I hope it’s obvious to all why I didn’t tell mom. Every weekend in the summer my father would take us up in some little plane, either a Cessna or a Piper Cub (or, on very rare occasions, a Supercub, Ooooooh, bring on the Cristal, we be livin’ large!) and we’d do shit like this. Mostly, though, we’d just go to Collingwood or something; if you don’t like Blue Mountain pottery and you can’t talk your dad into taking you to the candy factory, there’s not much to do in Collingwood, let me tell you.

Still, my sister (who now has a motorcycle, of course; t’was in her genes) was quite the shit disturber and wouldn’t be happy without at least one barrel roll. Dad’s specialty, though, was the move I can’t remember the name of, where you go straight up until you stall, then fall over, flipping the plane and free-falling: he’d ask us whether he should fall over forwards or backwards. I liked sidways, because that was much harder to keep on the plane (har, har) and far less predictable.

I remember once going down to Toronto in a floatplane and landing on Lake Ontario; it had ten times the amount of traffic we were used to, with several airports, pleasure boats, ferries and lakers all over the place, and you, the stranger, not actually knowing where you were supposed to go. We spent some time heading for Centre Island before we realized the airport was on the other side of it. It makes you feel very strange to go from Master (or Mistress) of the Universe on top of the clouds to just another tin can creeping past a huge freighter like some crippled-up waterbug; it would be humbling, if humbling me were possible. Anyway, as always Dad nailed the landing (he used to ask us to grade him; I was tougher than my sister, who’d grade a bumpy smackdown an A if it had followed an eight-point barrel roll) it was a B if I recall, and I have a mind for trivia if, as you can see here, nothing else. And as we docked he turned to me and said,

“That’s the first time I’ve flown one of these in fifteen years! Don’t tell your mother.”

Then there was the time he nearly lost his pilot’s license.

This is my family we’re talking about, so of course it is more complicated than that. Bear with me. And, if my sister ever checks the blog, bear with her extensive, detailed and footnoted corrections in the comments section; let us just say we are opposite sides of the same coin.

Dad used to help out with Air Cadets when we lived in Godforsaken Wiarton. The one thing Wiarton had to recommend it, and it had this in almost obscene abundance, was landscape. My high-school geography teacher was, in fact, a world-famous geographer, quite the swashbuckling Indiana Jones type who should have been changing young lives at a posh university somewhere but who, instead, moved himself and his exotic French wife to Buttfuck Nowhere, Canada, because of the perfect glacial geography.

And what do you do when you’re a group of Air Cadets, in Buttfuck Nowhere, Canada, and it’s a long weekend? You go camping. And so they did.

And all this was unbeknownst to me, who was being transported from Wiarton back to my school down near Barrie by plane. It was a hippie school, not posh in the least, but it did cost money and once you throw money into the equation there will always be a certain percentage of people who get competitive about it. I didn’t have a lot of status points in school, to say the least, but the one thing I did have was that I would arrive by plane, and that tended to keep a lot of people off my back who would otherwise be all over it and in my face as well.

In any case, there I was with my backpack full of clean underwear and all, hopping into the plane with Dad, who really just wanted to get in some flying time. It seems that, as he was filling out the flight plan, he neglected to mention the part that should have read “and then divert south-east, dropping to an altitude of two meters over the lake surface, reaching the Air Cadet camp at approximately 9:15am, when I will make a 90-degree turn upwards, knocking several of the tents and at least five Cadets flat with the force of my passing.”

Ooopsie.

But my father, the Bizarro World Murphy, had rather a talent for landing on his feet in a bed of roses with no skin off his nose and smelling like, in fact, a great big Hybrid Tea.

When the complaint was filed, it looked like he was definitely going to lose; there were some fifty witnesses, after all, who were trained in observation and his was the only plane in the vicinity. And besides, he happily told everyone at the bar that night, although it must be admitted that the regulars down at the bar didn’t make a prosecutor’s heart glow with the same fervor as a bunch of stone-cold sober Air Cadets, ready to testify in uniform if it came right down to it.

The day before the hearing was scheduled, the can’t-recall-his-title in charge of reviewing the case happened to be at the Legion where my father was working on his hangover. Hunter S. Thompson never went to court without a hangover, and he’d have found a soulmate in my father. The c-r-h-t took my father aside, drew him into a darkened corner, and whispered “April fool’s! I ‘lost the paperwork’ for ya!“

The cadets were a little confused as to why they didn’t have to testify, but I don’t think they were all that disappointed; it was my father, after all, who was in charge of teaching them about airplanes, and they’d rather learn it from some reckless Ace than from some boring old plodder. Also, the ones who had gotten knocked over had quite the good time at school, pulling off their shirts to show the girls their bruises. They were happy to see him back; several of them smuggled him beers, which he accepted as his tribute even though he didn’t actually drink beer.

Did you know James Doohan, the guy who played Scotty was thrown out of the RCAF for slaloming his plane between hydro poles on a bet? That story gave my father a whole new respect for Star Trek, I’m telling you.