Dear Friends,
When I was growing up all the boys wanted to be astronauts. And all the astronauts wanted to be Chuck Yeager. —Dan McLaughlin
That would do just fine as an epitaph on the gravestone.
So we enter this final month of this all-around lousy year losing an American treasure. Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager was, as the headlines accurately-but-shallowly note, the first man to break the “sound barrier” and fly a jet at supersonic speed. Yes, sure, he did that. He was also a World War II Ace, shooting down five enemy planes on a single day. He was also shot down himself, evaded capture, and ended up literally dragging a wounded comrade over the Pyrenees to safety. Then he demanded to be put back into action, which was against official policy, and they let him. And, oh yes, then for the next half-century he flew just about every experimental aircraft this country ever dared to put in the air—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
There’s so much that could be said about Yeager. For me, he was one of the greatest of the nearly extinct “Greatest Generation,” so much so he should probably lie in state under the Capitol dome. He epitomized his generation and an entire era of American history.
Yeager was passed over for NASA’s Mercury program because he didn’t have a college degree, and those seven “astronauts,” as they came to be called, were the toast of America. Chuck stayed out in the desert and out of the limelight, pushing that ol’ envelope, flying planes into space, and in the process quietly re-made the entire aviation industry into his own image.
Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot. . . coming over the intercom . . . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it’s reassuring) . . . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘it might get a little choppy’ . . . the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): ‘Now, folks, uh . . . this is the captain . . . ummmm . . . We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not . . . uh . . . lockin’ into position when we lower ‘em . . . Now . . . I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right. [….]
That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940’s and 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all of the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.
That’s how Tom Wolfe introduced him in his sensational book, The Right Stuff, which was later made into a glorious star-studded film that you simply must see if you haven’t. Yeager’s own autobiography is worth reading, too.
Everybody knows about that famous flight in the Bell X-1, the “Glamorous Glennis,” when Chuck punched past Mach 1 and into the history books. But do you know what happened on the very next flight? They dropped him out of the belly of that B-29 mothership and he had a complete and utter electrical failure. No engines, no radio, no nothing. Just a free fall, loaded down with tons of explosive jet fuel in an aircraft with no way to eject or bail out.
He lived to tell that tale. And many, many others.
On Craftsmanship
My friend Micah is a pipe maker. Not just any run-of-the-mill pipe maker, but what I would call an expert pipe-maker. Stuff like this:
You can go to his website to admire his work. And, no, I cannot afford them, either. Well, maybe you can—shop away! Anyway, the last few weeks he’s been giving Daughter #2 her “shop” class, teaching her the basics of shaping a block of briar, and I spent a lovely hour in the workshop last night admiring all his works in progress.
Jonah Goldberg likes to talk about all of the “embedded” knowledge there is that we simply take for granted, not even knowing it is there, much less knowing that we are relying on it. Knowledge accumulates over time and embeds itself into artifacts. He uses the example of food: a great chef can make a great meal, but he or she doesn’t really know a fraction of what goes into it. She doesn’t know the ins and outs of how each and every spice is grown, cultivated, harvested, and then brought to market. She might know a great cut of meat, but not so much about cattle ranching. What foods pair well with what other foods may be a matter of trial-and-error at the margins, but the truth is that knowledge of that sort is passed down somehow. Tradition is inescapable—we rely on millions of different “inputs” all the time. We are not autonomous islands, constantly starting from scratch. God created us as social creatures—that means reliant creatures; not just dependent on God, but dependent on other creatures, too, which includes other people. And not just living-and-breathing people; people long dead have passed on their knowledge and experience in innumerable ways, and we rely on those traditions all the time without even thinking about it.
Micah can shape a great piece of briar into a gorgeous pipe. But where does that briar come from? Who finds it? Well, in his case it turns out to be an Italian guy called “Mimmo”—and somebody made a short film about his particular expertise:
I love the part where he pats the ground and tells the briar bulb that it’s “too young” and needs to grow up. He knows that without digging it up first. Who taught him that? It’s remarkable to me that Mimmo’s knowledge and expertise gets embedded in actual artifacts: the finest tobacco pipe makers in the world want his briar.
