The Summer Camp Experience
Posted Friday July 26, 2019
I have found myself thinking about something I call the "new school" experience for the last few years. It's captured pretty well in the first Harry Potter story, where an outcast is thrust into a new world where he has to sort out how everything works, find out who's a friend and who's an enemy, figure out the literal lay of the land, etc. The Harry Potter example is quite heightened since it includes magic and wizardry, but it demonstrates the kind of thing I've thought about.
A normal human in our mundane Muggle reality would experience it when starting at a new school, or starting a new job, or going to summer camp for the first time.
It has been on my mind lately, because I've been going through that experience this week with Oshkosh. It's funny but perhaps not unexpected that we romanticize this experience, since we tend to romanticize all sorts of odd things in life when turning them into stories. The reality is not as romantic.
When I arrived at the Oshkosh airport, it was by a fairly ramshackle shuttle bus driven by a brainwashed Trump supporter. He dropped us off at a random location, far from where we would have normally been dropped off. I took the first transportation I could find, hoping it would take me somewhere useful, mostly hoping to make some forward progress with my 50+ lbs of baggage and see the lay of the land without concentrating on humping my stuff around. I was following directions to meet a person I'd only corresponded with, having no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn't have a map. There was confusion about my entrance to the sacred ground area.
None of which is to say it was bad necessarily, it just wasn't very romantic. More like boggling and sweaty and heavy. The romance comes later when you retell the story, and you don't concentrate so much on the sun beating down or the weight of the bags so much as the jaw-dropping quantity of airplanes of all types, or the fact that basically every aviation manufacturer, from the very largest the the very smallest, had some representation at the festival. The airplanes flying overhead, the jets deafening everyone with afterburners, the thousands of conversations in dozens of languages, every last one of them enthused on some theme of aviation.
I've gotten to feel almost like I know what I'm doing, by now. I know where the major areas are, and don't have to pull out the map and compass to get oriented every time I want to go from one place to another. I'm certainly not comfortable yet, but I no longer feel like I'm the new kid in school. Things are more settled.
Until I unsettle them, of course.
My first act upon getting to the airport was to make straight for the NASA building, and more or less straight for the attractive scientist as soon as I spotted her. I had a moment where I couldn't find her, and thought I might have missed my chance to have a further conversation. She waved, and obviously remembered me, which I took as an encouraging sign, and we ended up talking for another half hour, near the end of which I not very suavely suggested we might continue the conversation away from her display. What I didn't say was, "after your shift is over," and she said, with what I took to be actual dismay, that she couldn't. I nodded and said, "Of course" and dropped the topic.
I was planning to go see Dick Rutan talk about building and flying the Voyager aircraft, which flew completely around the earth in 1986 over the course of 9 days, without landing or being refuelled. As is apparently now my fixed habit, I left it too long, and had to hoof it over to the museum in 5 minutes despite the fact that it's a 15 minute walk. As I went, I replayed the conversation in my head, and kicked myself for not clarifying that I'd meant after her shift, then I kicked myself for not handing her a scrap of paper with at least my name and number on it, so that if she wanted to contact me she could.
Dick Rutan telling his story of flying Voyager 1
I did in fact find the Dick Rutan talk, but it was already 20 minutes over by the time I got there. Fortunately he talked at least 45 minutes over his allotted hour and a quarter length time slot, so I got to hear most of it. The Voyager process sounds amazing. One of the things I hadn't known was that it had essentially no major corporate sponsors. They got some donations of materials and equipment (a quarter-million dollars worth of carbon fiber, in 1984, for example). Lots of stuff was just funded by (he waved out at the crowd) folks like us.
The flight itself must have been utterly bonkers. He was the pilot, and his copilot, if I understood this correctly, was an ex-girlfriend who threatened to burn the plane down if she wasn't allowed to fly copilot, yet was physically unable to actually fly the plane if Dick wanted to take a rest. As a result, over the course of the 9 hour flight, he got miniscule snippets of sleep, like 1.5 hours one day, none the next, and so on. He's published a book about it, which sounds like it would be a pretty fascinating read. He's a good storyteller, though his habit of occasionally referring to himself in the third person in a venue where it was occasionally hard to hear his words was a trifle confusing.
Halfway through the talk, it occurred to me that I had a paper schedule book, so I pulled it out and wrote down my name and contact details on one of the blank pages in preparation for walking back past the NASA building. Such is the state of my brain that I couldn't concentrate on anything in the museum once the talk was over, and the EAA museum is no slouch when it comes to the history of aircraft, particularly amateur-built aircraft. I stopped long enough to photograph Arnold Ebeneter's record-setting plane; he taught me to fly tailwheel in the Harvey Field Champ, which led directly to acquiring Norbert. So, interesting, but I skipped most of the rest in order to be on my way back to the NASA tent to deliver my scrawled scrap of paper.
With less stumbling than I'd thought might happen (it has occurred to me approximately a zillion times that I'm a grown-ass man and shouldn't be having this kind of palpitation over talking to an attractive member of the opposite sex, and indeed normally don't), I found her again and interrupted her long enough to press the paper into her hand, say I wanted to stop monopolizing her time, and to contact me if she had free time and felt like continuing our conversation. It didn't come out that coherently, but I think I conveyed the sense of my message more or less comprehensibly, and quickly walked out to find the next thing.
The next thing ended up being a talk about what to do when one's plane develops issues far from home, and needs maintenance. The essence of it was, "don't" followed by "do as little as possible if you absolutely must," with some stories for emphasis. I guess the speaker runs a kind of advice/consultation service which helps aviators deal with problems while far from home. It was fun to hear the stories, and was pleasing to find that my instinct seemed to be on the right track as far as how to deal with maintenance in the field.
