Patterns in the Whole - EAA 105 Chapter Poker Run

Roy and I recently participated in the EAA Chapter 105  Poker Run. All types of aircraft – RV's, a Cessna, a Piper, fast planes, slow planes, young beginning pilots and pilots with many Hobbs hours, flew to a grass strip in the glowing, late summer morning light. We shared breakfast, picked our first card, got our T-shirts, admired the elegant, gathered planes, and commented to one another on what a gorgeous morning it was for flying. The poker run course took us over the Willamette Valley, over hay fields and beyond the thick, forested mountains. Earlier that morning, Roy and I left eastern Oregon, flying over the rugged Cascade Mountains, where lava flows spill out of thick forests. Now we hopped from airport to airport pointing west, to the wide, foamy, sea.

We were quiet that day - a peaceful, content quiet that filled the plane. Roy's soft, cotton T-shirt and scent of Irish Spring brushed against my arm. He pushed buttons, softly controlling our silver bird. Our world was above the earth, the rivers, mountains, clouds, and above the wide, blue water. The glacial plane of the Willamette Valley was a collage, a canvas, a brilliant masterpiece of gently woven patterns. Mown fields with loops and sworls, ginger, chocolate, and cinnamon cliffs that rose up in vertical towers towards the sky, deep black rivers of ancient lava, emerging from a blanket of green. I remembered a bedtime story I read to my daughter about a boy, stranded in the Canadian wilderness who learned to catch small game birds by seeing the pattern of an entire flock, instead of looking for a single bird.

If we were standing on earth, we would see each individual strand of hay, the furrows made in the grass by the plow and the occasional marring weed. Standing on the mountain, we would be in a field of rocks, the impossible heights of the peaks towering above us, rocky slopes rolling and tumbling away below. In the forest we would find ourselves surrounded by limbs, branches, bark, the hesitant deer or chattering squirrel. The ancient, emerging lava bed would draw our footsteps out across thumb-sized, pock-marked stones, and fascinating bits of obsidian, with smooth, sharp edges. Immersed in the beauty of the details, we would have no scope or vision of the sworls, the flow, the precipitous larger whole.

The kind people of the ocean town of Seaside hosted a BBQ lunch for our Poker Run group. We gathered around a runway, protected from the ocean breeze by a lining of trees. The local fireman grilled burgers and chicken. A pilot gave biplane rides. We shared peach pie, ice cream, stories and jokes with other pilots and people of the town.

People from the town gathered at the airport to see the planes; more planes than I've seen in so long, one said, and it's so great to have you all here, said another. In their eyes, we were a community of pilots and passengers, risk takers and adventurers, a group that builds planes, and takes to the skies. The EAA 105 Chapter is just that. It is a club, an entity, an organization. We host events, support aircraft builders and encourage would-be pilots. That is what we are from the distant outside.

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At the end of the day, we gathered in the chapter hangar at Twin Oaks. I was greeted by the wide, warm smile of the gal that organized the event, when she was not  running an avionics business and managing a home. I saw the steely blue eyes of a man who spent his life dedicated to aviation, and who lost his closest friend to that passion. I heard the story of the couple building a plane in their garage at night after their children go to bed, and about the pilot who spent an entire day helping people whose plane had a problem that day, fortunately encountered on the ground. I stood within the chapter hanger, and I did not see a club at all. Immersed in the beauty of the details, we are held together by the precipitous larger whole