Altered perspective

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The last time I went up in a small aircraft from the Sandpoint Airport had to have been sometime between 2001 and 2002. A high-school friend of mine was working on his pilot’s license at the time and I was visiting home with a college pal. 

My high-school friend took us on a jaunt out over the water, and, somewhere between the Long Bridge and the train bridge, turned to me and asked through the headset if I’d ever heard of a hyperbolic arc. Of course I hadn’t, and he smiled when he told me to hold a pen in my upturned palms.

“Keep an eye on the pen and don’t close your hands,” he instructed.

At that point, he pulled back on the controls and the four-seat Cessna started a sickening climb seemingly straight into the sky. Finally, I heard him say in a staticky voice, “OK, here we go.”

He pushed in the stick and the roar of the engine felt like it was coming from my chest. My view from the front windscreen shifted from the blue of the sky to the blue of the lake, the latter which came racing at me like the end of time, and I heard my friend yelling at me to look at the pen. 

An aerial photo looking south down the Byway and Sand Creek in Sandpoint. Photo by Zach Hagadone.

I forced myself to look away from the water seeming to careen upward at me and toward my somehow-still open hands. The pen hovered in space as we hit zero gravity.

That was cool for an indeterminate moment in time, until our pilot-in-training pulled out of the dive in a bowel-quaking maneuver that solidified my lifelong hatred of roller coasters. Then we were suddenly cruising peacefully with a panoramic view of the Selkirks ahead and Gold Hill to our right. 

This experience may account for why I hadn’t been in a small-engine plane until a recent Monday morning, when I took part in an airborne excursion with EcoFlight, a company based in Aspen, Colo., that provides flights over landscapes around the country that are under environmental threat or in need of protection. As EcoFlight states, putting stakeholders on board a plane offers a “platform for conversation to happen in order to find solutions.” That is truth in advertising.

In this case, the Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness partnered with EcoFlight to make three flights from Sandpoint to the 88,000 rugged acres on the Idaho-Montana border that FSPW has been working for years to see designated by Congress as a protected wilderness area. The passengers included local officials, media representatives and members of FSPW — and my 11-year-old son. 

I’ve written about the Scotchman Peaks a number of times for a number of publications for more than a dozen years, and even made the summit of Scotchman Peak in October 2011 (alongside my wife, who was then about four months pregnant with that very same now-11-year-old), but seeing the proposed wilderness from the air gave me a fresh perspective on just how vast, untouched and truly dramatic it is. As well as how precious that is, especially considering the amount of development that we saw occurring — and that has occurred — in the Selle Valley and along our lakeshore.

That EcoFlight and FSPW allowed me to bring my son along for the ride also added to the experience, seeing his excitement and wonder as he got to know his own backyard from a new angle and gain a deeper appreciation for the landscapes that surround him.  

Political, economic and cultural complexities abound in the Scotchmans, but riding in the plane the other day reinforced for me that altering our physical perspectives can have a profound effect on our mental perspectives.

My son was grateful for the opportunity — though not as grateful when I made him write a short report on it, since I let him miss school that day — and, among other things, I was grateful for the lack of parabolic arcs.