Today's Reading
The folks from the Port Authority had flown him over the project area in a helicopter, then continued the tour of the wide verdant valley. To Will, the rich greens below were like luxuriant carpets unfurled to welcome him. The pretty had worked its magic, and when an offer came on the mid-June day with the mercury hitting 115 degrees Fahrenheit in Tempe, he'd accepted without a second thought.
Since then, Will had lived into a healthy mistrust of pretty. What took you in on June 3 rarely looked so good come winter.
With altitude, the temperature dropped. Will twisted the vents to get more air flowing, cooling him down. The vice-grip headache constricting his temples eased for the first time since that morning, when he'd followed the kids into what had been their family home before the divorce last year. But he couldn't erase the image of Kat from his mind. Passed out. Face down on the couch. Naked. An empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red on the floor.
He knew she'd been drinking more the last couple of years. He'd seen the signs. He knew them all too well from his own drinking days. But he had no idea she'd gone so far down that road to nowhere.
Good thing she'd left the car, its fender crushed, out on the front lawn last night, or Will might never have known, united as the kids seemed in keeping her secret. Kevin, his fifteen-year-old, had shouted at Will to leave—actually pushed him out the door. Shocked, Will had stumbled down the porch steps backward, and stared at the door his son had slammed.
Will leveled the plane at 6,500 feet, backed off the throttle, adjusted the pitch of the prop, and fine-tuned the fuel mix. Almost set, he reached down and spun the trim tab until he felt the balance he was seeking, the perfect trim, in which the yoke took the lightest of touches for the plane to go where he wanted.
Now, it would take more than a light touch to get where he wanted to go. He'd mapped his course with such care over the past weeks. It started with an article in the Engineering News Record, "Swiss Cheese Rock Slows Kayakale Dam." Another dam where insufficient geological studies had impacted construction. Will had decided he was finished with his paper-pushing job at the Philadelphia Port. Turkey would be his next stop.
But now there was a big hitch in his plan; he couldn't leave the kids with Kat. He'd have to get full custody in the next two weeks, along with wrapping up at the port, packing to move, and selling the plane and the car, and, and, and....
Turbulence jolted the plane, and Will's attention, back to the cockpit. He gripped the yoke and rode through the bumps. Leaving the wide floodplain of the Delaware River, he steered toward the peaks of the Poconos, the landscape rising beneath him. When he got to the Susquehanna River, he followed its green ribbon west-southwest. Where the river split, the confluence of the north and west branches, he left it behind and headed for the heart of the Valley and Ridge physiographic province.
Ridges of resistant rocks, sandstones, conglomerates, and limestones yielded to valleys underlain by soft shales, then climbed again on the harder rocks of the next ridge. The rock units spanned the land surface in parallel bands, except where anticlines and synclines, geologic structures like the crests and troughs of ocean waves, angled into or out of the subsurface—there the units formed striking chevron patterns. To the geologist's eye, those patterns told the story of Earth's processes through the ages.
In Turkey, Will would read the story in the rocks. And in that story, he would find the answers they needed to make Kayakale Dam work.
He looped among the lofty cumulus clouds, leaning into turns and rolls, feeling the physics of flying in his muscles. His internal gyroscope engaged. Then he pulled into a stall. The stomach-dropping sensation of losing lift tested him. He stayed with it, fighting any hints of fear that rose in his throat. Satisfied he was under control, he pushed her nose down, gave her more throttle, and resumed his private air show by plummeting through another cloud break.
His neck relaxed and his jaw unclenched as he moved with the forces acting on the plane—never against them. That's what you do, he decided. Move with the forces acting on you. There'd be no more lawyers, no more court dates, and no more negotiating. He would take the job in Turkey and take the kids with him.
Will banked the plane hard left, turning back toward Flying W. There was even more to do now, and he'd best get to it. Coming out of the steep turn, he steered due east.
...
