Flight of Fear

On December 21^st, 1962, as our family was returning to Canada from my father’s RCAF posting in Metz France, the cabin of our plane suddenly lost pressure over the Atlantic. When I spoke of this with my brother Brian, he added that we had been in a four engine turbo prop Yukon – guys tend to recall that kind of detail - and that we had immediately dropped from 20,000 feet to 10,000, supposedly because of a shattered windscreen. At the time, I had recorded that we had lowered to 1,000 feet, but it turns out that Brian was most likely to be right.

In the event of a cabin depressurization, pilots will initiate an emergency descent to an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) or lower. This altitude is considered safe for passengers and crew to breathe without needing supplemental oxygen, as it provides sufficient oxygen levels for normal, unpressurized breathing. SOURCE: AI.

After our emergency landing, the pilot parked our plane well away from the hanger. Obvious reasons. We hurried across the tarmac as best we could in the bitter mid-night cold, me holding the hand of my youngest brother. I remember being thankful for my sealskin topped winter boots, the ones that I had worn  a couple of months earlier in this class photo beneath. The plane was more than a city block distant from the waiting room. I wished that we had gloves.

Our school was on the base in a one-storey H-hut. (SOURCE: War Museum - Oral History Program. Interview with Tony Humphreys ).

Weeks later, after starting in Grade 10 at my new school Lemoyne D’Iberville High School in Longueuil Quebec I wrote my account of our Gander emergency landing for a class assignment; What did you do in the holidays. The version published that spring in our yearbook included fourteen exclamation marks. I had yet to learn that when it comes to punctuation, less is more. The piece - my very first publication -could have benefited from an edit. (NOTE: I was in Grace 11 in France and subsequently Grade 10 in Quebec. Quebec’s version of Grade 10 was equivalent to Ontario’s Grade 11, the system used at Canadian military bases.).

Flight of Fear     The engines of the Yukon droned on monotonously. I rub my eyes drowsily; my mind was still fogged with sleep. Gradually I became aware of the insistent tapping on my stiff shoulder. What was the matter now? I had been sleeping on the floor under my chair. As I settled into my chair I noticed my younger brother anxiously pointing at me as he whispered “Seatbelts, Sharon. The sign says do ‘em up. Will you do mine up, please?”     Simultaneously the intercom squawked, “Attention all personnel! You will have noticed it's getting cold here. That is because the windshield has shattered and we are losing pressure. We must lower to one thousand [sic] feet. We must fly slowly since a minor flaw in our landing gear makes it necessary to fly with it down to avoid major difficulties. We must reroute to Goose Bay and will arrive there in 15 minutes. Please keep your belts fastened. Thank you!”     Twenty minutes later over the announcement system the voice droned expressionlessly, “We are now circling over Goose Bay to burn off excess fuel. We should land in twenty minutes. Do not worry. Everything is under control.”     Now I was not too dense to realize our situation! I knew that we were burning fuel so that we wouldn’t explode when we crashed! I took out a little white book that tells you what to do in case of an emergency. I put the book back. I had read it before not realizing the time that I would have to use its advice!     I looked at my four younger brothers who were happily playing the game, “I spy with my little eye.” Telling myself that I was worked up over nothing I suppressed a shiver and glanced out of the window.     Nearly screaming I gazed petrified at the scene below! We were very near the ground now, and I could make out the shapes below. I could count the number of clearly-defined vehicles. There were seventeen fire engines and ambulances! Did the stewardesses really say not to worry? I recounted the shapes on the ground. The ominous total of seventeen echoed hollowly in my mind. Seventeen was my unlucky number!     The plane started to land. I shut my eyes and felt myself stiffen. That was the wrong thing to do. The white book is said to relax. Impossible! I took a deep breath and relaxed slightly. I remembered Browning’s poem about hating that Death bandaged his eyes, and I resolved to see my death scene.     I looked out of the window. We had stopped! We hadn't crashed! I was alive! Seventeen wasn't an unlucky number after all! Or was it still? The plane made the number eighteen on the ground!