Then it was time for lunch, and I finally tried the local fried cheese curds. They were decent, but I like the ones they serve at Lost Lake on Capitol Hill better. I ended up sitting with a gent who's on the security team for Airventure, and his girlfriend, and we had an enthusiastic conversation about some of the planes we've seen. He's just starting his flight training, with 0.6 hours in his log so far, but he lives in the area, so he gets to do his flight training at Wittman Regional, where we were sitting. That's pretty cool. We were later joined by a couple who are also local, and they had some good conversations about local flying attractions.
The downside to having dropped off my phone number with a cute girl was that I was now obsessively checking my phone to make sure I didn't miss a call or text. I feel like I'm 14. I still have no idea what her name is.
Hand-starting an engine: proper technique
The next event on my list was a hand-propping demo. This is where you carefully set up the plane so it's restrained, get in front of it, and swing the propeller to start the engine. Absolutely normal on a 7AC Champ, which has no electrical system, thus no self-starter. My 7EC Champ fortunately has an electrical system and a starter, so I don't need to know how to do this, but it could come in handy at some point. If I accidentally leave the master switch on and drain the battery, I can still start the engine, which is pretty cool.
The demo was given by a husband and wife team, and was pretty clear. He laid out all the dos and don'ts of the procedure, and showed us some good ways to make it safer. A common problem is that someone will start a plane and for one of a variety of reasons the plane gets away from them. It can then crash into hangars, cars, other airplanes, etc. It's not hard to find photos of "grated" airplane tails where a runaway plane has sliced progressively into another airplane's tail before coming to a million-dollar stop. I liked his idea to use a bungee cord to pull back on the throttle in a plane like the Champ, with a little wedge that can be inserted to crack the throttle for starting (though I think Norbert might start without any throttle at all; I'll have to give it a try on the return flight -- try the throttle part, not the hand-propping part).
After the hand-propping, I was intending to wander the Vintage area, but realized I'd seen the planes already on a previous day, so I walked back past the big exhibition hangars and to the fly-market. I picked up a bottle of torque seal, which is a type of paint you put on fasteners to prove that they haven't moved. A lot of my pre-flight on Norbert is checking that fasteners haven't moved, so I might be able to make pre-flight faster this way.
I also finally found a t-shirt I wanted. There was a business in one of the fly market tents which had a bunch of airplane designs on silkscreen frames, and would print a custom shirt for you right there and then. I wavered between a Stearman biplane and a Champ, but of course the Champ won out. After all, Norbert got me this far, why would I not want to get a Champ on a shirt? Most of the shirts available are either in styles I'd never wear, or feature military planes, which are on my list of things I don't want to advertise on my body.
Then it was time to vacillate wildly: the displays were closing down for the day, it being about 5 pm, and rain was occasionally soaking the area and had been all day -- a blessedly overcast day, though this meant it was less warm and more humid, so no net temperature change -- and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Option one would be to get dinner at the airport and kill time until the movie, First Man, started at 8:30. Option two would be to take a bus up to the corner of the airport near where I was first dropped off, and walk up to Target. A confounding factor was that if I got a text from an unknown number saying, "Let's hang out," it's about a 99% chance that she'd be on the airport somewhere, so I was reluctant to leave. However, as the time wore on, it seemed less and less likely that this text would arrive, and I ended up walking up to Target to stock up on travel food for my departure on Sunday. Because I was getting stuff that would want to be refrigerated, this would necessarily mean I'd have to go back to the dorms, and probably would not spend any more time at Oshkosh this day.
Shopping accomplished, I caught the various buses and trams back to the big bus stop, and got on the next city bus to the university. Out of curiosity, I checked the on-campus menu for dinner, but with the vegetarian options being sweet potatoes, honey carrots and corn bread, decided that wouldn't be a very satisfying dinner for $16. Instead I found a Thai restaurant in the cluster of restaurants that obviously cater to students. I got their padh thai, and it was quite good.
On my way back in to the dorm building, I greeted Sydney, who works the front desk, and whom I've been chatting with when I pass her way. I discovered tonight that she's 19, and she discovered that I was 46. Age is a weird thing. Tonight she had another dorm employee with her, and we ended up sitting there chatting for 3 enjoyable hours. This is what I miss, just having a hang-out and chat with friends. The conversation turned to music at one point, and it was funny to realize how little overlap our respective musical experiences have. They named off a series of bands they like, of which I recognized one name. I'm pretty sure I've never heard that band's actual music, though. I listed off a handful of bands I like, to blank stares. To be fair, it was not just across generations but across genres, with me preferring fairly heavily-produced electronic-leaning music, and they preferring indie and folk. I realized once again that most of the music I like to listen to technically qualifies for the oldies station now. So this is what getting old feels like.
I'm pleased that I now have my pre-departure shopping done, or at least done enough. I can take off on Sunday reasonbly confident that I have what I need. It's nice to have that item off the list, since I had been afraid it would take up much of Saturday. The only biggish thing I have to do before Sunday is laundry on Saturday night ('cause this guy knows how to party: hanging out at the front desk on Friday night, and doing laundry on Saturday), followed by packing. Or not, the distance I want to fly on Sunday is less than an hour's flight to the south, so I can be pretty relaxed about my departure schedule. The only thing I may need to watch for is afternoon thunderstorms, which have started popping up in the forecast in the last day or two.
Still no contact from unknown numbers or email addresses, so I'll probably just have to chalk this one up to excessive high spirits for now. I've managed to tippity-tap on this little keyboard into the wee hours again (though for a fine reason, that was a fun conversation at the front desk), and have yet to shower off the day's grime. I'm using that shower for all it's worth, as long as I have it. The return trip and its possible privations is looming ever larger. I'll just have to take it as it comes. I'm ready.
Copyright © 2019 by Ian Johnston.