At the end of the rope

A single hemp rope dangled from the darkness. The man, bloodied and scratched, hung onto it with his blistered hands.  He felt his forearms burn.  The muscles in his fingers were beginning to cramp. He looked down — he could see nothing but inky blackness.  He was literarily and figuratively at the end of his rope.

Sweat poured down his forehead into his stinging eyes.  If he wiped his brow, he’d fall.  But he couldn’t fight much longer.  His muscles began to scream a bloody scream.  His right hand began to fail first. And then the left.  Never a quitter, the man let go and began to plummet. The darkness swallowed him and his screams.
“Wake up. WAKE UP!”

The man felt something, or someone jostling him.  He groggily opened one eye to see his wife standing over him.  “WAKE UP, you were having THAT dream again.”

He looked at his wife of 20 years.  She was a pretty as the day they married. Time had etched slight canyons around her eyes, but otherwise, Cathy could pass for a woman half her age. He nodded his head. “Yeah.  I had THAT dream.”

It didn’t take Freud to interpret what THAT dream meant.

David Hammack loved to fly. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, he had been a successful fighter pilot during the first Gulf War. He and his F-16D Fighting Falcon had been the terror of the Iraqi Air Force, downing one MIG in the air and destroying 12 on the ground.  Coming home sporting the Distinguished Flying Cross, Captain David Hammack decided to leave the military and chase the money.  He took a job flying MD-88s for Delta Airlines out of Atlanta. (or as he liked to call it “he was a heavy equipment operator.”)  He and Cathy moved out of base housing into a nice home in Peachtree City, Georgia and begin to live the highlife. Cookouts and parties followed. Then came the flights and long absences away from home.  David moved up to Boeing 767s and began to fly transcontinental routes.  He now saw more of the world and less of Cathy.

In a hotel room near Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, he said a simple prayer.  “Dear Lord, please show me the way to being able to take control of my life again.”

When he opened his eyes, he noticed the Plane & Pilot magazine sitting on the table near his bags. “Funny,” he thought. “I don’t remember seeing that. Some other pilot must have left it.” He got off the bed, walked over to the magazine, picked it up and began flipping through its pages.

There, on page 20 (next to the ad for the Rolex GMT), was love at first sight: A Piper Chieftain PA31-350. And in that French hotel room (with a lot of help from the banks), Falcon Air Charter Service was born.

When he got home, Cathy looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Need I remind you how much money you make?!?”

“Life is about more than money. It’s about freedom. Freedom to control your own destiny. Freedom to live your own life.”

On August 1, 2005, David Hammack left Delta Airlines and he and Cathy moved to a small airfield in Mississippi.

All their friends thought they were crazy moving to Mississippi, but Cathy’s parents lived nearby and she knew that there was a steady supply of doctors and business people who needed to get to the Gulf Coast to play golf or fish.  Memphis airport was too far and this allowed them to try to start a family in a place with a little slower pace than Atlanta.  They moved into a small house near the airfield and David began to offer flights all around the Southeast. Never had a man been happier.

Until the fall of 2008 when the Great Recession began.

The airline charter business had already been suffering. Fuel prices had been eating into his margins (and everyone else’s household budgets) and trips were the first thing cut from peoples’ budgets. The Great Recession hit and business trips fell off considerably. Steak turned to chicken turned to Hamburger Helper.  The bank, for obvious reasons, still wanted to be paid.  Food and rent be damned.

David groggily walked across the kitchen and looked out at the moonlit Piper Chieftain sitting in the hanger. It had now become an albatross hanging around his neck.

“God. You’re not very talkative, are you? Because you never answer my prayers.  You’re just going to sit there and watch me fail? Don’t you listen anymore?”

Fear had turned to anger, blasting from his heart like lava erupting from a long dormant volcano.

“Come to bed, David. You can’t solve this at 3 a.m.”  Cathy came in and put her arm around him. She didn’t say anything else. She was a scared as he was.

The next morning, coffee flowed like the Mississippi River.  David sat in the trailer parked between the hangers and desperately waited for the next charter.  The phone was silent. Nothing. He threw a wadded ball of paper (a past-due notice from the bank) in the air and hoped for someone to walk in for a charter.  Desperate times require desperate measures. But he didn’t care anymore.  He was about to let go of his rope.

Just then, the wind blew open the trailer’s door.  The bell clanged and a man walked in sporting a briefcase.  He was six-feet tall, brown-headed and had a neatly trimmed beard. On his wrist was a Rolex GMT (like the one in the ad) and he wore a fairly expensive suit. “I hear you do charters to the Coast.”

“Um, yes sir. When do you need to go?” David’s pulse quickened. After a long drought, it was going to rain a little.

“As soon as possible if that is OK. I’ll pay a little extra.”  The man opened the brief case and pulled out some $100 bills.

They were in the air before you could say “Destin.”