Once we had landed in the dark, albeit without incident, we waited in a cavernous waiting room with something like 120 men, women, and children. There were only two toilets, and the lineups were long. It would take time for the the arrival of the crew which had been called in to weld the undercarriage in place, a not-unusual MacGyver kind of move, and probably not the last or first time it had been used on such planes. As we waited, my brother Brian watched a toddler carefully stepping from arm rest to arm rest overtop the seated passengers. Then he misjudged, stumbled, and landed with one foot planted firmly in the crouch of an unprepared officer. Oops.

Brian also added other details to the bits that I had recalled: The plane didn’t leave from Metz, as Metz was the RCAF Command Centre and had no airfield.  We actually left from Marville (#1 Fighter Base)*.  We left late (3-4 hours) as the plane was delayed for unknown reasons. (Hmmm …)  I remember flying over London and seeing all the lights so it would have been dark.  We arrived at Gander at around 3 AM. I too recall the lights over London. As it was our first time to take such a flight, the sight of the lights snaking outwards from the heart of London was particularly striking.

It was daylight in Gander when the undercarriage of our plane was finally secured, we were refueled, and our plane was finally deemed good-to go. Because of the cracked windscreen, there was still no way to pressurize the cabin, so we flew much lower than normal. Beneath us, outlined by the winter snow, we could see granular details of people’s backyards and of cars driving on roads.

Late last year, I did a digital search to check out how accurate my memories of the incident had been, and perhaps to learn more. Surely, I thought, there must be a record online by now. There were lots of details when I searched “Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Canadair CC-106 Yukon crashes”, but nothing was a perfect fit with our event. There was no AI summary at the start of this initial query. Fair enough. Perhaps there was nothing on line. So, I tried a couple of Facebook queries. My first was to the “Ottawa’s Aviation History Since 1858” group:

“On Dec 21, 1962, our family flew from Metz France and were headed for Trenton when the cabin on our Yukon lost pressure (cracked windscreen?), and we had to detour to Gander. We arrived in the middle of the night, after circling to burn off fuel. Later, we flew to Trenton from Gander on the same plane, but with the undercarriage welded down. Any record of that? There were about 120 people on board - mostly families.”

My second Facebook query was to the Aviation History Gander Airport group. A posted photo of an emergency evacuation fit some of our known facts, but it was in daytime, and in warmer weather. Still, I asked: “What date was this?”, and also added: “I was on a plane that landed in Gander on Dec 21, 1962. We had been told that there had been a windshield problem. We then flew from Gander to Trenton with the landing gear welded on. I was 16 years old, and traveling with my family. We were returning from Metz, France.” Kent Peyton, admin of this site, replied to the query about this photo: “Nose wheel did not extend”. 

Kent Peyton. Nose wheel did not extend.

 That nose-wheel detail was a definite fit with our experience. The fact that this was clearly not a one-off made me even more curious. Had all of us - 120 men women and children – had an closer meeting with a possible death than we had been led to believe?

Two weeks later, in a follow-up search, an AI summary topped the response. Interestingly, this search response included all of my details – ones that I had only recently uploaded to the two Facebook pages. This was info which was mostly not to be found anywhere else online:

AI Overview A specific Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Canadair Yukon aircraft made an emergency landing at Gander International Airport on December 21, 1962, after experiencing a pressurization failure due to a cracked windscreen.  Details of the Incident Aircraft: An RCAF Canadair CL-44 "Yukon", a turboprop transport aircraft. Date: December 21, 1962. Route: The flight was en route from RCAF Station Metz, France, to RCAF Station Trenton, Ontario, carrying approximately 120 people, mostly military families returning home for Christmas. Emergency: The aircraft experienced a rapid decompression (cabin pressure loss), reportedly caused by a cracked windscreen. Action Taken: The crew initiated a rapid descent to a lower altitude where the air was breathable and diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, as an emergency landing site. The plane circled Gander to burn off excess fuel before landing in the middle of the night. Outcome: The landing was successful, with no injuries reported. Subsequent Travel: Following temporary repairs, the aircraft continued its journey to Trenton, but as a precaution, its landing gear was "welded down" to prevent a potential hydraulic failure from affecting the landing, meaning it flew at a reduced speed and altitude for the remainder of the trip

The fact of this confirmed what I had already been suspecting about AI. The way that it scrapes and uploads data with no indication of source or of accuracy. Perhaps I should have added something outrageous to my queries, such as ‘The interior of the plane was pink”. Would that “fact” then get included in an updated AI summary?

