retired commercial pilot, never having made it to a major carrier before mandatory retirement at age sixty and air travel cutbacks put him out of work. He worked for the glider club not so much for the twenty-three dollars a tow he was paid as for the five minutes in each tow flight between when the glider released and when the tow plane landed, when Willy would loop and spin the Korean War vintage L-19 artillery spotter plane on the way down to pick up his next tow.
“Too bad what’s happening to your people over there,” Willy said. “Who would have thought somebody would be crazy enough to mess with an atom bomb. Must have killed himself, too, don’t you think?”
Shapiro gave Willy a nod and then a second quick look, surprised but not upset about the “your people.” He’d never discussed being Jewish with Willy, or hardly anybody else for that matter. For him being Jewish was more a fact of life, like being six feet tall, than anything else. It wasn’t as if he ever went to religious services or bought Kosher meat for any other reason than that it somehow seemed more healthy and tasted better, not quite organic, but better than supermarket beef. Shapiro referred to himself as a “gastronomic Jew,” not a religious one. The thought of a pastrami sandwich with mayonnaise on white bread with a glass of milk was not sacrilegious, it was abnormal, not the way things were done. That was the extent of his religious beliefs.
“Yeah, too bad, too bad,” Shapiro muttered. “How’s the lift today, Will? Been up yet?”
“It’s developing,” Willy answered, looking up at the puffy white cumulus clouds, a sign of strong rising air currents. “A hell of a lot of traffic out of South Weymouth, though. Never seen it so busy there.”
South Weymouth Naval Air Station was a recently reopened Navy Reserve air base a dozen miles north of Plymouth from which the Massachusetts Air National Guard flew aging F-15s up and down the Northeastern seaboard.
Military traffic complicated the basic rule of safety in the sky, the rule that said, “Don’t worry. It’s a big sky and you’re in a little airplane.”
The largest piece of metal in Shapiro’s glider was the thermos bottle he carried his Gatorade in. The German-built fiberglass and carbon fiber sailplane, with its wings only inches thick and its smoothly curved body, was a better Stealth aircraft than the hundred-million dollar fighters the Air Force was so proud of. The glider returned a radar echo about as well as a hawk with a bottle cap in its mouth, and its circling flight, searching for the same rising air currents as the birds used, was a perfect imitation of a lazy bird of prey. Besides, aircraft radars have a “declutter” feature that removes objects moving at less than 80 miles an hour, designed to screen out ground returns from trucks and buses. Gliders rarely reached that speed.
“Your tax dollars at work, Willy,” Shapiro said. “If those Reserve pilots are up on a Wednesday, you can bet they’re getting time and a half.”
Shapiro walked slowly around the glider, mentally ticking off each of the twenty-seven items on the preflight check list, then kicked the one main wheel centered under the cockpit and gave each wingtip a good shake, just to prove once again that the plastic plane would stay together when he hit the turbulence that marked entry into strong lift.
He opened the rear canopy in the two-person glider and checked that the safety harness straps were buckled tightly, holding the seat cushions in place so nothing could get loose in the rear cockpit and jam the controls. He closed and locked the rear canopy.
The tow pilot carefully ignored Shapiro while he did his preflight inspection. Some glider pilots would chat away while going through the preflight ritual. Shapiro, Willy learned from experience, treated each stage of the inspection like a surgical procedure, counting the number of threads showing beyond the safety nuts on each connection. This attention to detail paid off in the courtroom for Shapiro and was carried over into every aspect of his life, including what was supposed to be recreation. His wife joked that he planned their vacations down to making reservations at gas stations every 375 miles, knowing his car got 400 miles to a tank.
This to a woman who never turned off a light or closed a drawer, who tossed away the cap when she opened a new tube of toothpaste, seemed to be a foible in her husband she categorized as one of those “Jewish things” about him caused by a compulsive mother, things she sometimes found enchanting but usually put aside with a laugh. In Sally Spofford’s childhood in the big house on the rocks overlooking the ocean on Boston’s North Shore there was always somebody to worry about the details, to turn off the lights, to make sure the gas tank was full.
The tow pilot walked over to Shapiro’s glider.
“Let’s go up to three-thousand feet. A tourist flight today,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro squirmed into the front seat in the glider, lying back with his head held up by a small adjustable support. The shape of the glider was designed to minimize air resistance, with the smallest frontal area the designer could devise and still fit a six-foot tall pilot. Shapiro buckled all five straps, one from each side around his waist, one over each shoulder and one coming up between his legs, the “aerobatic” strap designed to keep him from sliding under the instrument panel when he turned the plane upside down. He closed and latched the hinged plastic canopy, put his feet on the rudder pedals and gently grasped the control stick, projecting between his legs, in his right hand.
