Like Icarus
A reexamination of failing and flying
Walk with me into a tiny, padded room, grey as grief except for the wires and headset dangling from the wall, and a square piece of glass serving as a window to a different grey room.
Sit in the grey chair, which faces a poster detailing the warning signs for swimmer’s ear. Put on the headset. Wait. A woman’s voice booms in the eerie hush of the room. Her face is stern, expressionless through the glass.
“Don’t look at me,” she says. “If you can see my hands on the knobs, it might interfere with the test.”
The cockpit of a Cessna 150 is barely big enough to hold you, let alone your ambitions. And at 20 years old, they are enormous. But get in anyway. The man sitting next to you, who was chatty and jovial three minutes before, has now gone stone silent. He watches you complete the preflight checklist. Push the mixture knob in and the carb heat. Flip the master switch. No need to prime the engine; it’s summer in Arizona, and sweat is already crawling down your back. Turn the key in the ignition and hear the beautiful roar that swallows silence. Ensure the propeller blast area is clear, and you’re almost ready to hit the runway.
The flight test has begun.
To overcome the obstacle of gravity was once a singular preoccupation of humans. To transcend the limitations of physics, biology. To fly is to be free, we think. To be a superhero. A god.
In the Greek myth of Icarus, Daedalus, Icarus’s father, gives him wings made of feathers and wax so that he can help Daedalus escape prison.
Ecstatic with his ability to fly, however, Icarus does not heed his father’s warning to stay away from the sun. His wings melt and he plummets to his death.
Jack Gilbert wrote in his poem “Failing and Falling,” Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
“Don’t look at me,” the woman in the booth warns, and I don’t, but I understand the impulse. My hearing loss has made me desperate, wily, performative. I am always looking for a hack, a workaround, a chance to evade tasks I don’t know how to manage. In school, if I couldn’t hear my teacher lecturing, I would copy my neighbor’s notes. If I made a promise to a friend or lover that I didn’t hear, I would claim to have forgotten and ask forgiveness. Or worse, I would blame them for not speaking louder.
Before I started flying planes, my hearing loss could masquerade as something else — shyness, bookishness, a preternatural ability to concentrate, a fondness for wanting to be left alone. But once I began playing with gravity, I couldn’t pretend my deafness was a personality quirk. I may have been cavalier, but I wasn’t stupid.
And in the grim, grey booth, there was no longer a point in faking it.
Raise your hand when you hear a tone. Repeat after me. If you don’t hear the word, guess.
“Did fun at the pool leave you with a sore ear?” I read the swimmer’s ear poster over and over during pauses in the test. “Other types of infections can be caused by things like food allergies, seasonal allergies, clogged ear tubes or from traveling in ear planes.”
Ear planes. A typo or a portent?
I don’t look at the audiologist as she administers the test, but I don’t have to. I know this is a test I’ll fail. It’s the entire reason why I’m here, after all, even if a small, steadfast part of me still believes it isn’t true, that I can hear fine, that the world is in the wrong.
As the test finishes, I look once more at the padded wall in front of me and picture myself in a mental institution, which is where, for centuries and even still, people with disabilities commonly ended up, often against their will. I picture the life of independence I have so carefully cultivated for years and how I now have to part with it.
Picture my wings melting in the sun, and the stern warnings that were given to me by just about everyone when I told them I was learning how to fly.
Wonder if they might be right.
Taxi to takeoff. Get in position. The desert sky is so blue it burns. The Santa Catalina mountains in the distance sigh like a bruise missing a body.
Alert air traffic control of your intentions. Breathe slow. You’ve done this hundreds of times. You’ve flown solo to Eloy and Casa Grande, where the airports were so small they didn’t have control towers. You’ve completed night flights. Aced the written exam. Practiced mock-simulations with zero visibility, with failed engines, through devil winds.
If you can just hear the control tower this one time…
The thought turns into a chant that undertows your entire body. Please let me hear. Please let me hear.
“Five-Niner Golf, you are cleared for takeoff.”
Secure your wings with wax now and hold on tight.
Deafness is like flying — both offer a feeling of oblivion, however temporary.
I’ve been slowly losing my hearing for years, since I was a child, the big, red balloon of me deflating a little bit more each day.
I don’t remember losing it. This is common, I’ve read. It’s often a slow slide, not something that happens all at once.
I do remember the first time I was made aware of my deafness. Not the conversation itself, but the shame that followed in its wake. I remember how suddenly small the world seemed, how a hole yawned inside me wide as a grave and in its place rushed a nothingness I knew I could never fill.
I was nine years old.
Once cleared by the tower, go full throttle. Five-Niner Golf rears up, practically champing at the bit. Add a little right rudder when it tugs you to the left, gaining speed, keep the nose on that center line. The man watches your every move, pen scratching on a clipboard. Yoke back now, gentle, as the plane lifts off the runway, and register once more the feeling of disbelief. You never quite adjust to the moment of rising off the ground, two tons of steel buffeting you, no matter how many times you do it.
You don’t believe in God exactly, but takeoff is as close to resurrection as you’re likely to come. Savor it like a meal.