In one of the links in this subsequent search, the Canadian Warplane Museum linked me to more details about the Yukon planes.

CASPIR Warplane Serial # Search ·         Yukon serial 15501 Crashed and destroyed at Alto de Toledo, 24 km west of Medellin, Colombia, on 22 February 1975. ·         Yukon serial 15927  Disappeared on flight from Montevideo to Santiago de Chile, over Andes Mountains, on 20 June 1972. Wreckage has never been found. ·         Yukon serial 15928 Scrapped after leaving runway on landing with gear partially extended on 10 October 1979. Hulk burned, apparently before any official investigation of the accident. ·         Yukon serial 15931 Disappeared on flight from Lima, Peru to Maiquetia, (near Caracas) Venezuela on 27/28 August 1976, never found. Presumed crashed, written off. ·         Yukon (Serial No. 15501, renumbered to 15921, later renumbered to 106921). Harold A. Skaarup Photo Military History). No. 437 (T) Squadron, RCAF Station Trenton, Ontario, shown beneath on the tarmac at 1 (F) Wing, RCAF Station Marville, France, 20 June 1963.  This Yukon was later renumbered (Serial No. 106922).  Sold 18 November 1971 to aircraft broker Beaver Enterprises.  No Canadian civil registration known.  Sold to Societe Generale d'Alimentation (SGA), registered as 9Q-CWN.  First flight with these markings, in Canada, on 12 November 1973.  Named "Hoto Mbio".  Delivered, Montreal to Toulouse, on 18 November 1973.  First commercial flight, Toulouse to Kinshasa, Zaire on 23 November 1973.  Later stored in Luxembourg.  Operator name changed to TRAMACO, Transports et Manutentions Commerciaux, by 1 February 1977, when commercial flights resumed.  Stored at Kinshara from 1978.  Scrapped there, 1 April 1983.  (RWR Walker)

 The fact that so many Yukon planes crashed, also made me reconsider my adolescent use of exclamation marks. Were they warranted? Perhaps? Unfortunately, I do not know the serial number of our plane, so I don’t know whether it met its end in a blaze of unglory. Perhaps some plane aficionado who stumbles across this post could winkle this fact out for me.

MISC: Some history of the 106 Yukon. Firstly, the RCAF required a replacement for its C-54GM North Star. In 1954, a licence was issued to Canadair to build a derivative of the Britannia, which became the Canadair CC-106 Yukon/CL44. Canadair built 39 of these Yukon turboprop Rolls-Royce Tyne-powered aircraft, comprising 12 CC-106 Yukon for the RCAF and 27 CL-44D4 passenger/cargo variants for the civil market. SOURCE: Bob’s Gander History

 POSTSCRIPT: I embarked on writing this post mostly for my family, my brothers, and their children, but also in case there might be any others from that flight, who might stumble across this post. Perhaps they will be able to add more. If I have misremembered or misrepresented any details, please let me know. Corrections will follow ASAP.

Grandma’s Brain

Yes, I know my mind is a fickle little bee doting on a thousand thoughts, but I’m getting better at chasing my mind back to the moment. Traci Brimhall. This Beautiful Confusion.

For most of my life, I had assumed that I was pretty much neurotypical, but a young friend recently questioned me on this assumption, and I had to agree that he had a point. Now, at the start of my 8^th decade, I have also become more curious about whether uncommon brains might age differently than neurotypical brains? How are our strengths and weaknesses revealed in age-related cognitive tests? Is there anything that I should consider changing in either my expectations of life going forward or in how I live in the moment?

