Jake asked Stephanie Zool if she wanted to accompany him for the journey.
“I don’t know,” the guitarist said doubtfully. “I’m not a big fan of flying even in big old jet airliners. Your plane is even smaller than the one that brought us here, isn’t it?”
“True, but it’s good plane and I hardly ever crash it,” Jake told her.
“Hardly ever?” she asked, raising her brows.
“Hardly ever,” he assured her. “It’s just a little hop up over the mountains and then back down. About twenty-two to twenty-five minutes each way.”
“Well ... will it be bumpy?” she asked.
“It can be,” he said. “It’s warm in the valley today and we have a sea breeze blowing here. We get bounced around a little over the top of the mountains sometimes when that happens.”
“You’re not doing a very good job of selling this to me,” Steph told him.
“Come on,” Jake chided. “It’ll be fun, and I really need someone to go with me to help with the groceries and the loading and unloading.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I’ll let you do some turns and banks once we’re airborne,” he offered.
She shook her head. “No way am I going to fly an airplane.”
Jake nodded and then hit her below the belt. “All right, how about this? You don’t have a hair on your ass if you don’t climb in that plane with me.”
The eyebrows went up again, higher this time. And a little over an hour later, Steph was strapped into the copilot’s seat, a headphone set on her ears, her hands gripping the side of her seat as the aircraft accelerated down Runway 22 at North Bend Muni and lifted into the bright blue summer sky.
“Okay,” she admitted as they climbed out over the ocean, turned around, and then started heading for the mountains on the east side of town. “This is kind of cool.”
“Told you,” Jake said, smiling, enjoying himself. Below them they could see the extensive dunes along the coast and the estuary of the Umpqua River as it drained into the sea. The river itself was a twisting, turning blue line winding its way out of the mountains. Columns of smoke could be seen here and there as landowners burned debris in control burns. The mountains were covered with a dense carpet of evergreen trees—seemingly a billion of them.
“How high are you going to climb?” she asked.
“Sixty-five hundred feet,” Jake said. “That will keep us at least two thousand feet above the highest peaks between here and the Willamette Valley.”
“How high can this plane fly?” she asked.
“Theoretically, it could go as high as thirty thousand feet, but I don’t ever take it above nineteen thousand. If you fly higher than twenty thousand you have to have oxygen available in case of depressurization.”
“So ... you don’t have oxygen available?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Don’t need it as long as I don’t go above twenty. If the plane suffered a decompression at nineteen thousand, the air is still thick enough that I have time to recognize the situation and descend before I pass out.”
“I see,” she said. “Are you going to pressurize the plane for this trip?”
He shook his head again. “No need to at sixty-five hundred. I only pressurize when we go higher than nine thousand or so. At full pressurization we’re only at eight thousand feet of equivalent pressure anyway—same as in a commercial airliner.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means that this airplane and commercial airplanes flying at forty thousand are only pressurized to the level that a person sitting at eight thousand feet of elevation on a mountain would feel. That’s why traveling by airliner makes you so tired. The air is thin and dry.”
“Why do they only pressurize to eight thousand?”
“To prevent metal fatigue mostly,” he said. “If they were pressurizing to sea level altitude, the fuselage would be expanding and contracting a lot more with each ascent and descent. This reduces the useful life of the aircraft and increases the maintenance and inspection cycles.”
The flew on as Stephanie digested this information. Soon they were at their target altitude and flying over the coastal mountains. Though they were two thousand feet above them, they still looked close enough to touch. Highway 38, the road that crossed the mountains between Interstate 5 in the valley and Highway 101 on the coast, was visible twisting and turning its way through the passes. They bumped and bounced a little bit in the rising air, but not too badly. His passenger continued to stare at the passing scenery in amazement.
Jake was glad that she was enjoying the flight. Of all the members of Brainwash, he felt the closest to Stephanie Zool. It was not that he disliked any of the others—he did not—it was just that he and Steph spent more time together and had more in common. She was a physical education teacher and, as such, made a considerable effort to keep herself in shape. Like Jake, jogging was her favored method of accomplishing this. They ran together on the beach (or the road if the tide was wrong) most mornings before breakfast, the way he and Celia had once done. And she put at least as many dollars and quarters into the swear jar as Jake—maybe even more.
“Nerdly tells me that you should be able to finish up the primary vocals for Wrong the next session,” Jake said. Wrong was what they called Stephanie’s tune, Wrong Tree, which would be the last cut on the album when it was mastered, and probably a song of controversy due to its subject matter. It concerned a love triangle between two women and a man, with the singer—Stephanie obviously—trying to tell the other woman that she was a lesbian and should not be in a relationship with the man, she should be with her. It was a very profound and emotional tune, and Jake knew what Steph was trying to say with it, but he was afraid it would be misinterpreted by the more homophobic listening audience (those who were smart enough to analyze lyrics anyway) as Steph trying to turn a heterosexual woman into a lesbian instead of trying to explain to the woman in question what she really was.
“We just have the bridge to finish up,” Steph confirmed. “Finally. That used to be one of my favorite tunes to sing, but now I’ve sung it so much over the past few weeks that I’m sick of it.”
“That happens,” Jake said. “Is it a song from personal experience?”
She looked over at him, her eyes trying to see what was behind the question. He hoped she was picking up that it was simple curiosity. Jake had been around gay men quite a bit these last few years—Dexter, Charlie, Phil, Bobby Z—but Stephanie was the first verified and committed lesbian he had ever had a chance to get to know on more than a superficial level. He was finding that she was quite different in mannerisms, speech, and actions than what the stereotype suggested.
She seemed to see what she needed to see in his eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s from personal experience. Her name was Carissa. Carissa Morgan. She was a teammate of mine when I played basketball for BU. We used to room together during the away games. She was tall, thin, quirky, and she considered me her best friend. We did everything together. I was in love with her almost from the first time I met her. And I’m pretty sure she was in love with me as well. And she was a lesbian—not bi, not curious, not experimental. I wasn’t trying to turn her to the dark side or make her be anything she wasn’t meant to be. She was a sister—one knows her own kind. Only she wouldn’t admit to herself what she was.”