Flying by the Seat of my Pants: An Aviators Journey from Hot Rods to God1
Flying by the Seat of My Pants: An Aviator’s Journey from Hot Rods to God!
Part 1
As a kid growing up Catholic in San Francisco, I learned about Heaven. But I wasn’t quite sure how to get there. Until the church offered me a sure-fire way.
Make the nine first Friday church services during Lent, the church sages promised, and I’d somehow be guaranteed a priest at my deathbed or by the side of the road, probably the latter in my case!
In those days that was a one-way ticket to Heaven.
I figured that was as good a guarantee as I was going to get.
Not only did I make the nine first Fridays one Lent, but I continued to do so for the following four years of high school, not missing a one.
Thirty-six first Fridays! Sure-fire Heaven insurance! If some was good more was better.
After noticing my fervor for things spiritual (motivated in no small part by the church infusing in me a fear of burning in hell for eternity should I die in the state of sin) the nuns of my grammar school went so far as to cull two of my Italian buddies and me out of the eighth-grade herd for the seminary.
Those lovely ladies assured us that Jesus loved us enough that we were anointed with an adequate amount of the spiritual “right stuff” for a vocation to the priesthood.
But the deck was stacked against me in reaching that heavenly abode via the formal priesthood route.
That route was not to be since I was a normal, healthy, 50’s teenager growing up in San Francisco, one of the most alluring cities in the world.
Hot rods, girls, a six-pack – not abs – and various other teen rites of passage conspired to lure me away from the sacred path that the church elders had laid out for me.
I found myself leaning much more toward the profane than the sacred.
The luster of making Heaven via the nine first Fridays route and the priesthood faded into the acrid dust of burned rubber from the rear slicks of my ’32 Ford, 5 window coupe on the streets of San Francisco!
I concluded that I was not meant to minister to man’s spiritual needs.
But aha, what I didn’t know at the time was that some 45 years later a more direct method of tending men’s souls would be offered me.
But there would many detours, dead end streets and lost traction in between that would make me long for the comparatively tame route to heaven that had been laid out for me in that 50’s classroom.
Instead of the dubious nine first Friday’s route and a trip to the seminary, I discovered what brought me closer to God than anything else as a seventeen-year-old, speed loving, neighborhood domestic terrorist.
It was the intoxicating feeling of mashing an accelerator into the floorboard of an old jalopy, or the feverish twisting of a throttle attached to the handlebar of just about any kind of motorcycle.
And much later it was the sheer sensual pleasure of shoving three thrust levers, attached to the same number of Rolls Royce jet engines, rated at 420000 pounds of thrust apiece, a mere 18 inches forward, to launch a two-hundred-and-thirty-three-ton jet airplane skyward with forward movement of those levers!
This pursuit would bring me closer to the only God that I knew was worthy of my worship at the time – the God of Speed.
But times would change and so would I.
Stay tuned…
Bert Botta
Aviation Expert
botajet@me.com