For several months last year, my husband and I kept losing the word for nectarine. Why was that word so elusive? Or was it not the word itself, but that once a word is lost, then it becomes harder to re-find? This elderly kind of forgetting - creeping aphasia - sounds like a weed. So how does this slowly invasive weed impact on my usual non-neurotypical approach to research and writing? How does it impact on what I am still good for?

About a decade ago, I passed out while driving (thank you vasovagal syncope) and later uploaded a piece about the experience (Crash test Dummy). There were two upsides to the aftermath of this event. One was that the only lasting damage was to the car (and a few bushes). The second was that a scan of my brain revealed that I had an age-appropriate brain. I loved that label. The image of my brain revealed the presence of dozens of small white specks. They looked like snowflakes – as if they had landed at the start of a light flurry.

No doubt, there have been more flurries since then, but in spite of this there is some research which hints that there may be some upsides to living with an aging brain.

As your brain matures, it actually gets better at many important things. One of the biggest strengths that comes with age is the ability to recognize patterns. With years of experience to draw from, decision-making often improves, especially in real-life situations that require careful thought. You also tend to get better at managing your emotions, and problem-solving becomes more effective because you’ve faced and learned from a wide range of challenges. Your knowledge and use of language also continue to grow. Even if you occasionally struggle to find the right word, your overall language skills stay strong. In fact, your vocabulary usually keeps expanding well into your 70s, and your general knowledge increases over time. Many people also find that their storytelling skills improve—they become better at sharing ideas and experiences in ways that are thoughtful, clear, and meaningful. These strengths are a natural part of the brain’s evolution and a reminder that aging brings valuable mental abilities. Your Amazing Aging Brain: How It Changes and Thrives Over Time. Dr. Susan Borgaro, Clinical Neuropsychologist

My lifetime of being not too shabby at pattern recognition - and also of thinking outside the box - were both key to my being able to cobble together some bits of Irish history in my post: Seeking Ensign Jackson, although it wasn’t easy for me to find the flow. My creeping aphasia meant that I had to keep looking things up – not once, not twice, but again and again. Certain names kept slipping away with the same regularity as nectarine.  It took me forever, and made me ask myself: why do I keep doing this? Then, I came across a quote which I had written at the opening page of my 2021 diary:

I wonder what writing is or can be. There is a prophetic or mysterious quality to it sometimes – when you are on the brink of something, and even before that, when you are attracted to a subject. It is a kind of magic …. It is an odd sensation, when on the trail of research, to also feel that the research has, in a feeling that cannot be fully articulated, been on the trail of you." The Ghost Orchard. Helen Humphreys.

Am I tracking a thought, or is a thought tracking me? Or do both happen simultaneously? It has always been true that when I am in the early stages of having a thought that it begins in a totally wordless form. Do such pre-thoughts begin in the so-called lizard brain? Or in the pre-frontal cortex? Elsewhere?  Everywhere?  

 In Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst, the neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky opens with a chapter called The Behaviour, followed by the 2^nd chapter One second before, and then in subsequent chapters he tracks the hours before, then the days before, and then Back to the Crib, Back to the Womb and so on. He also explores how little control we have over where our thoughts take us.

Essay on Adam  Robert Bringhurst There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam. The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth, fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth, nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these is only an issue of whether the demons work from the inside out or from the outside in: the one theological question. From Selected Poems by Robert Bringhurst. Copyright © 2012 by Robert Bringhurst. Reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved.

Thinking is akin to an autonomic function. Like breathing, it keeps chugging along, with or without words, whether we are paying attention or not and whether we act or not. My own pre-thought moments - when I am conscious of them - feel as if they originate in that spot just behind my forehead. Perhaps this is a common experience. Perhaps this gave rise to the myth of how Zeus gave birth to Athena.

The "forehead of Zeus" is famously associated with the birth of the goddess Athena, who sprang from it fully grown and in full armor. After Zeus swallowed his first wife, Metis (the goddess of wisdom), he suffered a terrible headache. Hephaestus split Zeus's head with an axe, and Athena emerged, representing wisdom, strategy, and defensive warfare. AI Overview.

