Night Flight
In April, 1968, I had an operation on my knee. It is hard to say why. Actually, saying why is not really hard, but the remembering is. My knee, it is true, was acting up. But I was acting up, subtly, and in ways that now disturb me. My love life had gone terribly wrong, it seemed, and my life was going wrong too. This conviction, underlying my days, drove a hidden desperation. University life was about to end. Nothing lay beyond. Perhaps life was about to end. I decided to have an operation on my knee.
The decision point came in March on the banks of the Big Sur River. It was late at night, about 10 PM, and I had just forded the rushing stream, big with spring rains. I held my sleeping bag high over my head, my shoes tied together dangling around my neck. Something in me was trying to prove something, for my trip to Big Sur had come all in a rush. From Berkeley, I had taken a series of buses to San Francisco Airport, boarded a United Airlines Convair and flown the half hour to the Monterey Airport, where I had hitchhiked down Highway 1. Somehow, I decided to fit in a trip between a morning class and the next day's evening seminar. I had to prove I could do it. Complete with the flight. God only knows why.
So, there on the banks of the river, emerging onto the dry sand, I slipped and felt my knee momentarily go wonky. This, an orthopedist had told me, was a common malady. Knees went 'out', and not with other knees, but out of commission. Everything in my knee snapped back into place and I carried on hiking, but the unreliable joint disturbed me. In the darkness, I hiked a couple of hours up the trail, thinking I would make it all the way to the Barton Flats camp ground. I gave up, threw the bedroll on the ground, and slept right in the path. At daybreak, I hiked down, hitched my way back up Highway 1 to the Monterey Airport, and in Berkeley stuck my thumb out, only to be picked up by my seminar instructor.
The upshot of all this was the knee operation. During the spring break, I visited my father in Southern California, discussed the orthopedic prospects and scheduled surgery. One of my father's colleagues performed the operation, which required several nights in Redlands Hospital. I shared a room with a man who had begun his life in vaudeville. He was full of tales of big productions, splendiferous mountings of kitsch involving dancers and acrobats, animals and musicians. The stories went on a bit, but I didn't mind. The morphine, or whatever it was that smoothed my days, made everything enjoyable. Things acquired a deep emotional intensity. I felt well cared for in the white hospital womb. The surgeon had done a splendid, nurturing job of knee restoration, I was certain.
In the end, my right leg in a straight cast, my father drove me to Ontario Airport where I hobbled across the tarmac and up the stairs to a Western Airlines Lockheed Electra. To accommodate me on the half-empty plane, a flight attendant folded down the seat in front of me. I was unspeakably comfortable for the 90 minutes it took to get to Oakland. The plane roared through the spring night, flying along the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles, miles of city lights sparkling.
I was not unaware of the recent history of these planes. Only a few years before, Electras mysteriously blew apart in the air. After a couple of accidents, Lockheed had fixed the problem, but something in me remained unconvinced. Still, for that night flight, the plane's sad history did not matter. I was not afraid. The glow and the onboard care and the emergence from a healing experience merged into something just as welcome at the other end, at Oakland Airport where my mother met me. She must have driven me to her apartment in Walnut Creek. I really can't recall. In any case I was back at my Berkeley room within a few days.
A dubious operation, book-ended by the care of each parent. It was the latter that I needed. While all this is clear in retrospect, at the time the whole experience, knee pain and all, even the weeks of walking with a cast around the campus, less than two months before my shooting...felt like a pleasant interlude. We all need relief and escape and caring attention. And it is remarkable the strange paths we find.
The decision point came in March on the banks of the Big Sur River. It was late at night, about 10 PM, and I had just forded the rushing stream, big with spring rains. I held my sleeping bag high over my head, my shoes tied together dangling around my neck. Something in me was trying to prove something, for my trip to Big Sur had come all in a rush. From Berkeley, I had taken a series of buses to San Francisco Airport, boarded a United Airlines Convair and flown the half hour to the Monterey Airport, where I had hitchhiked down Highway 1. Somehow, I decided to fit in a trip between a morning class and the next day's evening seminar. I had to prove I could do it. Complete with the flight. God only knows why.
So, there on the banks of the river, emerging onto the dry sand, I slipped and felt my knee momentarily go wonky. This, an orthopedist had told me, was a common malady. Knees went 'out', and not with other knees, but out of commission. Everything in my knee snapped back into place and I carried on hiking, but the unreliable joint disturbed me. In the darkness, I hiked a couple of hours up the trail, thinking I would make it all the way to the Barton Flats camp ground. I gave up, threw the bedroll on the ground, and slept right in the path. At daybreak, I hiked down, hitched my way back up Highway 1 to the Monterey Airport, and in Berkeley stuck my thumb out, only to be picked up by my seminar instructor.
The upshot of all this was the knee operation. During the spring break, I visited my father in Southern California, discussed the orthopedic prospects and scheduled surgery. One of my father's colleagues performed the operation, which required several nights in Redlands Hospital. I shared a room with a man who had begun his life in vaudeville. He was full of tales of big productions, splendiferous mountings of kitsch involving dancers and acrobats, animals and musicians. The stories went on a bit, but I didn't mind. The morphine, or whatever it was that smoothed my days, made everything enjoyable. Things acquired a deep emotional intensity. I felt well cared for in the white hospital womb. The surgeon had done a splendid, nurturing job of knee restoration, I was certain.
In the end, my right leg in a straight cast, my father drove me to Ontario Airport where I hobbled across the tarmac and up the stairs to a Western Airlines Lockheed Electra. To accommodate me on the half-empty plane, a flight attendant folded down the seat in front of me. I was unspeakably comfortable for the 90 minutes it took to get to Oakland. The plane roared through the spring night, flying along the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles, miles of city lights sparkling.
I was not unaware of the recent history of these planes. Only a few years before, Electras mysteriously blew apart in the air. After a couple of accidents, Lockheed had fixed the problem, but something in me remained unconvinced. Still, for that night flight, the plane's sad history did not matter. I was not afraid. The glow and the onboard care and the emergence from a healing experience merged into something just as welcome at the other end, at Oakland Airport where my mother met me. She must have driven me to her apartment in Walnut Creek. I really can't recall. In any case I was back at my Berkeley room within a few days.
A dubious operation, book-ended by the care of each parent. It was the latter that I needed. While all this is clear in retrospect, at the time the whole experience, knee pain and all, even the weeks of walking with a cast around the campus, less than two months before my shooting...felt like a pleasant interlude. We all need relief and escape and caring attention. And it is remarkable the strange paths we find.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Night Flight.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.paulbendix.com/MT-4.0-en/mt-tb.cgi/426
Leave a comment