THE HISTORY OF POP AVIATION
B. Elwin Sherman
March 01, 2006
When American physiologist Walter Cannon first coined the term, “fight or flight response” in 1929, he wasn’t proffering an infantryman versus aviator interpretation of how, when we feel threatened, we will either stand our ground or literally take to the air.
His definition was a physiological one, owed largely to the fact that he was a physiologist. If he’d been an avid linksman or train engineer, we might now have more studies in golf handicapping or railway switchbacks, instead of a scientific explanation of why we react the way we do to a perilous proposition, and we’ve enough of those.
I’m grateful that Walter minded his scope of practice, because I wouldn’t play golf if you changed the greens to gold and chained me to a club, (the organization or the instrument) and there hasn’t been a passenger train in this town since spats.
But, I today find it necessary to redirect Mr. Cannon’s theory, if only slightly, away from its physiological intricacy and into the overt actions of two California adolescents, who ran away from home ... in an airplane.
It seems that the two as yet unnamed teenaged boys, skulked into the hangar at Big Bear Airport after resolving that their respective parental controls overshadowed their desire for noncompliance, (fight) and land-jacked the small plane belonging to one of their fathers, setting off for God knows where (flight). They did this, apparently, as dictates the mindsets of fourteen-year old boys, thinking it a good idea at the time.
And, if I remember correctly, my domestic breakaways at that age also seemed not only justifiable in their means, but just as undefinable in their ends, though I never had the airborne option available to these luckless lads. Had I been so blessed, I too might have chosen sky jaunt escapism, and not the much more restrictive geo-confines of a Schwinn Varsity.
The closest I came was an earlier attempt to flee the papa constraints of my pre-adolescence, and one I can only now report, when I climbed to the barn’s ridgepole with a Newton-defiant umbrella, opened the latter and leapt off. As is often said now in the skydiving community: “The ground’s the limit,” and my stunt must certainly stand as precursor to that admonition.
The two fugitives in this case, however, also unmindful of the Newtonian sub-text which demands that what goes unlearnedly up must certainly come down well-schooled, crash-landed their foolhardy Phoenix shortly after take-off, nose-down in Joshua Tree National Park. They couldn’t have invented a more poetic ditch, given how the Joshua tree got its name, and how its namesake once also managed to, as did these boys yesterday, seduce the sun as a vandalous co-conspirator in a quest for conquest.
A San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department spokesman speculated that the plane probably came down so ceremoniously because “it was low on fuel.” I submit that a plane low on fuel as opposed to out of fuel, like a humorist down to his last cup of Maxwell House versus out of his muse-driving elixir, won’t crash as a result, but both prospects may well precipitate unstable approaches to the tasks at hand.
Enough, presumedly, to send these respective parties to their vainglorious conclusions, with the two dropping from the sky in hellbent surrender, and the one braving this sub-zero March lion long enough to go downtown and replenish the stores of his umberous, if not lamb-hearted, addiction.
Yes, I believe Mr. Cannon’s “fight or flight” discovery was destined to be applied here, despite his intended parameter of a mere sympathetic nervous system catalyst. I’d opt, however, for the broader meaning, drawing from my own memories of when I pedaled to town in a non-conforming snit, and risked a plummeting canopy inversion rather than submit to unfair curfew:
“Boys will be boys.”
Ride like the wind, young rebels.
At least until Dad gets home.
Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.
E-MAIL ELWIN!
His definition was a physiological one, owed largely to the fact that he was a physiologist. If he’d been an avid linksman or train engineer, we might now have more studies in golf handicapping or railway switchbacks, instead of a scientific explanation of why we react the way we do to a perilous proposition, and we’ve enough of those.
I’m grateful that Walter minded his scope of practice, because I wouldn’t play golf if you changed the greens to gold and chained me to a club, (the organization or the instrument) and there hasn’t been a passenger train in this town since spats.
But, I today find it necessary to redirect Mr. Cannon’s theory, if only slightly, away from its physiological intricacy and into the overt actions of two California adolescents, who ran away from home ... in an airplane.
It seems that the two as yet unnamed teenaged boys, skulked into the hangar at Big Bear Airport after resolving that their respective parental controls overshadowed their desire for noncompliance, (fight) and land-jacked the small plane belonging to one of their fathers, setting off for God knows where (flight). They did this, apparently, as dictates the mindsets of fourteen-year old boys, thinking it a good idea at the time.
And, if I remember correctly, my domestic breakaways at that age also seemed not only justifiable in their means, but just as undefinable in their ends, though I never had the airborne option available to these luckless lads. Had I been so blessed, I too might have chosen sky jaunt escapism, and not the much more restrictive geo-confines of a Schwinn Varsity.
The closest I came was an earlier attempt to flee the papa constraints of my pre-adolescence, and one I can only now report, when I climbed to the barn’s ridgepole with a Newton-defiant umbrella, opened the latter and leapt off. As is often said now in the skydiving community: “The ground’s the limit,” and my stunt must certainly stand as precursor to that admonition.
The two fugitives in this case, however, also unmindful of the Newtonian sub-text which demands that what goes unlearnedly up must certainly come down well-schooled, crash-landed their foolhardy Phoenix shortly after take-off, nose-down in Joshua Tree National Park. They couldn’t have invented a more poetic ditch, given how the Joshua tree got its name, and how its namesake once also managed to, as did these boys yesterday, seduce the sun as a vandalous co-conspirator in a quest for conquest.
A San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department spokesman speculated that the plane probably came down so ceremoniously because “it was low on fuel.” I submit that a plane low on fuel as opposed to out of fuel, like a humorist down to his last cup of Maxwell House versus out of his muse-driving elixir, won’t crash as a result, but both prospects may well precipitate unstable approaches to the tasks at hand.
Enough, presumedly, to send these respective parties to their vainglorious conclusions, with the two dropping from the sky in hellbent surrender, and the one braving this sub-zero March lion long enough to go downtown and replenish the stores of his umberous, if not lamb-hearted, addiction.
Yes, I believe Mr. Cannon’s “fight or flight” discovery was destined to be applied here, despite his intended parameter of a mere sympathetic nervous system catalyst. I’d opt, however, for the broader meaning, drawing from my own memories of when I pedaled to town in a non-conforming snit, and risked a plummeting canopy inversion rather than submit to unfair curfew:
“Boys will be boys.”
Ride like the wind, young rebels.
At least until Dad gets home.
Copyright 2006 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.
E-MAIL ELWIN!
Print
Email