In order to take the next step - towards wording a thought - I am often drawn to locate a particular text.  It is always my body, not my mind, which will know which shelf of books will hold the key to my thought, which book it will be in, and it is my fingers – again not my mind - that know how far to flip in from the last page. I always start at the back of a book, never the front – why? – I don’t know, but once I get to the right page, I always know exactly where the needed words will be. It is then that my non-verbal thought can begin to take shape. In words.

A couple of years ago, when Robert Bringhurst and his partner Jan Zwicky were visiting, I told them both about this, and Jan laughed out loud. Apparently, her brain also worked like that. More recently, after hearing Dennis Lee speaking in Vancouver, and then after rereading his latest book, Wrestling With Cadence: essays on writing and intuition, I came to suspect that so-called non-neurotypical thinking is perhaps not so uncommon. Lee’s own version of his pre-thinking experiences connect him to jazz, so it makes sense that he named them cadence.

We don’t have a word in English for “an array of blurts & squirts of non-verbal energy that take you over but they can’t be seen or heard by anyone else.” But I had to call the fool thing something. So I hijacked the closest term I could think of – “cadence.” There was nothing sacrosanct about the word, though; I could have called it Fred. p 18

Fred? That made me laugh. A few years ago, when my husband was dealing with recurrences of a tumour in his head (thankfully now long gone), we always referred to it as Fred in the Head. There is something about being able to name things that crystallizes thought. So, cadence it is.

Lee also described how the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam experienced the first stirring of his poems as a hum. His widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, described this and she believed that this was a not uncommon approach for poets:

As many poets have said – Akhmatova (in “Poem Without a Hero”) and M, among them – a poem begins with a musical phrase ringing incessantly in the ears; at first inchoate, it later takes on a poetic form, though still without words. I sometimes saw M. trying to get rid of this kind of “hum”, to brush it off and escape from it. He would toss his head as though it could be shaken out like a drop of water that gets into your ear while bathing.

But it is not only poets who begin their thoughts like this. The famous physicist Richard Feynman, would writhe on the floor on the floor and emit loud howls and whoops when he was in his pre-verbal thinking. For him, there was a visual element to this:

What I am really trying to do is bring birth to clarity, which is really a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi-vision thing. … its all visual. It’s hard to explain.

As Lee points out, it is not insignificant that: Some of the seminal advances of modern physics were made during these painstaking joyrides in the intuitive field (p. 21).

As I follow my own joyrides in the intuitive field, the digital age has introduced two new conundrums. What is the starting point for a preverbal digital search? Also, what about community? Thoughts can only progress so far when we think in isolation. We all benefit when we have to work together with those who hold tenaciously opposing views - what is called adversarial collaboration. Engaging with those who would advocate competing hypotheses increases our capacity for self-correction, whereas on-line disagreements often end up in an entrenched stand-off.

Physical presence also matters, and I know that I definitely benefit from boots on the ground, hence my frequent trips to Ireland. Like words in books, it is being in the presence of people and places which both shape and enrich the start of my Irish research thoughts. As I write down the start of what I know – first for myself, followed by a more refined version as I think of sharing these thoughts with others - each thought becomes more complete. Slowly.

A couple of recent dreams revealed to me the probable reason why I chose to even write this post. In the first dream, I had entirely lost the capacity for verbal thought. Worse, it hadn’t felt as if I were dreaming. I felt awake, frozen in terror as my husband slept on beside me, blissfully unaware. The second dream was less terrifying because it clearly was a dream. In that one, I had lost my sight while driving a car. Such dreams tend to give voice to our subconscious fears. For me, they are probably: How long will I be able to think, to learn, and then to write and share and to continue to be of service? If not, when will this stop, and what next?

These days, it already takes me a lot longer to get to the nub of whatever it might be that I am thinking, but this is not unlike my capacity for walking. I can still do the recommended 10,000 steps per day, but I do them more slowly. As for my idiosyncratic approach to research? Well, that’s just me.

