Daily Archives: 2012/05/03

I spent the day in town, hoping to have had the brakes fixed after I lost all the brake fluid going around a hair-pin turn yesterday evening on Holy Souls Mountain road. It was an… um… interesting drive home after that happened. Don’t ask me how I got the truck into town to have the brakes fixed the next day. You don’t want to know. Let’s just say I know how to drive. It’s an extreme sport kind of thing.

If that wasn’t enough excitement, the neighbors kindly gave me a lift back up the mountain, since the brakes hadn’t been fixed by the end of the day. Getting back home, we heard some helicopter war games going on over the ridge on which the hermitage sits.

We couldn’t see them — as they were flying just over the trees – but we all agreed that these were surely not the usual spindlely rescue helicopters that frequently fly over the hermitage. Instead, I remember hearing this kind of engine depth when President Clinton visited Hyde Park, just north of Poughkeepsie, New York. There were, if I remember correctly, nine chinooks in that entourage. A good friend of mine was the pilot for the President’s aircraft. He was the one who drove me to the airport when I started my overseas saga in the late 1990s.

These helicopters last evening, however, seemed to be flying way too low, way too quickly to be chinooks, either dogfighting or just practicing playing catchup to the most rambunctuous of their instructors, and this, right at dusk, when your eyes rebel at adjusting to the still somewhat bright sky, but now the almost murky indistinct forest ridges below, and to the side, and above… tempted to fly by vision, reluctant to use instrumentation to survive. Good training. Personally, I think these choppers were the usual AH 64s. Way cool. Should I have bothered to rush up Holy Souls Mountain the rest of the way, I might have seen something like the picture above, only with more of them.