There are many pilots who write beautifully about their flying adventures—Beryl Markham, Tom Black, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—but few write well about why they fly. The overwrought style of de Saint-Exupéry, best known for The Little Prince, “works hair-raisingly well when he narrates an encounter, say, with a cyclone that almost tore the wings off his plane . . . but when he writes of why pilots fly, things get murky,” writes Caroline Paul (Tough Broad) in Why Fly: Seeking Awe, Healing, and Our True Selves in the Sky.
The majority of pilots resort to what Paul calls “pilotspeak,” understated and unsentimental, telling stories in a “rat-tat-tat interchange of humor and terror that casts the pilot himself as a dumbass, though a lucky one.” They are often very funny, though the jokes rarely have much to do with flight itself: Early stunt pilot Florence “Pancho” Barnes once said that “Flying makes me feel like being a sex maniac in a whorehouse with a stack of twenty-dollar bills.”
Paul—who is a recreational pilot, not a professional—has the rare ability to punch a hole between hilarious, brisk pilotspeak and breathless wonder, with more than a little Mary Oliver to her style. Her own stories in aviation span decades, from paragliders to her current obsession with a tiny experimental gyrocopter, and she’s earned her bona fide adventurer stripes. Alongside more practical concerns, like preflight checklists and simulated emergencies, she captures the sublime view, the freedom of doing the impossible and the loneliness and tenderness of leaving the Earth just so you have a reason to come back home.
In short chapters that address people’s fear of flying, stories of stolen airplanes, the history of aviation in Europe and the United States, and much more, Paul keeps her tone entertaining and balanced between light and dark. She hops from these histories to more personal stories, returning us continually to the fact that her marriage is coming to an end. When she alights on a flight-related subject, thrilling and scary, it’s easy for us to forget her underlying sense of loss. Then she reminds us, perhaps in the last two paragraphs of a chapter, by turning the subject of communication or pilot error into a metaphor for her fading partnership.
“It’s hard to describe how tiny I felt, how insignificant my emotions were,” Paul writes about getting momentarily lost in the towering Panamint Valley in California. “I wished suddenly that another human was here so I could point and gasp and they could point and gasp and my place in the universe would be secured. . . . I continued, my engine the only sound for miles around. Here I am, I was calling to the world, here I am.” With Why Fly, Paul reminds us that adventure stories have an uncanny ability to bring us closer to each other as we stand closer to the edge.