Fire Escape
by Morgan Kohler
part 1
Jim climbs the stairs to the airfield control tower and feels his sixty years with each step. It’s six in the morning, and the chill is starting to take hold, but the sun will still scald the afternoon in this high desert.
Once topside — it’s only a story or two above the airfield ramp, a single runway catering to a flight school, the cargo feeder route planes, the occasional military training flight — he flips switches to wake the weather station and the radar screen, tunes the radios to the correct frequencies and increases the volume.
The controller on the previous shift has left dredges of coffee in the pot. Jim dumps the sludge down the small sink at the back of the tower deck and waits patiently while the slow dribble from the spigot fills the stained pot, the water turning a dingy shade within.
This tower hasn’t been renovated in decades, light blue paint, favored heavily in 1994, slapped haphazardly over every surface but the floor and desks. Jim rather likes this unchangeable nature of his workplace, all but up in the clouds.
Soon, the smell of cheap coffee — bought in bulk, dry and coarse from the can, acidic on the nose — permeates the control tower, and it’s this moment in the morning that Jim savors. He allows the glow of the screens lining the front wall to fill the space with low light, refuses to turn on the lamp over the desk until October at the earliest. He prefers the natural light outside the large-frame windows in front of him, while the sun arcs upward, soaking the entire airfield below with a soft pink warmth.
There’s no taking for granted these mornings after decades of his now ex-wife blustering into the kitchen and flipping on the harsh overheads. The buzzing lights used to wedge a headache behind his eyes. He’d stand at the kitchen sink, blinking. If one would just wait a moment, they would see there was a perfectly good sunrise to light the way.
Jim records the weather information ten minutes to the hour, then sets it to transmit on its assigned frequency. He settles the headphones over his ears, wiggling the earcups until the set rests just right. At the top of the hour, a steaming cup of coffee on the desk, the airfield quiet yet, he keys the mic and says, “Attention all aircraft: good morning, this is Spinnaker Tower. Class delta airspace services have resumed. Weather information foxtrot is current, altimeter setting 29.92. Runway two seven in use. Any aircraft in the area please advise.”
He leans back in the creaking chair to await the day.
* * *
It’s early September, a Thursday, when three jets contracted by the Forest Service arrive at the airfield. A fire in the San Bernardino Mountains is one percent contained after three days of unchecked growth. It’s due to a lightning strike, he’s read in the paper. That’s better than a cigarette butt, better than arson, but destructive nonetheless.
The jets arrive sporadically throughout the afternoon, squat bits of metal: four engines hung under reinforced wings built to withstand any rollercoaster of convective thermals rising from the flames. The aircraft span the entire runway, wingtip to wingtip. The Forest Service has to park them on taxiways because the ramp is full of Pipers with flat tires and with fuel trucks, with attendants sleeping in the cabs, parked at the airport tie-down spots.
The first of the jets, Air Attack 163, arrives, followed half an hour later by Air Attack 12. The pilots of the pair of jets are male, an American and an Australian. They were probably here last year, Jim thinks, fighting that blaze in the Santa Monicas, but everyone sounds similar across the radio waves, so he can’t be sure.
Air Attack 58 calls ten miles east of the field; a woman makes the introduction from that flight deck. It takes Jim a moment to respond, to give her a landing clearance. He shudders. The creeping haunt of something he prefers not to think on much, though it’s inevitable, washes a cold wave over him, walking over a grave, whispering a curse...
* * *
His daughter had never been content with the idea of controlling planes from the ground. Rather, after years of sitting in the tower next to Jim at the sleepy field in San Diego where he’d been assigned at the time, pushing buttons when he told her or shooting the light gun at aircraft with failed radios, Cassandra declared she wanted to learn how to fly.
Jim had called over to a field closer to the city. There was a flight school where Cassandra could start training whenever she could see over the dash, phonebook-lifted or otherwise. The morning of her first flight, a Saturday in May, Jim drove Cassandra to the airport.
Mona had refused to be a part of it, convinced the small propeller planes would disintegrate at the moment of her daughter’s touch, or else — if the plane somehow made it into the air — dive for the ground with Cassandra at the controls, no matter the instructor, no matter the FAA’s stringent standards, no matter the safety record of the flight school.
