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Legend Has It: The Passing of Chuck Yeager
In eulogizing Chuck Yeager, a broken telephone pole in West Virginia seems an unlikely place to start. But it is the perfect place to start.
Of all the things that will be said, written, and remembered in eulogizing legendary pilot Chuck Yeager now that he has passed on, a broken telephone pole would seem an unlikely place to start. But it is the perfect place to start.
Jutting out over the embankment, where the sliver of flat land on which the doublewide I spent my first decade of life living in sat turned to a steep drop down to the Elk River, no one cared, much less asked, how it got there in the first place. With one end buried who-knows-how deep and the other sticking six or seven feet out into the air at a 70 degree angle to the river below, to adults — had they noticed it at all — it was an eye sore. To my mother, whose only son insisted on climbing all over it, feet dangling above what she was sure was my imminent fall and certain death, it was a terrifying menace. To my father, it was a good place to look for a missing hammer or screwdriver, or his missing son for that matter, as I put nails and screws near the airborne end of the pole in semi-planned rows and clusters. That’s the problem with adults sometimes, and parents in particular; they…
