To See the Whole Picture
When I was a small child, my father would often be late for dinner because he was up in the sky, flying and watching the sunset. After a day of hard work he simply had to do it. Flying was in his blood. He designed and built airplanes, which he named ANBO. My mother said that stood for the combination of the first letters of both their names, but to the aviators of his day in Lithuania it stood for Antanas Nori Buti Ore--Antanas wants to be in the air.
My father’s life was one of the millions extinguished by the dark forces of World War II, when I was not yet six years old, so my memories of him are blended with stories I heard and photographs in the family album. In one of my favorite photos he’s sitting in the first plane he built, in front of the farmhouse where he was born. That little plane won him a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering in Paris. He became one of his country’s leading aviation pioneers. When I went back to Lithuania for the first time, as the Soviet Union was collapsing and the Baltic States were reclaiming independence, I was amazed to be shown the real thing, an aircraft that looked like an antique handmade toy, hanging from the ceiling of a loft in the city of Kaunas. It had been dismantled and hidden for almost 50 years, through the German and then the Soviet occupations, then put back together again. It is now on display in the War Museum, in Kaunas.
The love of flying is widely shared in Lithuania, I discovered, and wondered why. Perhaps, I thought, it can be explained at least partly by topography. The country is so flat that any little rise in the land is called a mountain; perhaps this generates a longing for an elevated perspective. But if so, then what about Icarus, in mountainous Greece? What about my two-year-old grandson building a rocket from his blocks? The longing to rise above our normal horizon seems to be universal. Its expressions vary with changes in society and technology.
The early aviators had to be at one with the elements. They had to recognize and understand the patterns of wind, clouds, landforms, and water because their survival depended on their ability to navigate with them. (Read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight.) Today, pilots of commercial and military aircraft depend far more on instruments. Millions of airline passengers cross oceans and continents without ever having to look down at what’s below and around them, intent on games, music, or movies on a small screen.
More and more in our society we are isolated from direct experience of the natural world and confined to frameworks that provide only limited and distorted pictures of the planet we are part of. The forces of ignorance and greed would have it so, but that fact has not extinguished the desires that took many of the early fliers into the sky. We need experiences that allow us to perceive as a whole the things we are only offered in fragments. We want the whole picture, with ourselves in it. That need is there even in people who don’t recognize it. And where there’s a need, of course, there is also a response.
In this issue you can read about two unique and immensely valuable contributions to conservation that were born of the love of flying: Gabrielle and Ken Adelmans’ awesome Coastal Records Project, and LightHawk, an organization of pilots who volunteer air support for environmental causes.
Do go on, after reading about them, to “Mapping Past and Present Creeks of San Francisco.” The desire to know our interconnections extends down into the ground and into the past, as well as up into the air and into the future. The San Francisco creeks map, too, is a creation of love nurtured with passion. And as Isaac Singer said in an interview with Studs Terkel recorded in the KFPA archives and broadcast on Thanksgiving weekend, there can be no compassion without passion. He went on to say that in German the word for suffering, Leiden, has the same root as the word for passion: Leidenschaft. These three--passion, suffering, and compassion, all interconnected--could well be keys to discovery of the whole picture.