Walkin’ on sunshine

I saw a meme the other day about fathers being the biggest influencers of their kids’ musical tastes. That’s certainly true with my three. In the garage, in the car, in the living room, wherever they’d hang out with me, it was a constant blend of 60s, 70s and 80s rock, with a little classical now and then.

So as I sat on Myrtle Beach about a decade ago with my toes in the sand and a cold Corona in my hand, I was not surprised that my youngest had her boombox playing the Beatles. She was furthest away from me with the rest of the fam in the middle. I caught her eye, tipped my bottle in salute and gave her a thumbs up. She grinned.

It was a peaceful day, light winds, small waves, people building sand castles. Not much to look at except people parasailing. They were quite a ways out, maybe half a mile or so, and seemed to be moving very slowly. I wondered what that whole experience was like. Probably pretty cool, but also friggin scary. What if the wind blew the wrong way? Or the engine conked out? Ah, maybe someday.

I reached for my novel and just then a banner-ad plane droned by. The sign it was pulling was advertising a parasailing place somewhere nearby. I got that tickle I usually get just before common sense goes out the window.

I felt eyes looking at me from my right. I turned and my oldest…she of doll-head house fame…looked at the plane, then me. We are very simpatico and often finish each other’s sentences. Nothing needed to be said. “You think?” I asked. “Let’s do it,” she said firmly. We lurched out of our sand chairs and grabbed our wallets. Sue looked up. “Where are you guys going?” she asked. “Parasailing!” we said.

The youngest, always up for anything, stood. “I wanna go!” she said. She was nine. It took a lot of fast talking with Sue, but we eventually wore her down. She turned back to her magazine with a dismissive wave. I figured if it wasn’t safe for nine yos, they’d tell us and we could bring her back.

In the van, spirits were high. We chose “Birthday” by the Beatles as our impromptu adventure theme song and had the volume up to a level that Sue would never tolerate. The place was only a mile away.

I half-expected the people to shake their heads at the sight of a nine yo, but we were all given forms to complete and sign. I sorta glossed over the waiver of liability part but a few words did catch my eye that made me gulp.

Within minutes, we were trussed up in lifejackets and heading for the horizon in a powerful 35-foot speedboat. Over the roar of the engines, the banging of the hull hitting the waves and the salt spray, they shouted instructions to us.

The boat stopped and the captain put it in neutral. The engine gurgled and fumed. The buildings and the beach were tiny and the water was an aqua blue; certainly a lot different than it looked from my sand chair. The crew removed the sail, the ropes and the slings from bulkhead bins and positioned us on the fantail of the boat. We stepped into the slings, held on to the horizontal bar, and the sail filled with wind behind us. “All set?” the one guy shouted. Is your will up to date?

Thumbs up. The Captain turned into the wind and gave us a final look. Then he pushed the throttle forward and we lurched forward. We were all pulled backward off the fantail as the sail filled with air. I wondered for a second if we were going to drop right where the props were roaring and wake was high as the stern…instant seagull food…but I needn’t have worried; we dropped farther and farther behind the boat, but also rapidly gained altitude.

In about ten minutes, we reached maximum height and a different world.

Everything was silent except for the sighing of a light breeze in the rigging. The boat, a tiny thing way over there, made no sound. I looked down and was interested to see that between my feet there was nothing but air between me and the whitecaps, hundreds of feet below. I looked to my left and the kids were also looking and grinning. We whooped and did high-fives. We saw the far-off beach and beyond that, the city of Myrtle Beach…and even farther still, across the Intracoastal Waterway, the afternoon sun glinting off the thick marshes of the Carolina Low Country.

Time slowed down. No conversation, nobody wanted to break the spell. Now and then we’d see some big cigar-shaped things below….I wasn’t sure if they were sharks or dolphin, I was hoping the latter. I heard from a banner-ad pilot that if surfers could see what he saw, they’re never go out again. The most interesting thing we saw was an enormous manta ray, gliding slowly along.

I fell into a reverie, looking and hearing without anything really registering. There were some things in my life back then that seemed perplexing and troubling; my mind strayed to them. From my lofty perch, I had a heightened awareness, a fresh perspective. I got the glimmerings of a few ideas.

All too soon, we began to be pulled back to the boat; I felt for Icarus. We were met with hearty thumps on the back and shouts of “How was it?” as we stepped out of our gear. They made an especially big fuss over our 9 yo. She beamed.

That night, over our seafood boil dinner, my two fellow adventurers talked about nothing else. Sue…who has a fear of heights… shuddered. But to me, there there was more. There’s a poem, High Flight, written by an RCAF pilot in WWII shortly before he was killed. It was my dad’s favorite; the first and last lines really get me:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God”

Up in the clouds that afternoon, I gave silent thanks for the experience, for my kids, for our family.

And it seemed that on some mystical level I had been given a fleeting glimpse of the mysteries of the past and the future, of those gone on and those yet to come, of the firmament and the earth and the heavens. Of things ordinary and extraordinary; of things beyond our ken.

At least, for now 😎