“The One Mile Radius”
He was very much a real rouge, and an extreme asshole sometimes, and he could be easy to hate, when he was at his worst. He was a womanizer, and cheated on his wife, who he loved. But, he would never think to run out on a debt. He was a loyal friend and family man, regardless of his philandering. He was often strikingly generous. Yet at the same time, he could be extremely parsimonious. He was honest in all of his dealings, and operated with the highest respect for precision and craft, and elegance in design. He admired and demanded the highest standards of human performance, whether it was controlling an airplane, or a sailboat, or using a woodworking or machine tool. He was a hard and ambitious worker, who often could be heard whistling, as he labored. At the same time, he could be, not just brusque, but, malicious, cutting, and even vicious in his dealings with people, especially if he held them in little regard. They were little better than dirt. He could go from a smile to a threatening scowl in a heartbeat. He once beat up another man, and was briefly jailed. He did not spare the rod with his children. When he became angry, his eyes narrowed and fired. Yet he would tear up at even the most maudlin of human situations, if they struck a resounding chord with his own experience. This included puppies and children, even if he had little patience with his own.
He was a master woodworker and shipwright, who created the most skilled and beautiful pieces, meticulously crafted and refined. He took tremendous pride in his work, though he never would have spoken of it. When he was pressed by others to tell any tales of his 36 years of flying, particularly the most terrifying, he was dismissive, and would say that he had better things to do with his time. He was medium in height, stocky in build. He was once championed by the local small town paper for dragging an unconscious man from a burning boat. He didn’t like the limelight, and hated politicians. He’d rant on about them using unchecked profanity. He was a very intelligent man, yet he had no use for higher culture, whatsoever. He didn’t understand it or care to. He preferred simplistic and dramatic crime movies and books, steamy and violent. When he was almost seventy, he took a beating from a young black mugger outside a downtown bar, when he refused to give over his wallet, preferring to fight, even if the odds were against him. Fight for the pride.
He was a hard drinker, but, he held his liquor well and never got sloppy. He was too proud to be sloppy.
When they made him stop flying, at sixty, he was lost. He’d spent more than half his life flying around the world, and to suddenly be confined at last, was a huge tragedy. He was ready to go to Saudi Arabia, because he could still fly there. But, his wife was not enthused. They made attempts at genteel vacations, and he tried hard, but it was not in him. He was not a tourist. He’d flown them for 35 years, and he didn’t want to be one.
He spent most of his time working on his boat, but there was only so much to do. He was lost, and then his wife got cancer and died, and he was more lost. She had set up their social world, and he had gone along for the ride, and loved it. He was able to be the curmudgeon, because her bright, merry friendliness made it so that he rode her skirts. Friends came often, over the years of their lives together, but with her gone, the friends stopped coming so much.
He wasn’t the type to invite them, so that he became isolated, and took to taking long car rides, for thousands of miles, staying in cheap motels at night, but mostly just driving, without much of a destination. It was the only thing that mimicked the life he had known flying. Things were timeless when he was moving through space, any space. He would arrive back home again, exhausted, after a week, or so, and be lost there again.
One day he fell down the companionway ladder on his boat and savagely bashed his head. Maybe he’d had some kind of stroke, or maybe he’d drunk a bit too much. That was never quite clear. But it was clear 
that his isolation and lack of direction made him drink more, and by himself. He dated some of his old girl friends, stewardesses and such, but nothing stuck. He couldn’t, or didn’t fall in love again. He eventually started to stutter and be unable to find the word he was trying to grasp. And then he would just give up, and say, “Oh, hell.”, and just stop trying. Finally, he had another stoke, or something, and he was even less able to communicate. You could see the anger and frustration behind his eyes.
Then one night he fell asleep driving, and crashed his car, fortunately into bushes, where no one was killed, but, it was the end. He, who had always, throughout his life, been the captain who safely navigated the ship, and airplane, and motorcar, was shamed and humiliated of himself, with this moment. Once his driving privileges were gone, he was gone. He was 82 years old.
He eventually quit, or couldn’t keep, taking care of himself in his own home anymore. His children lived in other parts of the country, and he fought their attempts to provide him with live-in help, or help that came for a few hours a day. He locked the doors on them, refusing to play along. Eventually he had to be moved to a care home, a fine one, of quality and class, and really it was the best thing for him, even though he tried to fight physically from being taken from his own home. Yet, when he settled in a bit, he had people around him to talk with, and he made friends, as much as a man of his nature was able. He was like a tiger living amongst house cats. One night he tried to escape. The police found him cold and exhausted not far from where he had started.
And he was not far from where he started in other ways. The house he had grown up in, and the house that he had built with his own hands, and lived in with his wife, and raised three boys in, and the “house” that was the senior home where he had wound up, were all within a one mile radius in the north end of his town of Tacoma, Washington, United States of America.
The biggest non-ferrous metal refining facility on the entire Pacific Coast of North America, run by the American Smelting and Refining Company, was also within that same one mile radius. All the natives called it, simply, “the smelter”. His father had been the machine shop foreman at the smelter, and eventually died of the emphysema that he acquired over his working years. Yet, it was a proud position to have held. And he had worked there as well, as had his sons. The smelter had a 571 ft. tall smokestack, which had once been the world’s tallest. When it was completed in 1917, he had been four years old, and had already watched for two years as a cognizant infant. He had watched the stack grow daily. When he was eighty years old, in 1997, the smokestack, which had been polluting the entire vicinity with arsenic and other poisons for over three quarters of a century, was demolished with dynamite, in four seconds time. He watched the entire spectacle, which generated enormous hoopla, from his own front yard, within that one mile radius of his life, and he wept uncontrollably.
Though he lived his entire life within that radius, he had also shouldered the responsibility of flying airplanes, loaded with trusting passengers, through every kind of weather and hazard, around the world and back again, over and over. He’d never lost a plane, or a passenger. He had build sailboats of his own design, with his own tools and hands there, within that same radius. He’d fished for salmon daily off the docks, during the depression, to help feed the family, all within that radius. And carried his new bride across the threshold, there, within that radius. And finally, as is the human condition, now feeble, after gradually loosing the energy to live, watching out his window at the bay and harbor, right next to where he had been born, within that radius, the light flickered, and he up and died.
Well, you know, it’s damn hard to watch a good man go down.