A Book Under a Bed
I was a little apprehensive since the decision was made. Quite suddenly and without anxious forethought, I visited the old farmhouse that had briefly been my home. The idea popped into my head while I was gently rocked into a trance on the train toward Uxbridge Station near Heathrow Airport. I had just enjoyed a slow Sunday afternoon, walking alone through Hyde Park and window-shopping on Oxford Road. In my hand was a plastic bag containing two books. Both long since read, but whose titles are now forgotten. They were bought at a little bookstore tucked down a side street paved in cobblestones, which I entered to escape the January cold. On that day, a pub was out of the question.
Three decades have passed since my late teens, and much has changed in the surrounding urban landscape of Uxbridge Tube Station. The station itself was nearly how I remembered it —gray concrete floors, red brick walls, obligatory newsagent — but the surrounding stores and office buildings were newer and larger. They were also fused around a modern shopping mall. However, the most obvious difference was the increased concentration of cars and buses and people. All of them moving at a pace more frantic than I remembered.
Stepping from the station to the first cab in the taxi line, I asked the driver if he knew the whereabouts of the Denham Roundabout. The old farmhouse was less than half a mile along its smallest spoke. That much I could remember. Not taking his hands off the wheel, he said it had recently been turned into a much larger traffic circle. That it wasn’t called the Denham Roundabout anymore, and for about six pounds he could take me there. Less than two miles and eight pounds later, I was standing next to a large black-and-white sign fastened onto its concrete post: “Denham Roundabout.”
Willet’s Lane was the small spoke that lead to my destination and I walked its muddy ground, hoping for a moment of recognition. Within a hundred yards, I came upon a shed that sat next to an old wooden fence, not far from the side of a residence. I leaned against one of its damp posts and took in the scene without trying to direct any thoughts. Yes, it was possible that was the place where I rented a room. That might even be the shed where the landlord and I developed a brief interest in horticulture, sprouting the seeds I had brought from California.
For several months, straddling the summer and fall of 1978, the farmhouse was likely my address. But I could see, bolted to the post by the door, two consecutive digits. The house in which I lived, had a name, instead of a number. That brought a slight contradiction to the growing feeling, almost a certainty, that it was, indeed, the place. I remained a few minutes longer, trying to empty my mind of guided thoughts, with only partial success. Everything had changed, even the name of a newly bought house, especially if the old words meant little to the new owners.
That thought began another: it was likely that my own perceptions had changed over the decades. During those uncertain times, my own rhythms were in sync, though set unconsciously, within the world around me. Yes, that was definitely the house, complete with the small bedroom and its view of fields and hedgerows. There was the occasional cow grazing in wet grass, as one had when I lived there. I recalled a slightly humorous thought I’d had: I was waiting for my fate, much as the cows were.
While performing a rare cleanup of my personal surroundings in that old farmhouse, I stumbled upon a book. It was under the bed and covered in dust, among empty beer cans, a guitar case, and a pile of dirty clothes. It had obviously been there for months.
It was a book whose title and author I no longer remembered, but its subject instigated the change that began the course of my working life. It was only the second time I had ever completed a full-length book in one sitting. Hesse’s Siddhartha was the first. When I reached the last page, and closed the book, I felt as though a part of my life was closed as well. I sat on the bed, feeling a mix of happiness and excitement. I also felt strange, as though I was not entirely directing my own thoughts and plans. My stint in Britain was over, and every effort of each subsequent hour would drive me to return to California and fly.
The book under the bed was about the life of a transport pilot, researched and interpreted by someone outside the profession. He was an excellent writer, who did not set out to build a romantic story of the flying life. Rather, he was honest about the benefits and pitfalls of a career flying airplanes and what it took to achieve it. Not being a pilot, he was unlikely to create a tawdry little book filled with fantasy, lies, and nonsense. Its honesty had a strong appeal to me.
An appendix to the book had a fifty-question test that, if passed, assured the reader that he or she had the aptitude for the job. I incorrectly assumed that, one required a high level of quick mental dexterity to fly an airliner. The pilot also needed to be intelligent, but the test the book offered seemed ridiculously easy. Most middle-school kids could have passed it, for each question was either basic arithmetic or a simple, logical puzzle. The cynic in me flipped through the pages of the test, to the end, looking for the tie-in to the flight school, but it wasn’t there. There was no sales pitch, and I reminded myself that an honest portion of the book was not flattering to the job or the lifestyle. I was nineteen and intrigued.
A phase in a person’s life could come to an end in a moment. Despite the abrupt nature of the change, the transformation often festered under the surface for years. Since graduating from high school, I had happily remained without direction. I had taken several classes at a couple of community colleges in California, completed a few road trips with friends, and was then in the process of discovering that a six-month flop in Britain was coming to an abrupt end.
When I closed the book, I knew that something had shifted. I went for a long walk, the beginning of a lifelong habit. Whenever my mind was unsettled with choices, out the door I would go. Nearly thirty years later, I still remembered two things about that walk: the weather and my thoughts. The air was chilly and the ground damp, and the October sky was half filled with fast-moving clouds. They were gray and damp, but the sun was bright above, and their shadows led the way in front of me. With the wind at my back as I walked down Willets Lane, I harbored two seemingly contradictory feelings. I was both unsure of myself, yet filled with a newfound confidence, a confidence of a kind I forgot I could muster.
The transformation had been germinating for years, and then it was no longer under any surface. The trigger had been pulled. Within seventy-two hours of closing that book, I was back in Los Angeles.
Thirty years later, I leaned against a damp concrete post on Willets Lane. I probably could have retraced that walk by taking my time, slowly sauntering up the lane, then correcting some likely wrong turn due to a new road or landmark. But I didn’t. I needed to return to the hotel and try to fit in a few hours of sleep before flying out that evening. Ethiopian Airlines had a number of young copilots who were new to the Boeing 767, and I was flying out with one that night. He, not to mention a few hundred passengers, ought to have a pilot who wasn’t struggling against sleep at the beginning of a seven-hour flight.
After a ten-minute walk toward the center of Uxbridge, I came upon a parked taxi in a residential street. Its driver was reading a newspaper, and I interrupted his break by asking if he could take me to the Holiday Inn off Bath Road, near the M4 motorway. In the relative quiet of the taxi, my thoughts were fixed on that younger man of thirty years ago. I wondered if I had lived up to his expectations and created a life he would choose to live again, or was the adventure a string of shallow successes and disappointing failures. Of course, I knew how that younger man would answer the questions: each with a yes.
© David James
David James, a pilot for a major US and several international airlines, has lived on five continents. His work has been published in Atherton Review, Cobalt, Courtship of Winds, Entropy Magazine, Evening Street Review, The MacGuffin, Peatsmoke Journal, The Penmen Review, and Whistling Shade.
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