The only thing better than a pilot's license is surely a friend with a
pilot's license.  And in 2016, such a friend with a big heart, and an
empty seat in his Cessna, offered to take me on a ride I'll never
forget.

Matt was flying Cessnas for a small company in Uganda.  "Take me along
some day if you've got space for me," I joked one day.  But it was
half-hearted and a joke. So imagine when one day he called me up and
offered me a ride in exchange for some help loading up a guy who had
broken his leg in the rural bush of northern Uganda.  I could scarcely
meet him at the aerodrome fast enough.

I killed time in the company office while he filed his flight plan.
Then we went out to the airplane where it sat, gleaming at the edge of
the airstrip.  Airstrip, not runway, because it was packed earth as I
remember it, and clean but very simple.  "It's even rougher where
we're going" he laughed.  If flight is magical, so is being a pilot:
checking various gauges, mechanical structures, bits of engine.
Suddenly we were ready -- I couldn't discern how -- and it was time to
go.

We taxied down one end of the broad, African field, Matt pressed the
throttle forward and we were hurtling forward.  With a rush of air,
our wheels left earth and we were airborne.  We raced over Kampala's
red steel rooftops, banked around counterclockwise, ever upward toward
the gossamer sky, and were gone.  It occurred to me that to pilots,
it's the sky that beckons; to me the beauty was below us:
neighborhoods I recognized, roadways I'd driven, landscapes I
struggled to identify because they are undiscernable from overhead.

We lurched northward, over a landscape that browned with distance from
Lake Victoria.  Uganda has always been a respite from the hot, Kenyan
and Tanzanian lowlands, but Uganda has a low, dry corner of its own.
We threaded through a blue sky pocked with white clouds, dense with
resplendant sunlight, endless, like a swim through the thin waters
between reef and shore, watching shadows on the hillsides below.  Then
we descended.

Matt circled twice, looking for the trace of a strip he knew to be a
proper airstrip. I saw nothing, but why interrupt the experts?  We
dropped; the earth swooned up to meet us and then suddenly our wheels
were on the dry dirt again.  The speed -- so recently invisible --
rushed from our spinning wheels and we slowed to where a crowd had
gathered to meet us.

We gathered up the injured gentlemen while a crew of rural Ugandans
watched.  A scrawny mutt tottered along behind the boys, looking for
something to eat.  I realized how ridiculous we were: joined at the
same coordinates on earth but separated by a universe of culture and
technology and knowledge.  But we'd come from the same primordial
soup, and at death we'd be joined there again.  In the meantime, Matt
and I may have just dropped in from outer space.  Time to depart.

The trip back to Kampala was rife with meaning as the sun lowered over
the horizon and we punctured a squall that sent us jumping through
space.  I gradually got accustomed to that moment when, having steered
straight toward a wall of white cloud, you punctured it and were
briefly enveloped by total blindness, only to emerge unscathed on the
other side.

Then we landed, and I drove slowly through the hideous Kampala traffic
to our home in Bukassa.  My next flight would take me farther still.