The omission of airplanes in much artwork is understandable. It’s not a question of talent, but of choice and visibility. When used in art, the most visible kinds of planes—those used for war and commercial purposes—signal the glorification of aviation’s base functions: to carry and to kill. There is no shortage of propaganda art featuring aircraft within the scope of warfare: smoking wrecks going down over a muddy European battlefield, or fighters strafing a South Pacific island. Airplanes’ other function—commercial—draws, blessedly, even less interest. There is something inherently tacky and inartistic about the jumbo jet, with its tuberous body, lumpy frontal node, bulbous engines. The same could be said of the jets’ central node, the international airport. As a crisscross of double-wide highways overseen by watchtowers and featureless grey buildings, these depots have all the charm of a postmodern prison. Through these portals, flying has become an accessible part of life, but as a passive event. We are flown, we do not fly.

There is one painting that records that difference. Painted by Frank Johnston, one of the Canadian Group of Seven artists, the work depicts a biplane performing aerial tricks high above a tapestry of rolling cropland. Titled Sopwith Camel Looping, it captures the dizzying effect of flight, the splendour of movement, the possibility and freedom offered by a clear, open sky. You can smell the wet dog tang of fuel, feel the grip of the pilot’s hands on the stick, sense the buffeting against the wings. The earth, threatening in its middle proximity, not far below, yet not close, is “above” the upturned pilot’s head. The effect is one of thrilling vertigo.

The pinnacle of aircraft beauty is unquestionably the open cockpit biplane, such as the one in Johnston’s painting. The perfect landing spot is a grass strip in a field. Like most ideas of perfection, this one coincides with an early memory. The first plane I can remember is a canary yellow biplane landing on the short turf runway at the Gladstone Municipal Airport. The airport, some nine miles from my family’s farm in southwest Manitoba, is more accurately called an uncontrolled airport, or, even better, an airstrip.

At Gladstone Municipal Airport, there are no shops, no duty-free; engine oil can be topped up by cranking the handle fixed to a 55-gallon barrel. Likewise, a self-service pump with 100LL aviation fuel. There are no overpriced restaurants, but a bottomless supply of coffee and creamer can be taken with a gaggle of farmers. There is no control tower either, and therefore no custodian to sweep their eyes over the skies and maintain a semblance of order on the hidden aerial highways. Whereas a large airport allows access to the world, the airstrip provides access to the sky. There are only the limits of flight to consider—weight and balance, lift and thrust. Pilots and passengers taking off from Gladstone Municipal don’t do so to travel anywhere, but to fly, and to take in the view. It is flight in its original intention: to see and soar as a bird does, so that we might change our perspective.

At the time of its peak operation in the late 1980s, the airport supported an aerial spray business, a restaurant, and the Glad-Air Flight Training Centre, which, between 1976 and 1987, graduated over one hundred students. Learning to fly was cheap then, and a kind of piloting craze swept through the area. Farm kids got their wings, bought small, single-engine monoplanes, and began cruising the skies. My uncle was one of them. He growled over his farm and others’ in a little underwing Piper, a single-seater. I only saw it fly once, when he landed it in my parents’ field, en route to its winter storage. Though I have no clear memory of that moment, perhaps a seed was sown that day—seeing someone I knew and loved emerge from the cockpit of this intangible freedom machine.

In my mid-twenties, I took the necessary steps: studied physics, mechanics, and weather, sat the theoretical and practical exams needed to get a licence of my own. When I told my uncle, he offered me a leather bag full of maps and charts, the textbooks and circular slide rule he’d used to calculate wind correction, weight and balance, and other flight technicalities. Those tools, by that time fifty years old, aligned with my longing for a kind of antiquity. I didn’t want the experience dulled by too much technology. I eschewed GPS for dead reckoning—navigation based on geographical inference—and that way came to know the land as its own one-to-one map. Threading an invisible needle over the patchwork quilting of farmland I’d known my entire life, I saw it anew, with an improbable perspective.

