EPISODE 322

62 year-old gyrocopter pilot Caroline Paul is an inspiration to Boomers seeking a sense of adventure in later life. She’s the author of the new book, “Why Fly: Seeking Awe, Healing, and Our True Selves in the Sky.” In this episode, Caroline shares her philosophy about approaching life courageously, while weighing risk and reward. A must-listen for anyone who dreams of soaring — literally or otherwise! Her book is available at carolinepaul.com.

TRANSCRIPT:

ANNOUNCER: It’s You Earned This, the Social Security and Medicare podcast, brought to you by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. And now your host, Walter Gottlieb.

WALTER: It’s Walter, and I am so excited to talk to today’s guest. Caroline Paul is a boomer, like me. She leads an amazing life. She’s a gyrocopter pilot who has written a new non-fiction book called Why Fly? Caroline has also been, ready for this, a firefighter, a paraglider, a competitive luger, and a backcountry skier.

Reading her book, you get a taste for the adventurous life and a sense of possibility as wide as the open sky. And joining us from San Francisco is Caroline Paul. How are you?

CAROLINE: I’m good. Thank you, Walter. I’m excited to be here.

WALTER: Yeah, I’m excited to meet you because I love this book. Love, love, love this book. And I think it has a lot of inspiration for the 55-plus crowd, our audience. So, so happy to have you.

CAROLINE: And I’m 62, so good.

WALTER: You’re still a little younger than me.

Okay, we thought we’d start by asking you to read a beautiful passage from the book that I absolutely love. It’s the second page of chapter 12. And I wonder if you’d read that short passage for us, because I think it really captures what you’re trying to communicate in this book.

CAROLINE: Okay, I’ll introduce it just quickly by saying that I refer to an “invisible soul cord,” and that’s because I’ve talked a little bit about this concept called astral projection, which as a New Englander, I don’t necessarily agree with, but it’s this idea that there’s always a silver cord that attaches us to earth, but we could wander the universe.

WALTER: Ah…

CAROLINE: As long as that silver cord is still there, we’re alive and well on earth. So, that’s a little premise.

*begins reading* Flying brings out the mystic in me. I can feel that invisible soul cord unwinding on takeoff, tugging as I gain altitude, tightening way up high. When a familiar landscape becomes an unrecognizable higgledy-piggledy of tiny geometries below me, and the horizon is suddenly at my feet, I am not just aloft, but adrift, as flotsam swept overboard into a heaving sea.

It is then that if I am in my paraglider, I will glance at the carabiners that attach to the lines that themselves attach to the wing and make sure they are closed. In my trike, I will peer at the cables for sudden imperfections.

None of this is reasonable, but it is somehow reassuring. It is my version of “checking the silver cord,” for its pulse of otherworldly light, its sturdy, glinting sheath.

WALTER: Amazing.

CAROLINE: So, just as a reference, paragliders and trikes are two of the aircraft that I have flown. And the paraglider, for people who don’t know,  it looks kind of like you’re flying under a bed sheet. You jump off cliffs like hang gliders do, but it looks a little tenuous up there, precarious for that person. But I did that for about 15 years. I was a paraglider pilot.

And then trikes refer to hang gliders with motors that I also flew. So I fly, in general, these sorts of weird experimental aircraft.

WALTER: But your aircraft of choice is the gyrocopter. Is that right?

CAROLINE: Yes. That’s where I became really obsessed with flight. I’ve been flying since my 20s. I learned in a Cessna, a normal fixed-wing, what most people think of as what we fly. But I realized very quickly that I didn’t like the enclosure. It just felt like driving in the sky.

So I went to open-aircraft. And so paragliders, trikes, and I loved flying. It was fine. I wasn’t obsessed like a lot of pilots are. I liked it. It was great. It gave me a lot of adrenaline for someone my age. But it wasn’t until I was 58 that I became obsessed with flying. And that was when I got into a gyrocopter.