It was an uneventful flight. The Piper Chieftain cruised comfortably at 6,000 ft, allowing a beautiful view of the Mississippi and Alabama countryside. The pilot allowed the stranger to sit in the front seat with him.  “Can I offer you a soda?”  The man shook his head no politely.  “DTS, This is Falcon 7. Requesting clearance to land on runway 1.” The flight was over almost as soon as it began.

As the plane taxied to a stop, David noticed some commotion off the right.  He killed the engines, hopped out and helped his passenger with his luggage.  “Thank you for flying Falcon Air!”  The stranger nodded and looked at the people surrounding what looked like a little girl slumped over in a chair.  An ambulance sat parked and EMTs feverishly worked on her.  A woman ran over to David and screamed, “You have to help us!”

The hot Destin sun and accompanying humidity caused him to began to sweat profusely by the time he ran over to the group.  A man looked him in the eye and began to speak forcibly (if not with a hint of panic.), “You have to help us. My daughter must be flown to St. Jude’s in Memphis immediately. She had a heart condition and must have surgery. Surgery they can’t do here.  Our other plane has broken down and we need to hire you to get us and her doctor to Memphis.”

David waved at entourage and the EMTs helped the little girl to the plane.  “What’s her name?” The man, who had obviously been crying, looked up at him, “Cathy.”  As David fired up the Piper’s engines, he knew this would be his most important flight ever.

The Piper, with a much heavier load, clawed at the sky. Gravity finally released her grip and the twin-engine plane soared into the Florida sky. No one spoke a word until they crossed the Mississippi border.

“Thunderheads. Severe thunderstorms are between us and Memphis. Radar is lit up like a Christmas tree. This doesn’t look good.”

“Can we fly over them?” The mother looked at David with panic in her eyes.

“Negative.  Those storms go to 45,000 feet.  We can’t climb that high.  I’ll have to thread the needle. Everyone get buckled in. ”  David’s stomach sank. What he was about to do was nothing short of stupid.  But there was a dying little girl in the back of his plane. He just hoped he didn’t get them all killed.

The plane began to shake violently. One of the EMTs vomited.  Then the second one did, too.  Lightning danced between the clouds, threatening the small interloper.  And then it happened: A bolt hit the right engine, causing a blast and flames.

David had a flashback to the flak over Kuwait.

The right engine was on fire.  David struggled with the controls, all the time repeating the Lord’s Prayer.  He flipped a series of switches and managed to extinguish the blaze.  Oil covered the engine cowling. Burnt oil.  He killed the engine before it blew and fought to fly the plane with one engine. The father sat silently and the mother cried over her daughter. “OK God, I know you don’t listen but I really need you this time.”

The wounded Piper struggled in the storm.

And then it happened, the storm parted and the sun lit the passenger cabin.  Up ahead was Memphis International Airport.

“This is Falcon 7, we have an inflight emergency.  We are on one engine and have a very sick little girl on board. We need an ambulance to St. Judes IMMEDIATELY.  Requesting clearance to land. Tell the Fed Ex boys to cool their jets.”  The plane dropped out of the sky.

There was no sweeter sound than the sound of rubber tires meeting black asphalt.

An ambulance met the plane on the runway and the little girl was whisked off to surgery. David limped the plane over a nearby hanger, killed the remaining engine and got out to inspect his wounded bird.

He looked at his plane’s burnt engine. How they got through that storm, he’d never know. Now it was just another bill he could not afford. Not only does it pour when it rains. There is lightning, too.  He sat down against the landing gear, put his head in his hands and said, “Why God?”

“Excuse me?”  A voice woke him from his pity party.

It was the father.  “My wife went on to the hospital. I wanted to settle up with you. Thank you. You saved my little girl’s life. No, you saved all of our lives. That was the best flying I’ve seen since Vietnam.”

“Thanks. You flew?”

“F-105 Thunderchiefs.  I felt like I was being shelled over North Vietnam during that storm.  Don’t worry about your plane’s engine. I got it. ” The man waved his check book.  “And I have another business proposition for you. My company is a Fortune 500 company.  Our pilot just retired and we need a new one.  You’re as good as I’ve seen — outside of myself of course.  How’d you like to fly for us.  We’ll buy your plane, too and add it to our fleet.  I’ll double what you made as an airline pilot.  I need someone like you making sure we make it safely home.”

David said yes before he could think about the deal.

“Thanks again, David. Here’s my card. Call me Monday and we’ll work out the details.”

As the man walked toward the waiting Jaguar sedan, David looked into the front seat of his plane and found an envelope. It must have been from the previous passenger, the strange man who had led him to Destin in the first place.  He carefully opened it and unfolded the letter.

“Dear David,

I was listening.

God.

David looked around the hanger and then up at the sky.  Off to the east, he could see the thunderheads on horizon.  He then picked up his cellphone and called Cathy. “Honey, you won’t believe this.”

That night, he had THAT dream again — the one of him letting go of the rope.  And when began to fall into the darkness, two giant hands caught him and held him safely.