The Grad School Diaries: Still At the Zoo

“Another cracker, my dear?” I asked, offering the package to my wife. She accepted one gracefully, and we leaned back into the patio furniture. I took another sip from my drink, and considered the show going on before us. About a hundred yards away, a brightly-painted airplane came screaming down the runway and vanished again into the mist.

“Was that a CRJ?” my wife asked, referring to the commonly-used short-haul aircraft formally called a Canadair Regional Jet by the manufacturer.

“One of the early ones,” I agreed. “All of the CRJ family have the same basic form – narrow fuselage, T-tail, tip spoilers, fuselage-mounted engines and so on, but the 100 and 200 models are about ten meters shorter than the later 700 and 1000 types.”

It’s trivia that only an airplane hobbyist (or flight crew member, perhaps) would care about, but my long-suffering spouse has had many years of experience with my obsession and knows to expect this sort of behavior when there are airplanes around. We’re sitting on the enclosed patio at the Air Zoo’s original facility, a much smaller building located a quarter-mile or so closer to the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport. I’d imagine that having the museum located right next to the runway of a full-sized airport was very appealing when they were first getting organized, but today most of the attention is on the newer building, which includes an actual snack bar and a dining area overlooking the main gallery. The only food facilities here at the original facility are a trio of vending machines on the glassed-in patio overlooking the airfield…

We spent most of the morning walking around and looking at airplanes in the new facility, then drove down the service road to this smaller building, which has a definite 1970s flavor to it, with a focus on space exploration and the (then new) Space Shuttle program. I always enjoy that sort of exhibit, but for me the real treasure here is the World War II exhibits, which include old friends like the Corsair and Hellcat, but also include much rarer birds, like the Douglas Dauntless and the Waco glider. It’s one of the only collections I’ve ever seen that has the Hellcat and the earlier Wildcat displayed side-by-side with the graceful Corsair and the powerful Skyraider. They also feature classics like the F-80 Shooting Star and F-86 SaberJet, and a military version of the DC-3 (called a Skytrain) that you can actually climb into. And the only examples of the B-57 Canberra and F-84F Thunderstreak I’ve ever gotten to see up close…

Not that long ago I was still thinking about one day pursuing an advanced degree in history, most likely as a retirement project. Without a college degree in history (or any reason for graduate programs to take me seriously), getting in would have been a challenge, and with my middle-aged-man’s memory getting worse every year, I don’t know how I could have passed Comprehensive exams. But over many years of frantic scrambling, working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to stay alive and being bewildered by many aspects of my life, there have been times when spending the whole day pottering around a facility like this, studying the subject of my obsession at close range in the dry, cool silence, sounded like heaven itself…

I know it’s an illusion, of course. I’ve experienced a real doctoral program now, and serenity does not seem to be a regular part of the experience. Going for a doctorate in history would probably be just as stressful and just as bewildering as the program I’m in now, and it seems doubtful that anyone is going to let me take a degree in The History of Airplanes anyway. All things considered, there’s probably more serenity to be had sitting here, on a comfortable patio that apparently no one ever uses, watching the world go by and having a vending-machine snack with the love of my life. The serenity here is also illusory; soon enough we will have to get back in the Torrent and head back to East Lansing, so I can spend the rest of Spring Break working madly to try to catch up. But for the moment, it seems like more than enough to just be here today…