WALTER: And I want to talk about the gyrocopter in more detail in a little bit. But I did want to ask you first, based on the passage in the book, in what ways do you find flying to be a transcendent experience?

CAROLINE: A couple of ways. First of all, I do fly in an open cockpit. So you’re very exposed to the elements. So you feel very vulnerable. And I think in this day and age, we don’t often feel that because we have so many sorts of controls on our lives. We have all these computers and phones, and we try to maintain control all the time. And there’s a vulnerability that you have while flying that feels… Spiritual.

It feels like the universe is really huge — because it is, and you feel that the other thing is you just get this incredible view when you’re up there, and I think, being able to see where you’ve come from up there, it’s like you know.

It’s when people say: “Oh, if you have a problem, just try to get perspective, the long view, the big view, and that’s what I, and it feels spiritual.

WALTER: That is wonderful.

You mentioned this a little while ago, but how and when did you first get into aviation?

I started flying when I was 19 or 20. A friend of mine flew. He said, “Do you want to go up and fly?”

And I was like, “Yeah, sure!” I mean, I was already an adventurer of sorts.

And he tried. He did all these steep turns and stuff that basically made me airsick, and I think it was just showing off. But I was nevertheless just awestruck, and I wanted to fly.

So I did learn to fly Cessna’s. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, because back then the instrumentation was very different than now. It was pretty rudimentary.

It was a pencil, a map, a compass, and you still had to fly straight and level.

WALTER: Well, you don’t have to fly straight and level anymore? What, what the heck?

CAROLINE: You still have to do that. What I mean is: Calculating fuel, calculating wind… knowing where you are.

And, you still have to fly the plane.

WALTER: Oh….

CAROLINE: It’s a little bit like, you know, trying to read the dictionary while driving a car. It’s very, very difficult.

WALTER: Right, and I assume you don’t text and fly

CAROLINE: No, negative.

You know, in an open cockpit, you can’t bring anything out like that. Everything’s attached to me. You bring out your phone…

I mean, there are tiny times when I might snap a picture, but it’s very controlled, because if you drop something and it hits your propeller,because you’re open to the air, that’s a bad situation.

WALTER: So your partner doesn’t call you, and you’re like , “Yes, yes, I’ll pick up 2% milk once I land!

CAROLINE: No, you know, that’s one of the beauties of being in the air. I don’t have any idea about what’s going on.

In fact, I flew during the pandemic, and there was this odd sense that maybe I was the only one alive, because down on the ground, I could see there were no cars or anything. This was very early.

And so, yeah, you’re really without connection.

WALTER: Yeah, I can see how that would be one of the fringe benefits, I didn’t think about before.

You had flown paragliders and fixed-wing aircraft before flying the gyrocopter. Why did you settle on this kind of craft as your flying machine of choice?

CAROLINE: The gyrocopter, you know, only flew a gyrocopter because I could tell that the winds were getting worse and worse, and I had a long view on climate change back 20 years. Because when you’re in a tiny aircraft, you feel the wind change, and I could see it getting more ferocious, and it became pretty untenable to fly my hang glider with a little go-kart underneath because it’s so light, so I’d get tossed around. And then my friend Paul said: “Oh, I flew my gyrocopter over the Sierras.” Those are burly mountain winds.

He’s like, “Yeah, the gyrocopter handles turbulence really well.” So I decided to fly one.

WALTER: And I do encourage people to read the book, but just describe for us, you know, or those of us who don’t have a picture in our head of the gyrocopter: What does it look like? What color is yours?

CAROLINE: Mine is a little yellow two-seater. It looks like a praying mantis of sorts or a tiny helicopter with a go-kart underneath.  It’s got a rotor-blade and a small sort of go-kart hanging underneath it. That’s what it looks like, and it’s the most rudimentary description.

WALTER: Is that a technical description?

CAROLINE: *laughs* Praying mantis?

