Capers With Carroll

Last month’s Capers tribute to the DC-3 became part of a conversation, both here and on Facebook, that included several of my former students and a couple of students who graduated from Lomalinda before my time.

Garth Harms obtained this picture from photographer Jeff Evans, who spent a couple of months in Colombia just before I got there. That dates the picture to late ’83 or early ’84.



Photo by Jeff Evans


It’s authentic, right down to the left-wheel and rear-wheel ruts where the plane pivoted to put its passenger door facing the covered waiting area. The entire community was here to receive my family when we stepped off the plane the first time, and in turn, we joined the crowd for countless welcomings and goodbyes. Departures had a ritual: after final hugs, the doors closed but the waving continued. Then the engines would rev (first one side, then the other) and well wishers would jump on motor cycles for a race to the last hill at the end of the runway, for final salutes as the gooney bird lifted off. This airplane was central to so many emotional moments that just looking at the picture—all these years later—touches a nerve.

One educational advantage that students in Lomalinda enjoyed was an unusual opportunity for work experience during high school. Kirk Garreans tells me he had the privilege of working alongside the DC-3 crew. Through his connections, he also came up with the fact that DC-3s continue to be active in the relief efforts in Haiti. Ponder that a moment: the youngest DC-3s are 65 years old, and still play a role in work-a-day aviation. Amazing.

Kirk also traced “our” DC-3 to its current owners, Dynamic Aviation, of Bridgewater, Virginia. The firm supplies “special-mission aviation solutions,” with over 150 aircraft doing commercial charter, fire management, sterile insect application, airborne data acquisition and other tasks. Before writing my first post, I was 90% certain I’d found the airplane, but Kirk’s information locked it. Dynamic Aviation restored the craft (N47E) to its original, 1943, Air Force paint job and insignia, and renamed it “Miss Virginia.” Here it is:



Finally, Kirk reported that Miss Virginia was part of the twenty-six plane, 75th Anniversary Fly-In to Oshkosh. Several nice videos are posted on You-Tube. Here is one:



A tip of the wings to all who participated in this conversation.

(My earlier post is here.)

In the rush of Christmas, I’m a little late with this post. I had hoped to have it ready for December 17th, when one old friend turned 75 and another turned 108.

On December 17, 1935, at Santa Monica, California, test pilots tried out the first DC-3. Exactly 32 years earlier, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilber Wright piloted their Wright Flier 1 to what is generally considered the first sustained flight by a self-propelled and pilot-controlled aircraft.

I’m not a pilot, but I enjoy being a passenger. I love both the arriving in some exotic place and—under most conditions—the process of getting there. Maps fascinate me, as does the world they represent. (Ask the two generations of students to whom I have assigned map learning.) Having the earth stretched out beneath me is like enjoying the map in its purest form. I have pressed my nose to the window of multiple crossings of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, and on flights that puddle-jumped across four continents.

I remember all the places I visited, but some of those airplanes I got on, got off, and forgot. By far, my favorite flights were in the airplanes that carried me during the nine years I lived in Colombia. In 1984, I moved my family to Lomalinda, a small Bible-translation and linguistics center on the Colombian llanos, or eastern plains. When I arrived, the center had three single-engine, Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) Helio Couriers, and an unusual looking plane called the Evangel. In addition, twice a week, the community was served by a DC-3 flight from Bogotá. Primarily, the small planes connected us to the state capital (Villavicencio, a.k.a. “Villao”), or remote areas where indigenous languages were still spoken. Through Bogotá, the DC-3 connected us to the rest of the world.Loading the DC-3, Bogotá, Colombia, October 1985


Lomalinda was 35 miles from the closest paved highway, miles that were always difficult and sometimes impassable. I remember one rainy trip where buses and trucks lined up on both sides of a thousand-yard mud pit while two Caterpillar tractors sloshed back and forth, towing a single vehicle each trip. In good weather, the road trip to Bogotá took 12 hours. The DC-3 could do it in just under an hour.


Cockpit of the DC-3, with seats for pilot,
co-pilot, a third crew-member, and to
offer one passenger a remarkable
vicarious experience.


















When the DC-3 went into production in the mid 1930’s, it revolutionized passenger airline service. It cut the New York to Los Angeles trip from 38 ½ hours (beginning with a train ride from N.Y. City to Cleveland, and then 13 more stops to L.A.), to 17 ¾ hours, with just three stops. In four years, as one airline after another went to DC-3s, the rate of passenger fatalities per million miles flown fell by four-fifths. Over the same years, the cost of airline tickets fell by half and the volume of passengers more than quintupled. DC-3s had captured 90% of the world’s airline traffic. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Douglas Company had built 507 of the DC-3s. War brought a military version, the C-47, and production that reached 4,878 in 1944 alone.

The DC-3 assembly line shut down in 1945. That means the airplane that carried my family that last leg to Lomalinda could not have been less than 39 years old. It might have been closer to 48. By comparison, I was 35. Before we left California, we junked the Dodge Dart we’d been driving. It died at 19.

