Nobody is going to read this but I need to set it down for my own self. There is so much that I must come to terms with. The unreality of it all.
I am known to have been born in this valley with my parents well known and alive until recently. I can remember my childhood here in detail all the way from my beloved Horhee my stuffed toy horse. Cheeky Horhee who, with my father’s manipulation, would casually sneak up on the sugar bowl, looking ever so innocent, to make that last final dash to gorge as much as he could before being taken, given a shaking, and a stern talking too. A puerile joke that never wore out. Poor chewed, patched, dribble-soaked Horhee. The wrongs I did you. I couldn’t sleep without Horhee.
Then there are my school years. They are surely real enough. And my boot-making apprenticeship. My growing fascination with the magic of radio. Something to be read about in magazines and longed for there being no signal at that time in this valley. My study by mail with Coynes. Surely again real and yet how could it be?
Strong in me is that other childhood, that other young manhood, in what is almost certainly my real life with a Mom and Pop still alive, or at least they were when I came here, and a sister Ruth.
I lived that other life in one of the Mid-West’s better areas for soaring with ridge up-draughts that could be relied upon and some very useful thermals over the extensive plowed areas on the plains beyond. When all else failed there was always the thermal above the Wal-Mart car park. What could be more natural than that soaring should have become my sport of choice and that I should buy myself a Standard Cirrus to look down on the world from Mount Olympus. I came to know the home state well. If I got too far from the home spread, Ruth would come out with the Chevie and the transport trailer to fetch me home.
I come to my last flight. My last forever I would imagine. How the scene below me changed I do not know. I didn’t notice the change sudden though it must have been. There was still a plain below me but it was a sunken valley plain that couldn’t exist this close to home. I had been up only a matter of minutes. The valley appeared to be about sixty miles long, at least thirty wide, and to be completely ringed in by high vertical bluffs. The best way to imagine it is as a giant shoe-print deep sunk in wet sand.
I am confused at what happened next. One moment, I was at sufficient altitude to see the full extent of the valley and yet, at what seems to be the very next instant, I was finding myself below the level of those bluffs and in urgent need of some lift. I was not to find that lift and had quickly to decide where to put my fragile bird down. There was a dirt road but I was not going to reach it. My forced choice was a flat waste of thigh length grass. Who was to know what that grass concealed. Nothing as it happened and I was able to put her down with only slight damage. But where was this valley located? I was already convinced that the answer had to be nowhere. More convinced when my normally trustworthy Global Positioning System could give me no indication and an attempt to call Ruth made it clear that there was no cell-phone signal.
I had not opened the canopy. I could not bring myself to open the canopy. Outside was a world, an obviously solid world that could not exist: a world that occupied the exact same space as the solid world that I knew. Another dimension. I was unmanned. I could not let this alien dimension in. The cockpit encapsuled my known safe world.
I had lost everything that I loved. Mom and Pop, Ruth, everyone that I had known. All of them possibly nearby but now physically unreachable. There could be no hope of getting back to them. I had no idea how I had stumbled here. Even if I knew how a crossing is made, scientists posit a multitude of possible dimensions. Getting back was not possible just as it is impossible to describe the anguish one feels on finding oneself in that situation.
I sat locked into my little plastic cloche and although the day outside appeared overcast, time began to make my fragment of the old world hotter, muggier, and oxygen depleted. I couldn’t stay there forever. 801