In those moments lay the finest discoveries. Concealed scars emerged—old railway lines, oxbow lakes, abandoned yard sites—to reveal a hidden history. Herds of cattle looked like handfuls of scattered rice. In the spring, thermals rose from plots of black, seed-primed earth to rock the airplane with violent turbulence. In summer, there were stamps of yellow canola, green blocks of immature wheat, and flaxseed so blue it seemed to reflect the sky itself. When the midsummer heat reached a head, clumps of storms swept over the land, fired through with fissures of lightning. The worst of them were grey and black, angled at the fore, like a locomotive’s cowcatcher. In winter, the air was smooth over the cool, rippled top sheet of snow. At any time, it was the kind of landscape one can imagine a de Havilland Tiger Moth bouncing over, or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry laughing about—the landscape of 1920s barnstormers, such as those depicted in the 1975 film, The Great Waldo Pepper.

Much like in that film, a plane passing over the farm is still an event. Ordinary people did not fly, and their presence over us was an occasion that drew us all in, made us part of the extraordinary. The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is always enough to send my family onto the lawn, where, with hand to brow, we scan the skies for the source of the furor. Each year, a pilot-cum-photographer knocks on the door to sell photographs he has taken while flying over our farmyard. These annual aerial shots grace the walls of homes across the prairies, cataloguing the year-by-year changes taking place around us.

Today, only the crop-spraying business remains at Gladstone Municipal; the restaurant has closed, as has the training school. The airport is unstaffed except for a mechanic, whose workload is markedly light. A few crop-dusters—Pezetel M18B Dromaders and Air Tractor AT-400s—take to the sky each spring. A row of pleasure crafts, mostly single-engine Cessnas and Pipers, gather dust. There are no longer so many who take to the sky for pleasure.

The other day I drove past the airport. A yellow biplane, the one of my youthful memories, lay upside down, resting on its top wing. The metal plating of its underbelly was exposed, giving it the distressed look of an overturned insect. A few years before, while coming in for a landing, it had skidded in too fast, jumped the runway, and come to rest in a slough. It stayed there for years, its yellow tail jutting from the marsh reeds.

The day was hot—approaching 40°C—and there were no takeoffs planned. In that hot air, windless and thin, it would take the entire runway, maybe more, to create the lift needed to take off. Instead, the only action was a farmer baling a thin cut of hay along the near side of the runway. On the other, a sallow crop of canola withered in the heat.

“Ask ‘Why fly?’ and I should tell you nothing,” wrote Richard Bach in A Gift of Wings, his devotional to flight (its French title, Liberté sans limites, captures better its aspirational writing). Another pilot tells Bach: “I suspect the thing that makes us fly, whatever it is, is the same thing that draws the sailor out to sea. Some people will never understand why and we can’t explain it to them. If they’re willing and have an open heart we can show them, but tell them we can’t.”

From Gladstone Municipal, I’ve taken family and friends with me into the skies. We rose into the sweet spot, 1000 feet or so above ground level, where the visual connection to the earth is still palpable, but the distance is immutable. For some, it’s a muddling height (more than a few were unable to recognize their own houses and farms from above), for others illuminating. My father, for one, was always keen for an aerial crop inspection, to see where the water lay in relation to his pastures.

The journeys are typically quiet, the thrum of the engine unbroken except by an occasional interjection to look at this or that. There is little to say when everything, one’s entire world, is spread out, laid bare, minimized and expanded all at once. It is an abeyance of one’s life, a chance to look and think without needing a question to answer. As Beryl Markham has written, in her wonderful book about flying, West with the Night, “There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing… There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt… Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”

Each time I take off, I battle the silent fears of crash reports, of self-doubt, and a distrust in the immutable laws of physics. Flying becomes a confidence trick played upon the self. Up there, drifting upon nothing and through nothing, there is only one’s own reserves to pull from. There is nothing but context, and one’s reaction within it. If something should go wrong, there is no help, no out, no withdrawal. The silent fears of flying are the same as those of loss—that ultimately, we are alone.

I never flew with my uncle. He is dead now, and another of life’s opportunities has gone forever. The time was never right, or our paths did not cross in that way. His charm was coupled with a shrewd remoteness that few, if anyone, could access. But knowing that he and I shared the same sky, the same flat stretch of land, the same sense of limitless destinations, is something to bridge that distance. It is, as I prepare for takeoff, something to help me face the aloofness of the earth below—not far, yet not close.

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Image: Frank Johnston, Sopwith Camel Looping, 1918, CWM 19710261-0254. Courtesy the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum