A two-day trip up from South Florida by small plane turned to four last week, the weather leading the pilot to weigh the hell of a $200-plus night at a Marriott in Jacksonville against risking his life in a storm. He chose the Marriott.
In a hundred times flying with this guy, who happens to be my father, I can’t recall a weather-related layover like that. But I can recall an entire day spent waiting around a backwater airport somewhere in interior South Carolina — sounds about right, anyway, who really knows with memory these days — the result of a propeller bent on an uneven grass airstrip.
It actually wasn’t that bad, thanks to a vending machine dispensing Mr. Pibb, the sweet, plummy, storied Dr. Pepper competitor that back then couldn’t be found north of the Mason-Dixon line.
A pilot’s son who got airsick — it was like being a coach’s kid who not only couldn’t ball, he just wanted to shut himself in his room and read comic books. It got so bad that within 100 yards of the plane, still safely in the car but approaching an airport parking space, my ears would start ringing.
Up from Florida on Sunday, before we caught some of the Masters from Augusta, Ga., he apologized, my father, for making me fly while sick, but he needn’t have, despite my memories of a rear cargo net used for my seating. That would’ve been in the old Cessna high-wing, blue and white or maybe silver, long since replaced by his late-1960s Piper Cherokee low-wing, red and white, but again, who’s to say if memory serves correctly. I probably didn’t in fact roll back and forth like a loose bottle belowdecks in choppy seas.
For the sickness-prone in a small plane, how bad it gets is largely situational. A trip down South might find you holding a Martinson’s coffee can for barf and shivering in a winter coat in a rear seat, where the sun was just out of reach, while two feet away up front it beat down on the pilot and my older brother, to the point where they had to strip down to T-shirts. Contrast that with later trips from suburban Massachusetts to the Cape for dinner, when the smoother nighttime air, cool and eased of its pressure, made for pure pleasure, and no end of twinkling lights to look at below.
We’re not talking a mogul here, more like a working pilot who used to tow banners up and down the beach. We moved to Green Street in Sag Harbor in 1969, so sometime around then he first landed at East Hampton, brought here, like so many others who remain, by Southampton College. He made it from the airport to the ocean at the end of Beach Lane in Wainscott and decided it was the place to be.
He’s tied down at Gabreski in Westhampton Beach for the time being. It’s cheaper. And friendlier. As East Hampton Airport goes private, whatever that means. I wish it meant a luncheonette in the terminal.