It is difficult to pick a date in automotive history as dramatic as Kitty Hawk, but by 1903, motorcars had almost a century of experimentation behind them and were in production in both Europe and the United States. Still, by 1984, most pre-1945 models saved their public appearances for car shows. Few pre-’45 buses had regular runs and few pre-’45 trucks hauled freight. The DC-3 arrived 32 years into aviation history, and then served widely for roughly 50. This would be like the common-place usage today of a 1940’s telephone, or a 1980 photocopier.




My daughter, earning
her wings as a stewardess.

After World War II, cheap military surplus DC-3s made possible the beginnings of many new airlines, or fell into private hands. From Lomalinda, it was 35 miles in one direction and 60 in the other to find airstrips capable of handling a DC-3. Therefore, when storms sealed off either destination, airplanes landed on our strip to wait out the weather. I remember once counting 13 aircraft crowded in our little parking lot, half of them DC-3s.

In many ways, the DC-3, at age 50, was more comfortable than airplanes fresh off the assembly line today. For one thing, seats seemed roomier, aisles wider, and windows larger. True, the cabins were noisier, and unpressurized. At high altitudes (like over the Andes, to reach Bogotá), passengers sipped oxygen from tubes. I remember one painful flight with a head cold, descending into Lomalinda with the pilot circling the airport an extra two times to give my ears additional time to adjust. But more, I remember the spectacular views of Andes and Llanos.


Sipping oxygen at 16,000 feet
Colombians pass down a story that when God created Colombia, the angels came to complain that no place should be allowed such beauty. God is supposed to have replied, “Yes, but wait until you see what else I will do to it.” In many ways the country has suffered a torturous history, but its landscapes are breath-taking, and to fly over it is dazzling. Few places on earth display as many shades of green, or as wide a variety of clouds, sunsets, or rainbows.

The Colombian Llanos,
under the wing of the DC-3.

I might have ridden the DC-3 eight or ten times. It brought my youngest son home after his birth, brought my in-laws for a visit, and carried my wife and me to a second honeymoon in Bogotá. For part of one flight, I sat in the cockpit’s fourth seat and the pilot pointed out the unremarkable peak of Nevado del Ruiz. On November 13, 1985, a small eruption of the volcano melted the snowcap and sent a wave of boiling mud across the town of Armero, killing some 23,000 in the worst recorded lahar in history. The disaster sent our DC-3 into full-time relief service. Even at fifty, this veteran was not an air-show classic. It was still a workhorse.

For this reason, it came as a shock when the government decided no longer to allow DC-3s over the Andes. Ours had superchargers on the engines that gave them extra power and safety, and our pilots trooped to government offices looking for an exemption, but to no avail. Unable to use it for the Bogotá run, we had no choice but to sell it. My last photographs of the DC-3 are from 1987. I was told the plane had been purchased by a company that flew tourists over the Grand Canyon. It continued to serve.

This year, aficionados celebrated the DC-3’s three-quarters of a century with a formation flight across Wisconsin. Twenty-three DC-3s landed together in Oshkosh; of 26 that had had gathered at Rock Falls, Illinois, to attempt the flight; of the hundred or so still operational in the United States; of the some fifteen thousand made during the decade of their construction. Would you like one? I see this one advertised for only $299,000.

I found some of my history for this here.

As evidence that we have entered the season of buying things, BlogPatrol tells me that over the last week, of the 20 visitors who found my site through a Google search, 15 were looking for some variation on “Canon PowerShot SD1200.”

I wrote my product review in June, five days and 300 pictures into owning my SD1200, so perhaps it is time for an update.

I’ve lost count of how many pictures I’ve taken over these six months, but I continue to enjoy this camera and have grown to trust it. (My G3 used to accidentally power-on while riding in my zippered waist pack. This on-button avoids that problem.) The small size means I am comfortable carrying it almost any time I leave the house. That, in turn, means I have it with me almost any time some image catches my fancy, for example, this ground fog I spotted on my way to work one morning.

After 30 years of using film, I continue to marvel at a digital camera’s ability to capture low light or overly bright situations (or the two existing in the same frame), and at the ever-more-compact memory cards (the tiny unit in the SD 1200 carries more than the five larger cards I carried through China, in 2004, for my G3, and multiple times more than the 40 roles of film I carried through Europe, in 2000). Maybe these things color my conclusions. Maybe some jaded techie who never shot on film or lugged around a bulky SLR can find something to complain about on this mighty-mite camera, but I can’t.

I’m vegging today after what has seemed like the most intense summer since 2000, when we pushed for seven weeks through Uzbekistan and eight countries in Europe. This summer, we drove some six thousand miles, going north to a family reunion in Wenatchee, WA . . .



. . . and south, to San Diego, for part two of the wedding that began with part one in China, last October.

Since the last time we had the whole family together for a picture, we’ve added six members.

Along the way, we enjoyed delightful visits with family and friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen in over a decade.