Three years ago, my granddaughter (now six years old) drew two circles for heads with eyes and mouths included, and with stringy lines hanging down for legs. The big circle was her father’s head, she said, and the little circle was hers. Together, they took up half the page. There was also an energetic scribble, a very energetic scribble, that took up the upper part of the other half of the page. It felt that it must have been important to her. What is this? I asked. Grandma’s brain, she said.

Intro for Michael Crummey and his novel The Adversary.

Annual Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts | Sechelt,  BC. 2025 August

My disheveled hair - oh well- but Michael looks great.

On my hind legs, blathering on.

 NOTE: I saved this as a blog post as a simple way to not lose it. By necessity, it was brief. The audience mostly wants to hear lots from the author - and way, way less from the presenter. Done.

After my first read of The Adversary, it was the cadences of Crummey’s sentences that stayed with me – that and his great strings of curses, often invented by transforming nouns into verbs. The way that he accomplished this put me in mind of Dennis Lee, James Joyce and Shakespeare, all masters of cadence.

Then, in my 2^nd read - after reading Guy Vanderhaeghe's essays, Because Somebody Asked me to: Observations on History, Literature and the Passing Scene - I experienced how The Adversary can help us to arrive at a more deeply felt sense of our own times. 

The characters of Widow Cain and her brother Abe are textbook examples of what we now call The Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. Metastatic evil, such as that which afflicted the fictional community of Mockbeggar, takes root and flourishes when there is a combination of three things: deep inequality; a validating religious and cultural landscape; and no effective feedback loop to rein it all in, to constrain it.

In The Adversary, Abe Strapp’s ruthlessness combines with his feral unpredictability and his insatiable desire for retribution. Serving as Justice of the Peace gives him the legal cover and clout as he arrests his competitors without legal cause. Because of his government post, he faces no effective social censure in spite of his Strip-Me-Naked booze sales, his gambling, and his prostitution ventures. The Beadle - and this character is key – is his Enabler.

What if we substituted the fishocracy of Newfoundland’s early 1800s for our current experiences of the techno-digital-otocracy? Or what if we compared the impacts of the early 18^th century merchants to those of our current oligarchs? The quality of the light and chill suffered by the defenseless who are doomed to live in the underbellies of such times is equivalent.

Thankfully, the extremities of such realities as experienced in the fictional town of Mockbeggar need not continue to be like that forever and forever. In The Adversary, Crummey has also created the characters of three children, all raised by Quakers, whose lives embody love, loyalty to service, and a sense of shared purpose. A more holy triad. One of them even gets the last line in the novel. I plan to hold on to that.

For more links and reviews see: The Adversary 

ADDED: Here are bits from Vanderhaeghe's book which influenced my second reading of The Adversary 

Because Somebody Asked me to: Observations on History, Literature and the Passing Scene. Guy Vannderhseghe. 2024 Thistledown Press.

Pg	Notes
145	How often do we turn on our television and hear someone say about some grisly event, “You could never have made me believe that this could happen here.” But the novel also explored the phenomenon of evil on the largest stages, evil on a national or international scale, those arena where territorial ambitions run amok, where wars are purposely fomented, where people’s rights are ruthlessly trampled. I waned to show that the perpetrators of evil in the small stage often share the psychology and character of evil that has the greatest scope and consequence. [referring to his novel August in Winter.]
146	History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance … The encounter between character and circumstance is essentiall a story.” [Quoting the Canadian historian Donald Creighton.]
268	“Many historians continue to treat their ‘facts’ as though they were ‘given’ and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much found as constructed by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before him” [Quote from Hayden White The Burden of History.]
270	Stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story, this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which mean, of course, that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true. Is this true enough? [From Hayden White The Content of the Form.]
317	[Hilary] Mantel knows that historians and historical novelists edit our pasts, but she also knows that every human being indulges in that editing. Mantel writes, “It is the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writinigs, we rewrite their lives.”