The tow pilot attached the tow rope to the release mechanism in the glider’s nose, tugged to confirm it held tightly, then walked the 200 foot length of the rope to the tow plane and started his engine.
Shapiro breathed in, filled his lungs with air, held his breath, then released the air slowly. Chanting his “rope break” mantra of “stick forward, land straight ahead, stick forward, land straight ahead” - the action to take if the tow rope broke in the first 200 feet of flight - he stepped down hard on the right rudder pedal, then hard on the left, wiggling the plane’s rudder from side to side to signal the tow pilot that he was ready. He heard the tow plane get full throttle and the next second he was moving slowly along the grass field the gliders used. In thirty yards he had enough speed to gently pull back on the stick and lift the glider five feet off the grass, holding it there until the tow plane rose from the grass. Carefully, duplicating each movement of the tow plane, wings banked right, then level, then left, then level, the two aircraft rose into the sky, linked by a rope umbilical.
At 200 feet his mantra changed to “sharp turn to the left, stick forward,” knowing he had to act instantly should the rope break above 200 feet of altitude, turning the glider back to the airfield before it ran out of altitude and hit the trees at the end of the runway. The rope had never broken, but some day it would. Shapiro got through life knowing that even though the odds against disaster were a thousand to one, if you did something a thousand times, disaster was a certainty. He expected the tow rope to break on every takeoff. He expected the arresting police officer to lie at every trial. In both cases, if the expected didn’t happen he was pleasantly surprised, but he still expected it the next time.
The towplane circled gently and crossed the duck shaped pond southeast of the grass field that marked the IP, the interception point, where the gliders entered their landing pattern for that runway, just as the altimeter needle on the glider’s scanty instrument panel touched three-thousand feet.
As the glider passed over the pond, Shapiro took the yellow release handle in his left hand and gave it a strong pull, then another to be sure the tow rope released. Two tugs on the release were standard procedure. Just in case. Following the prearranged pattern, the tow plane banked sharply to the left and the glider gently to the right.
Pointing the plane’s nose into the wind coming from the ocean five miles to the east, Shapiro slowed the plane to 47 miles an hour, its minimum sinking speed. Although almost all glider competition was in smaller one-person aircraft, Shapiro preferred his two-person plane. Few things impressed clients more than a glider ride, besides, it got them used to being in a position where their lawyer was in complete control of their fate.
Shapiro’s glider was, for the moment, the state of the art, delivered from Germany the previous winter. With its 90 foot wingspan, with wings smoothed to a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch and with the latest high tech tubes and turbulators designed to squeeze every ounce of available lift out of the air, the plane had a glide ratio of seventy-five to one, meaning it went forward seventy-five feet for every foot it dropped. From six thousand feet up, that meant the plane could glide for seventy-five miles even if it found no lift at all.
The glider could carry a two-hundred pound passenger in the rear seat. Shapiro had flown two five-hundred mile cross-country flights in the glider already, and he was still learning how to press it to its limits.
The glider seemed to hover over the moored sailboats and fishing boats filling Plymouth Harbor. He spotted the canopy over Plymouth Rock and pictured the crowd of disappointed tourists surrounding the rock, expecting something like Gibraltar and finding an ordinary boulder with a crack down the center.
He gazed at Cape Cod hooking out into the ocean, its tip swirling around at Provincetown like a cat’s tail curled up for the night. To his left he saw Boston, a layer of smog hugging the ground for a thousand feet above the glass towers reflecting sunlight. He flew silently for two hours and let the altitude and solitude disconnect him from whatever was waiting for him on the ground, anxious clients, an increasingly distant wife, law partners worrying about collecting fees. Shapiro sometimes wished he could fly off and never land, impossible as that was. Eventually, as always, he steered for the interception point and flew the regular landing pattern.
Willy helped him pull the glider back into the club’s hanger, next to the custom trailer Shapiro used for towing his disassembled plane to other flying areas.
Shapiro, his mind eased by the medicine of the sun, the wind and the sky, opened his car door, sat down, started the engine with its reassuringly powerful turbo hum. He rolled down his window, not yet ready to give up the feel of the wind for the sterile coolness of the air conditioner.
As the electric radio antenna whirred up, the radio came on.
“Two ships carrying thousands of Jewish refuges illegally entered Boston harbor early this morning,” the radio announcer said breathlessly. “The Coast Guard ordered the ships quarantined. President Quaid personally directed that nobody be permitted ashore. Spokesmen for the Jewish community in Boston expressed outrage.”
I’d better stop by the office on the way home, Shapiro thought.