Micah, the “Yeti” himself, is pretty enthusiastic about what looks like an ordinary block of wood. He stares at it, examines it from all angles, and spots beautiful grains as different shape ideas begin to occur to him. He is a craftsman. That means trying to know as much about the craft as possible; it matters to him where the briar comes from. It seems to me that part of being a great craftsman is to know your dependence.
Our culture—particularly in the arts—celebrates the “genius,” that rare person who can create as though ex nihilo. But we are not God. We do not create “out of nothing.” We shape and form and cultivate and craft with pre-existing materials: artifacts—and even ideas—that come to us with knowledge already embedded in it. At its most basic level, “stuff” has embedded meaning because God created it for a purpose. But as human beings shape and form things, they embed knowledge and expertise into things, too. Being keenly aware of this, recognizing our dependence and limitations, is a kind of humility and teachability and respect and generosity of spirit toward others. Craftsmanship involves Christian virtues.
You know how Chuck Yeager survived his free fall in a fuel-bloated death trap? Craftsmanship. He had a few secrets, as he reveals in his autobiography. One of them was that he worked tirelessly to know everything there was to know about his aircraft. He knew his dependence—on designers and engineers and mechanics. He wanted to know how every single thing worked, from the internal workings of the engine to the electrical systems.
In this case, he had mere seconds to figure out that he needed to lighten the aircraft so that he could glide the plane safely to the ground. That meant dumping all of his fuel. Of course, the switch designed for that purpose was worthless without electricity. He remembered that behind his head there was a valve that he could manually open to dump his fuel. It worked. He eventually hit the ground hard, but unscathed.
Chuck Yeager did not have the “right stuff” just because he knew fancy flying (and, boy, did he know that). He had it because he was a master of his craft, right down to the last literal nut and bolt. The natural question emerges: what is your craft? What are you called to do? Are you putting in the proverbial “ten thousand” hours needed to absorb all the embedded knowledge of ages past so that you can, at last, make a valuable contribution of your own? In a world obsessed with re-imagining and reinventing everything—even our very “selves”—I think there’s a more profitable way. Humility and generosity toward the accumulated wisdom of the past. You might even call it conservatism. It might not be flashy, but it has long-term durability.
Miscellany
Not a lot of odds and ends this week. Election hysteria is still sucking up all of the commentary oxygen, and I have no interest in further involving it in this newsletter.
Our weather has been magnificent of late. The girls and I finally got all the leaves raked up, which is a huge job. It was pretty embarrassing how long we let it go this year. But at least we got it done before more snow!
It’s that time of year for my eyes to keep rolling until they fall out of my head. In other words, it’s time for our annual debate over the theological reliability of the song “Mary, Did You Know?” There are some who positively insist that the song is wrong because, well, you know, an angel actually appeared to Mary and told her all about the child she was carrying.
I’ll just tell you: I think that’s a pretty one-dimensional understanding of the word “know.” I do not think the song is really asking whether Mary had a cognitive grasp of certain information. It is asking about the actual real-world, experiential realization of that knowledge—the information coming to fruition. I can “know,” for example, the information that one of my daughters is gifted with a wonderful singing voice. But I’d like to think that if I had never heard her sing, and then actually experienced it, I’d wonder: Did I ever really know? There is a very real sense in which I didn’t fully know it. That’s the point: we are told that Mary was “treasuring these things in her heart.” Her lived experiences of her son’s life and ministry must have been, even with the information she knew, surprising and astonishing in a million ways. The fulfillment, realization, or enactment of the promise is so much greater than the bare words of the promise itself.
So it means: Mary, did you really comprehend how awesome your son is? That’s a pretty honoring thing to ask a mom, and pretty glorifying to her son, too. So enjoy it without a scintilla of guilt. My favorite version is Christopher Parkening and opera soprano Kathleen Battle. I can’t believe there’s not a live performance of it online anywhere, so here’s the studio recording: