The Clearing

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Along one wall of my father’s room are stacked dozens of model aircraft wings. They rest on pegs, in descending order of size. Each wing is carefully glued together from tiny struts of balsa wood across which is stretched a fragile membrane. I lift one gingerly, blow off the dust, and my finger pops straight through the desiccated membrane. It is as fine and light as a bee’s wing. There must be dozens of model aircraft here. I had no idea he had made so many. I had hardly known my father fly them since I was a schoolgirl, but he must have kept on building them.

My father would show me a crosssection of a wing and explain to me the theory of flight, how faster airflow across the upper curve of the wing creates lift, how, to be able to take off, a plane needs just the right balance between weight and lift, drag and thrust. Lift coefficients. Thermal updrafts and katabatic winds. How birds soar. I try to remember when he told me these things, but those moments are beyond recall now. I can hear his voice, explaining. I can see his eyebrows bristling as he squints into the light, as he points out something in the sky, a bird riding the rising air current on the windward side of a hill: “Orographic lift,” he says. The words have stayed, the bird is still there, a soaring speck, but his voice, his face, his hand, pointing, these flash clear for an instant but then are gone. All I can take hold of now, so carefully, is something about flight, about being in my father’s room and him gone from it, a feeling that all these stacked wings give me, a feeling of catching a bird that’s been trapped in a room, of a wren’s panicky fluttering between my gently cupped hands, like holding a beating heart, and of opening my hands outside, and the small brown thing bursting from them to lift itself into the sky. He must have kept on building them for years. So many wings. ■