I just finished reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It’s a skinny little volume and, as I expected, is packed with pictures of the writer struggling in a hundred ways to produce work that reads as free and easy as if it happened all by itself. But in the last chapter I came upon a real surprise. Annie and I have something in common—six degrees of separation and all that.

When I was a freshman in college at Washington State University I took Geology 101. The professor was Dr. David Rahm. He had a reputation on campus. He was known. Students were drawn to him because he was larger than life and funny too. He made geology fascinating and when he did his “cheese whiz in a can shot through wonder bread” lesson on geologic formations students came to watch whether they were enrolled in the class or not. I knew Dr. Rahm was a great lecturer and top in his field of Geology, but I didn’t know he was a stunt pilot.

Annie’s last chapter is all about Dr. Rahm. Annie used to live somewhere in the San Juan Islands, just a stone’s throw from Western Washington State College in Bellingham. Dr. Rahm transferred from WSU to Western about six years after I enjoyed the cheese whiz lecture. He was a crack stunt pilot who had flown for King Hussein of Jordan. He had, in fact, traveled there many times, training a team of Hussein’s pilots to fly some of the stunts. Annie went to the Bellingham Airshow and saw Dr. Rahm fly for the first time. She was captivated, later having the privilege of flying with him for a couple of barrel rolls just to get the feel of it. She writes:

“The plane moved every way a line can move, and it controlled three dimensions, so the line carved massive and subtle slits in the air like sculptures. The plane looped the loop, seeming to arch its back like a gymnast; it stalled, dropped, and spun out of it climbing; it spiraled and knifed west on one side’s wings and back east on another; it turned cartwheels, which must be physically impossible; it played with its own line like a cat with yarn. How did the pilot know where in the air he was? If he got lost, the ground would swat him.”

Sadly, the ground did eventually swat him and at age 42 while training a Jordanian aerobatics team he died in an air crash. In the closing paragraphs of the book Annie says, “When Rahm flew, he sat down in the middle of art, and strapped himself in. He spun it all around him. He could not see it himself…he must have felt it happen, that fusion of vision and metal, motion and idea. I think of this man as a figure, a college professor with a Ph.D. upside down in the loud band of beauty. What are we here for? Propter chorum, the monks say; for the sake of the choir”

So there you have it. We both knew David Rahm, a man who made everything he touched into art. He lived a life of beauty and danger and died at an early age because of it. I was impressed, Annie was impressed–Annie and me.