Pause For Effect
Dream 25 December 16. Pause For Effect
My camera was state-of-the art. While filming, when the camera is paused everything inside the field of view becomes frozen in time. A startled bird will be frozen in the motion of taking wing, it’s loosed feathers suspended in mid-air. A race car traveling at 200mph will be stopped in time as surely as if it were a rock cemented to the ground. Everything outside of the field of view, however, continues to move and act according to the demands of physics. A second racing car hurdling toward the frozen one would crash into frozen space. The feathers of the startled bird that escaped the frame fall as they would at any other time. Kinetic energy is lost during the paused moment, however. A ball caught rising in mid-air will have lost some of it’s upward momentum after time is allowed to continue once again. A boulder crashing down a hill will have lost some momentum depending on how long it was frozen for.
I was in Hawaii filming army maneuvers on a rocky lava shoreline. The army had this plane that was also a helicopter. It resembled a dragonfly. It had a cockpit like an Apache helicopter and too long wings with large ballasts on either end. A long tail with tail-wings completed the rear of the aircraft while a mini-gun on a turret complimented the belly of the beast. On top she had long helicopter blades that extend the length of the wings. I picked a nice spot where a shallow stream cut through the rock and was filming the Dragon Fly flying maneuvers low and fast over the cliffs while it strafed an off-shore target with the mini-gun. The Dragon Fly zoomed by again and again leaving vapor trails, the smell of gun power, and an echoing percussion of gunfire in my head. When I freeze the frame a staccato of bullets slammed against the target then all becomes silence. The Dragon Fly was frozen, its helicopter blades were no longer a blur and bullets formed a steady line of pending destruction, highlighted every fifth projectile by a glowing tracer round. The waves on either side of the frame crashed and continue to swell, the only sound at the moment, while the wave caught in the frame stood 4' tall and at the cresting of a barrel. The edges of which are sheared flat like a slice cinnamon bundt cake. When I release the reel the dragonfly drops a few feet out of the sky and continues its run. I hear the pilot curse and push the engines harder, he doesn’t know what happened.
On the last fly-by the pilot unexpectedly executes a barrel roll maneuver at the end of the fly over. Excitedly I freeze the frame to shoot stills of the moment. Vapor and smoking guns trail a swirl in the air behind the aircraft. When I return time to normal speed the dragonfly has lost too much momentum and crashes straight down on its dorsal side, shattering the Apache cockpit glass and scattering the blades. The pilot and co-pilot crawl out of the plane and run in frantic circles around the ‘Fly expecting to find a gas leak and urging everyone to keep back. I’m the only one there though and 50 yards away at that.
From behind me my sister, Jennifer runs up and demands to know what happened in scolding tones and I stare wide-eyed at her and the scene. She produces a notebook smaller than my palm and the co-pilot appears next to me carrying his helmet and wearing a space suit. I am told to record all the details and information to report the event. The co-pilot gives me the pilot’s name, Orlando Hondu, but the book is too small to record his email address on one line. Two enlisted men walk by and insist on telling me that something they saw was a “good thing” before moving on.
Frustrated, I tear out page after page attempting to write everything about Orlando on one line while the co-pilot and my sister scrutinize my smaller and smaller handwriting. Then I woke up.
