“I probably have a thousand memories,” my friend from Albuquerque said. He was talking about our five days together in Madrid over Easter week.
“Really?”
“Yes. Easily a thousand.”
I said that I didn’t have that many, I was certain. I couldn’t prove it though, not even to myself, because I didn’t know how you could inventory memories. I might search for a particular one, bring it up, dust it off. But how to count five days’ worth? Especially when those memories were very soon mixed in with countless memories from before that time and, by the time we talked, many others from after. Plus, memories tend to disintegrate into something like hollow fluff if you examine them. Mine do, anyway. Do those fluffy bits count as separate memories? Before I can decide, some have drifted away. Chasing memories is like chasing fireflies on summer evenings from childhood: running after floating, blinking spots of light. Madrid: not just a big full noisy moving city but a city lit up by illusive memory. Was it similar for my friend, or did he collect memories the way you might collect iron shavings, all at once, as if holding out a powerful magnet? The memories practically clinging to him? I thought of Wanda Gág’s children’s book Millions of Cats. In the story, a very old man goes out for a walk in search of a kitten to keep himself and his very old wife company. He soon comes to a hill that is covered with cats. He chooses the prettiest, but then sees another just as pretty, which he also takes. He soon sees cats everywhere, under every bush and beside every rock. Hundreds and thousands of cats, millions and trillions. Is that, I wondered, what my friend had with his memories? My landscape was barren in comparison.
He reminded me that he’d never visited Spain before and suggested that because everything in the country was brand new for him, he had been affected by many things that would have made no impression on me. Even the flights to and from Madrid contributed to those 1,000 memories.
He may not have many transatlantic flights under his belt—only one other trip, to London, years ago—but he spends plenty of time in the air. He has a pilot’s license, owns a gyrocopter that he keeps in a hangar at an airfield 20 minutes from his home, and tries to get off the ground three or four times a week. By now, his accumulated flights must be the equivalent of a couple of trips around the world. His craft is small—a two-seater without much room to stretch—so it’s mainly jumping and hopping that he does, generally from one airfield in New Mexico to another, flights often lasting less than an hour, rarely more than three. The farthest he’s flown is L.A., making two stops en route. On my yearly visit to the Southwest last year, he took me up in the gyro. We flew out of the Double Eagle II airfield, circled toward the west and north to see Cabezon Peak, flew east over Tent Rocks monument and on to Santa Fe, where, in what’s known as a touch-and-go, we touched down briefly and took off again without stopping. Then we headed back south to return to Albuquerque and the Double Eagle airfield.
I looked down. Where else would you look? At the start of the flight, I had spotted an old pickup in an arroyo, some lone houses on dry brown land, and some very sparse vegetation. Then the fantastic geological formations. Coming back from Santa Fe, I saw cars below me, moving along Interstate 25. They didn’t appear to be rushing, just moseying along with us. “What would you do if we had to make an emergency landing?” I asked.
The answer was to use the interstate as a runway.
But there are cars on it, I said, confused, partly because a gyrocopter is more similar to a helicopter than to a plane, and so I was envisioning settling down, plop, right in the middle of a lane. That couldn’t work amid moving traffic.
If, however, you match your speed to the cars’ and pick a space between two vehicles, you might land at close to traffic speed, then taxi to a stop, my friend explained. The car behind you would brake as you slowed, and the car behind it, and so on, until the whole lane was still. Miles back, a car would put on its flashers as it pulled up behind the stopped car ahead of it.
Is that even legal? Disrupting traffic like that?
My friend said no law prohibited a gyrocopter from using the interstate.
My mouth dropped open. It had never occurred to me that interstate use was not restricted to cars. Then I remembered that I had seen signs at entry ramps banning horses, bikes, and pedestrians, suggesting that if not specifically prohibited, uses other than car traffic were allowed. I thought of a pertinent jocular comment on nationalities, which goes like this: in England, everything that is not forbidden is allowed; in Germany, everything that is not allowed is forbidden; in France everything is allowed even if it is forbidden; and in Russia everything is forbidden, even that which is expressly allowed.
“Huh,” I said.
Now, a year later, I can still picture us with the cars streaming along below.
My friend may not remember our flight as well as I do. It was all new for me, after all. Except he had a good reason to remember it. Unbeknownst to me, the fuel tank’s pressure-gauge warning light had flickered as we rose out of Santa Fe, and my friend was concerned about engine failure. Another warning light had also come on briefly, the engine fire warning light. Following the interstate was not an idle choice but preparation for a possible emergency landing. No, he later told me, he had never made an emergency landing. It would have been a brand-new experience for him, too. The legality of using the interstate as a runway would not have been uppermost on his mind as he maneuvered a failing aircraft to avoid harming anyone while trying to save us.
Considering the matter of prohibitions and permissions, I think of the impish, cheeky side of the Spanish character. In Spain, you might guess, everything that’s not allowed is something you should try, just to see if you can get away with it. But that’s only one side of the coin. The other is that, legal or not, if a thing is fun, it’s worth doing.
And in the United States? The flight was exactly a year ago, July 30. The country still felt then like a safe, sane place. Survival was not a worry. It certainly doesn’t feel that way now to many hundreds and thousands. The coin is mid-flip right now, and how it will land, nobody knows.