The hearing aids I buy (and return a month later) are the size of raisins, cost twice as much as a year’s worth of flight lessons (almost $7,000), and are not covered by insurance. The instruction booklet I am given is full of white senior citizens drinking wine and smiling at each other. In one section, titled “The Communication Process,” the accompanying photo feels as if I have walked in on my grandparents having sex. The woman, smiling, tasteful cleavage, wears a wedding ring (on her right hand), and grips the bare, salt-and-pepper chest hair of the smiling man.
When I “failed” my hearing test in the grey booth, I also found out that my hearing loss is the opposite of most people’s. Typically people lose the high tones first — the trebles, the falsettos, the birdsong. This is the loss that hearing aids correct. But I lost the low tones, the deep resonance, the bass notes, and the range in which most men’s voices fall. The air traffic controllers at Ryan Airfield are all men. So is my test administrator.
My hearing loss has complicated every area of my life — sex, dating, jobs, friendships, family — and it shouldn’t have been a surprise that it affected my flying, as well.
Yet, hope is a strange fish. And love is a fever that has nowhere left to burn, except through.
Hearing loss be damned. I had come too far to stop now.
Five-Niner Golf crawls steadily up. Five-thousand feet, six thousand. In the cockpit, you feel swallowed. Nowhere to go, except through. The man grading you says very little — a blessing, because you don’t have to waste the mental energy on small talk, and you will need all of it to hear the tower later, but also a curse, because you don’t know how you’re doing. He runs you through the drills you’ve practiced every week for a year.
Your engine has died mid-flight. What do you do? How do you make a night approach? How do you recover from a stall? A spin? A too-steep turn?
Your body responds, almost mechanically. Say, “Pitch for the best glide speed. Look below for an area to make a forced landing. Declare an emergency. Above all, don’t panic.”
With the $7,000 raisins, the world blooms and bursts in my ears. My own voice sounds like a god applauding an empty stadium. Eating chips becomes an aural assault. The swish of my pants startles me as I walk. A bird sings and I turn around in dismay, thinking I’ve been cat-called. The world becomes louder, but no clearer.
I try other things. Noise-canceling headsets. Speech therapy. Therapy-therapy. Acupuncture. Chinese teas. Horse-sized vitamins. In a last-ditch Hail Mary before my flight test, I attend a sweat ceremony on the Yaqui reservation where my mother worked. I’m half Native but you’d never know it looking at me. My ethnicity is invisible as my hearing loss is invisible. White skin. White noise.
But come with me anyway to a hut half the height of a human, made from the ribs of cactus and old wool blankets. The sun hankers low in the sky, a fat glowing orange. The floor is earth and already feels warm against my hands and knees as I crawl inside. Join me in the “hot seat,” the place closest to the hissing stones and farthest from the exit. Clutch knees to chest as the last blanket is drawn, engulfing everything in darkness. The thump of the drums is fleshy, physical, and when the healer stretches her mouth to sing, it sounds like need made tangible. The other women in the hut join in her song.
Three rounds of prayers, to whomever you want — to the Stone people, Yahweh, Creator, Grandfather, Buddha, MotherFather — pray for sobriety, your health, single mothers, those ravaged by wars, pray for your kids, your husbands, your dreams that refuse to die.
I haven’t prayed since I was a child and never in front of strangers. I know what I want, but when my turn comes, I’m too ashamed to say it.
I want to hear, I don’t say, the words knotting my chest, eyes shut tight against the smoke and steam. I just want to hear.
Homestretch now. You’ve almost made it. The only remaining hurdle of the test is to land the plane.
Radio the tower. Back off the throttle. Reduce airspeed to 70 knots, descending 500 feet per minute. Lower the flaps.
Almost there.
Almost there.
The voice of the tower crackles in the headset: “Five-Niner Golf, you are cleared to land on runway ___.”
No, you think. No, no, no.
“Tower, this is Five-Niner Golf, say again.”
Silence.
Don’t panic. Take a guess. Say, “Runway two-four left?”
Silence still. Heart racing and eyes darting, you see no other planes around, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. Prepare to land anyway. Angle the nose of the plane down but keep your eyes up toward whatever afterlife might take you the moment you die because you missed a single number, taking with you the silent man scratching with his pen, and however many people might be in another plane you crash into when you land on the wrong runway.
But death does not come.
Instead, the man next to you takes the yoke, sharp yank to the left, admonishes the tower for not responding, gets them to name the correct runway, gives control back to you.
Don’t cry. Prepare to land. The ground looms large before you, center line a blur of motion. Nose up to hold Five-Niner Golf a couple feet off the runway, hovering, until the two back wheels touch down. Then the front wheel. Feel the ground beneath you steady and sure, no matter how much your hands are shaking. Apply the brake. Taxi to the hangar.
He’s still not speaking and you can only assume you’ve failed the test with what might have been a fatal mistake.
Secure the Cessna in its parking spot. Take your headset off, and see the man’s grin wide as the dawn.
“Congratulations,” he says.
I pass. I now have a private pilot’s license. And I never set foot in a cockpit again.
I try to remind myself though, that, like Icarus, I also flew.
