When I was a little kid, I thought my dad was a superhero. He was fast, resourceful and powerful. I’d seen him lift boulders in the fields of our farm. He was daring and dashing, a pilot since his teenage years. He was gentle and kind, helping friends and neighbors in need.
As I grew up, I still loved my dad, but he slowly melded into the background of my life. My attention focused on school, sports, dating, and my career.
I’d forgotten that I thought of Dad as a Superhero until one day when I was back in upstate New York visiting my family as a grown woman.
Dad planned to fly his small airplane to a farm trade show in Pennsylvania that wintry day, and two of my brothers and I decided to join him. Happy in the back seat of the plane, I buried my nose in a book.
As he brought the airplane down for landing, Dad reached for the lever that lowers the landing gear. The lever moved much too freely. The cable to the landing gear had snapped.
My 18-year-old brother, Neil, said, “We’ll have to belly it in.”
I found it hard to breathe. I looked out my window and prayed. Hard.
Dad remained perfectly calm. He circled two different airports, assessing the runways for landing our airplane on its belly. There were too many obstacles along both runways. A collision could cause our fuel tanks to explode.
Dad decided to fly back home in order to burn off as much fuel as possible, and to take some time to think. He asked the controller to put him in radio contact with his trusted aircraft mechanic, and with the Piper Aircraft Company.
The airplane mechanic proposed an idea. Unfortunately, it required a saw.
Greg and I searched the cabin, but all we could find were a screwdriver and a metal chainsaw file that Dad used for sanding nicks off the propeller.
Dad was clearly disappointed. Silently, he ran his finger along the fine tread of the file. Then he unscrewed the bolts that secured the pilot’s seat to the floor of the airplane, and passed the seat to the back of the plane.
Dad said he was going to try to saw into a pipe under the dashboard and manually release the landing gear.
Saw through a metal sheath, and the braided steel cable inside, with a tool that looked like a large fingernail file? The idea seemed preposterous. But when Dad lay down on the floor of the airplane and began to put his big farmer’s muscles to work on that steel pipe, my fear disintegrated like The Sandman in a Spiderman comic strip.
My brothers must have felt the same way. We all started cracking jokes and laughing together. Neil flew the airplane, Greg took a two hour nap, and I read over 100 pages in my book as Dad sawed like crazy.
That’s the part of the day I remember best: my faith that Dad would do his very best to take care of us. So many times in the past, dicey situations had become exciting and even hilarious adventures with Dad, like when several of our 10-wheeler truck tires burst on a rural road at night, or when we couldn’t find a hotel vacancy and had to sleep in our car during a family vacation. Dad taught us by example that everything will be OK if we make it OK, by our deeds or least by our attitude.
Incredibly, after more than three hours of non-stop sawing, Dad successfully filed through that steel cable. My brothers and I gave out a cheer when we felt the familiar thud of the landing gear locking into place beneath us. We passed the pilot’s seat back up to our Dad, who hadn’t ever really been out of the pilot’s seat during any part of the ordeal.
Minutes later, we made a perfect landing down the center of the runway, flanked by emergency vehicles with their lights flashing.
We emerged from the airplane to face a small crowd of newspaper and TV reporters, who reacted incredulously to our account of the relaxed mood inside the airplane that day. At the time, I couldn’t find the words to explain to them that Dad had always made us feel safe with his can-do attitude and energetic perseverance. I guess I could have said: Most grown-ups don’t believe in superheroes anymore, but I still do.
Jackie Avner of Highlands Ranch (Jackie.Avner@gmail.com) grew up on a dairy farm, worked in the U.S. Senate, and is now a full-time mom to three young children.
