In a Nutshell

This is due Tuesday. I have to describe a broad part of my life using only concrete details. Here's my first crack at it. Lav, I apologize in advance for refering to you only in the abstract, but I was pressed for space.

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The RA gave the receiver some final adjustments, securing it to the top of the car’s hood with a wad of gum, and hopped back down, gravel crunching underfoot. “November one tree eight niner echo romeo,” the box croaked, “IFR approach for landing on the one eight, requesting vectors to the initial, over.” The receiver looked like an oversized Altoids tin and picked up radio transmissions about as well. Each voice that flickered over the battered speakers came out thin, strained and hoarse, like every pilot in Florida came down with a cold on the same day. I strained my ear and leaned closer. “Riddle one tree eight niner, turn to heading two six and squawk two four one eight, over.” Nope, it was still gibberish. The individual words made sense, but that was about it.

Beside me, Adrienne shifted from foot to foot, beads of sweat forming at her hairline. The wind was unsteady, moist, and unrefreshing, each gust bringing the acrid smell of brine and sand inland. Night had taken the edge off the heat, but not by much. At midnight, it was still in the high eighties and Adrienne was in the American University sweatshirt she’d put on with her pajamas. I leaned over. “What’d they say?” Adrienne had been a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol before she transferred to Embry Riddle, so she was the closest thing I had to a translator within a five-foot radius. “Someone’s trying to land,” she replied. Her breath smelled like chocolate cake. “I got that, but is it the heavy?” I asked. A moment snailed by. More croaking from the radio. Adrienne shrugged. “How should I know?”

Fat lot of good she was.

I craned my neck. At my count, five planes drifted overhead like Christmas trees with wings, but not a one of them looked significantly larger than any of the others. I decided to try my luck mining my roommate one more time. “Any idea when this thing’s due?” Adrienne kicked a nugget of gravel, which skittered of in the direction of some freshmen. “Nope. Ask Kevin.”

Kevin was our RA. He owned the radio, which he had bought his freshman year to listen to every night while he slept. Like an immigrant that watches movies to learn English, Kevin had learned to speak Aviation through osmosis. He already had his private and his commercial license, so he was working on his multiengine certification. Hot shit. At the moment, he was in deep converse with the cluster of freshmen Adrienne had kicked a pebble at. Somehow, interrupting him to flaunt my ignorance didn’t appeal to me. “I’m sure it won’t be much longer,” I said.

It had better not be, I thought. We’d been out here nearly an hour. I’d been halfway asleep when a thin girl with dreadlocks pounded on our door, discovered it unlocked, and invited herself in. Her nose was inches from my face when my eyes cracked open. A heavy was scheduled to come into DAB tonight and the whole floor was going to drive out to runway 25L to watch it land and we had to come. It wasn’t like I’d spent ten hours in a Volkswagen followed by five hours unpacking or anything. Sure, we’d come.

Everyone had come. A few feet away my suitemate Beth chatted with her roommate, a Jamaican girl with elegant features and a distant expression. We’d met earlier but I’d forgotten her name. She was going to spend the entire summer semester and most of the fall bedridden with homesickness, before dropping out. Beth would get a room to herself for a couple months before withdrawing herself. Financial reasons. The girl that took Beth’s room in the spring would drop out as well, along with the guy in the room across from ours. Embry Riddle’s retention rate was as dismal as its credentials were impressive.

Beth waved at me from her perch on the hood of a car and mouthed, “When is this plane gonna get here?” I started to shrug and then noticed that Kevin wasn’t talking to the freshmen anymore. We felt it before we heard it. The gravel rattled. Everything—the ground, the car, our teeth—throbbed in sync with the engines. Three hundred thousand pounds of screaming metal bore down on our heads, a cacophony of vultures howling in knife factory during a hurricane, blocking out the stars for a terrible instant—and then a very different gust of wind rushed in, knocking the radio off into the dirt. For a moment, the evening was cool, and smelled of oil. It was a perfect landing.