(Product review: The success of this summer was made possible by my Toyota Sienna, which will be ten years old this fall. It flipped 158,000 miles on Monday. During one, three-day, one-thousand-mile segment, it carried five adults and way-too-much luggage. It had all the power I needed going up steep grades, and comfortably handled curvy Highway 101. Thanks to Bob and Jim at The Auto Shop, the Sienna has never suffered a breakdown, or needed a tow. With the removable seats out, the Sienna has moved my children in-and-out of multiple apartments. With the seats in, it has carried countless kids on field trips or to Sunday school. What a blessing this car has been. Thanks, Vicki, for buying me this car, and for riding around with me all summer.)

So yesterday and today I’ve been moving kind of slow. I’ve pulled a few weeds, run some laundry, and started to think about school starting in ten days. I’m also trying to make amends to a blog that has been feeling abandoned.

A few thoughts:

• We live in a big, beautiful country. We saw parts of California, Oregon, and Washington that I hadn’t seen before, and revisited some places that were familiar. If I had stopped to soak in every vista that tempted me, I would still be on the road.


• Family is a tremendous blessing. This summer I got to spend time with my parents, the aunts and uncles who helped raise me (all now in their 80s), and with the cohort of siblings and cousins who grew up with me (and have grown with me now, well into middle age). The nieces, nephews, and cousins-once-removed pop up as spitting images of the previous generations, but with the twist of their own generation’s unique personality and outlook. I got quality time with the children I raised, the spouses my children have married, and my grandchildren. Pretty amazing.


• I need to learn more Portuguese. With Brazilians as son-in-law and daughter-in-law, and now a nephew with a Brazilian girlfriend, I listened to a lot of Portuguese this summer. I over-heard my Chinese-born daughter-in-law encouraging my son-in-law to “Speak only English!” His English is coming along, and we had several conversations we could not have had last time I saw him. My grandsons, also, are progressing as bilinguals. Yet there were times this summer when I wanted to follow a conversation, and couldn’t. I have been working recently on Chinese, but I need to redouble my efforts toward Portuguese.


• While I was gone, hundreds of luscious figs fell on the ground. Pity. I must redouble my efforts to see that no new figs go unappreciated while the season lasts.


• I went the summer without getting any writing done. (Okay, three paragraphs on my novel.) Now I will need to write at the same time I am teaching. I find that very difficult.

So, here’s to a wonderful summer. And now on to the challenges of a new school year. Life is good.

I was slow going digital with my photography. As late as the summer of 2000, I dragged forty roles of slide film and my Nikon SLR for seven weeks across Europe and Uzbekistan. I still hadn’t organized and viewed all those slides when I bought my Canon G3 during the summer of 2003, and now, of course, when I want to use one of those European shots, I first have to digitize it. My G3 has been twice to China and twice to Brazil. It has recorded weddings for my five children, gotten me nearly three years into grandfatherhood, and illustrated these first five years of Capers with Carroll. On a single day in Yunnan, I shot 600 keepers from a bus window. In Pernambuco, I captured 120 images of one male Frigga sp. to get the picture I use at the top of this blog. That would have been a prohibitive four 36-shot rolls of film. I love my G3.

However, in September, I spent some time in the camera section of a big-box electronics store, helping a visitor from China choose a pocket-sized digital. Suddenly the G3 felt pretty bulky. My favorite shirt is a guayabera with four pockets. They will hold the G3, but it’s awkward to maintain for more than a few minutes. I usually carry my camera on a belly strap, but that creates other problems. Whether I’m photographing urban wildlife or grand kids, the key to success is to have the camera perpetually at hand. Even as a junior high teacher, whether I want to record evidence against a graffiti artist or a cute candid shot to forward to the yearbook, a camera in the pocket is worth two in the closet.

So Friday I bought (and my wife credited to Father’s Day) a Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Consumer Reports had rated it their top choice and Staples offered a good deal.

As the photographs show, it passes the grand-kids test. Natu and I were on opposite sides of a spider web. I was trying to capture an image of the too-small spider (visible as an orange-brown smudge), but the camera’s automatic focus went for the better shot.

In my first several attempts at photographing the hummingbird, the automatic focus preferred the surrounding foliage (a tough shot for any but the best manual focus), blurring the bird, before my subject did me a favor and came out to a better perch. I’ve grown spoiled by the ability of the G3’s small display to rotate out of the camera to facilitate shots from difficult angles, but the PowerShot’s much bigger display outdoes the G3 in bright sunshine. It even outlines the targets where it has chosen to focus. On the G3, the zoom always seemed to cost clarity, but I’m very pleased with the zoom on my hummingbird shots.

I’m also pleased with the jumping spider (Habrocestum sp.) and water strider shots, taken at the default full-wide angle. In each case, the critter let me get within 18 inches, and the pixel density let me crop and enlarge. For closer studies of insects and spiders, I will continue to use the even higher density capacity of my G3. For those, I fix the camera on a tripod, turn the subject loose on a leaf, manipulate the leaf to achieve focus, and record a superabundance of poses. Spontaneity is not an issue.