No, Mona would not be complicit in an activity that might, at worst, cause her daughter egregious physical harm or death and, at best, stunt the growth of a young woman. There was no telling what those dirty machines and the uncouth men who keep them flying might imprint on a pretty girl of sixteen. Cassandra didn’t have even her learner’s permit, but someone had to do it.
Jim remembers shaking hands with a young man, Cassandra’s assigned instructor, who Jim assumed was probably just there to check off his required airline hours. The idea didn’t thrill Jim; he wanted someone invested, willing to spend time truly teaching rather than worrying over lines in a logbook. But the instructor had already started showing Cassandra the airplane, letting her climb on its wings and under its belly, and like a child with a new pet, there would be no tearing her away.
* * *
“Air Attack 58 cleared for takeoff runway two seven,” she repeats.
It’s a Tuesday now, and the fire is only five percent contained. The winds, as it so often happens in this high desert, have been ripping across from the west, sending flat streams of smoke northeast, filming the Mojave with something so akin to a marine layer that one might be forgiven for thinking the coastline — and a refreshing reprieve — lay just beyond. But the smell is pungent — sagebrush and pine and whatever they build houses out of these days — and Jim wonders if Mona’s asthma is bothered, up there in her new house with her new husband in Las Vegas. Jim rather likes the smell. It reminds him there’s still some summer left.
Jim watches through binoculars the tanker on the east side of the field. She taxies onto the runway and aligns the nose with centerline. The morning sun has him squinting, and his eyes are beginning to tear. The jet accelerates past his large window. He can barely make out her profile through the left cockpit’s small window.
After he hands her off to the approach controller, the morning quiets until Ray ambles up the stairs around midday. Ray mans the ground frequency while Jim retains tower control. Jim is hoping Air Attack 58 will return before his shift is over. He’s missed her several times now, because their schedules simply don’t align, but he reluctantly hands off both the tower and ground frequencies to Ray by two o’clock, packs out his lunch remnants, takes his leave.
On his drive home, the shadow of the jet on final approach, five and eight painted in red on the tail, washes over the highway.
* * *
Three months of early Saturday mornings and thirty-minute drives to the airport. Three months of sitting in the front office of the flight school, quietly reading — the term used loosely — the same out-of-date Wine Spectator. Three months of awkwardly clearing his throat and trying not to disturb the secretary with the turn of each crinkled page. Three months of driving thirty minutes home, with Cassandra smelling of the old Cessna, the fumes of leaded gas, engine oil, sweat.
Three months and one day, Jim is waiting in the office for only an hour when the instructor returns. “She’s going to solo today if you’d like to watch.” The young man takes a handheld radio from a shelf over the desk, leaning into the secretary’s space without a second thought, and Jim follows him out through a hangar, then onto the ramp.
The radio chirps to life while the instructor tunes in the field advisory frequency. From the ramp, Jim can see down to the far end of the runway where Cassandra has taxied. Her voice cuts through the handheld: “Gulf traffic, red and white Cessna departing runway one eight, Gulf.”
Together, the men watch as the Cessna moves forward onto the runway, waiting for the far-off whine of the propeller when she opens the throttle. At the midfield point, she’s got the plane airborne, and Jim can hear the nerves in her voice on that first circuit. But by the second lap in the pattern around the runway, and the third, he begins to hear the confidence, can imagine the smile glowing on her features as she realizes what she’s doing on her own.
He’s no stranger to student pilots working in his airspace, of course. The same tail numbers come across quite often from the myriad Southern California flight schools while the students learn how to work with control towers and tower controllers. Sometimes they come from a hundred nautical miles away, solo or under the purview of radio-jumpy instructors for cross-countries. Some even fly down, he imagines, just for the chance at a view of the ocean thirty miles west, because there’s no better way to see the vast sweep of the Pacific.
He’s always careful with them, helpful and kind and never quick to violate for mistakes big or small; he believes the awkward exchange of having to list a phone number to be called upon landing is best reserved for egregious behavior. But here, at a field with no control tower, it’s simply Cassandra making her own way. There’s no one to tell her when to turn to her downwind pattern leg or when to land or whom to watch out for in the stack. For the first time in her life, she goes at it alone.
After three rounds in the pattern, Cassandra taxis back to the ramp and cuts the engine. Jim and the instructor meet her at the door. A high five from the young man, a hug from her father. “Congratulations, Cass,” Jim says, as he folds his arms around her. “Congratulations.”
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Morgan Kohler