WALTER: Yes

CAROLINE: You’ll find that I don’t really use technical descriptions.

WALTER: Well, what is it about flying a gyrocopter that might differ from flying a fixed-wing aircraft, including any advantages and risks?

CAROLINE: Well, it is an experimental craft which isn’t as scary as it sounds. It used to be kind of scary, but now with  experimental (aircraft), a lot of the parts are manufactured by really reputable places. You just have to sort of kind of put it together.

The gyro is really safe because it doesn’t stall. It has a rotating rotor and a teeter, which means that — and the stall is one of the most dreaded things for pilots — it basically means your wings are no longer flying, and you fall out of the sky, and if you’re too close to the earth, you have no room to recover.

The gyrocopter does not stall. We do not hover, which means we aren’t like a helicopter where we can stay in one place. We will be dropping if we stop, but we will not fall out of the sky. We’ll still be essentially flying- very complicated, but, mom, if you’re listening, very safe.

WALTER: *laughs* Your mom is still with us then, I assume.

CAROLINE: Yes.

WALTER:  Which is wonderful. So is mine. You don’t seem to mind, Caroline, and perhaps you even relish the low-tech nature of the gyrocopter’s navigational tools compared to today’s fixed-wing aircraft, and certainly commercial aircraft. I sense in the book that you actually prefer to rely more on your own navigational skills and “flying” by the seat of your pants, in a way. Is that accurate?

CAROLINE: Yeah, and I think it’s just my brain. I don’t have an engineering mind. A lot of pilots really love the bells and whistles, and I respect that, and I wish, I wish, I had that kind of mind. I mean, I am a certified repair person, but I don’t love fixing things.

I just like to fly, and I want to fly like a bird.

It’s just too bad that I have to have an aircraft that needs fixing. I have a partner in it, Paul, who is fantastic at all that.

So, I have to say that it’s more than I want to be flying. So I want to keep my eyes outside the cockpit, and the more avionics we have, the more it feels like you’re just really being shuttled in a big metal thing across the sky, and you kind of forget that you’re actually flying. So I do love GPS because my own navigational skills are incredibly lacking. So the GPS technology has been amazing.

But otherwise, I wish that I didn’t have to use any, and I use as little as possible.

WALTER: You know, I was sort of on the edge of my seat when you described flying to Death Valley, and you either landed or were about to land and figure out you were in the wrong place.

CAROLINE: I know it’s so hard. How could you be in the wrong place when I had like two GPS maps open and a paper map at my feet, which obviously I couldn’t grab because the wind was flapping it.

I think I was. I was just so unmoored and so awestruck by Death Valley. Just that landscape.

First of all, it’s immense, and it feels like it wants to kill you because it kind of does. I mean, it’s indifferent to you.

But if I had any sort of issue, would anybody find me if I had no service? Yeah, so there’s a sense of overwhelm, and I thought that I was coming into a valley that was Death Valley, and I wanted to experience it. So I didn’t really pay attention to my GPS in the way I should have.

And as I was descending, I realized, “This isn’t Death Valley. This must be a valley before Death Valley.” And when I zoomed in and suddenly saw, “Okay, now I know where I am.”

But that moment of being lost is super humbling and very scary, and you have to kind of talk to yourself. You can’t be lost. It’s 2024, I can’t be lost.

And then, just the immensity of the range that I had started descending into, which was the Panamint range, was also just awe-inspiring.

WALTER: Yeah, I forgot. Did you actually land in the wrong place before you realized?

CAROLINE: No, I did not. But I was low, and I had to do circles from, you know, like a couple thousand feet all the way to 11,000.

WALTER: You had to do circles in order to cycle up and up and up, because you couldn’t go straight?

CAROLINE: Yeah.

WALTER: Okay…  

CAROLINE: Because I was in a valley.

WALTER: You know, I took one flying lesson in a Cessna. It was great, but the one problem was the instructor kept telling me to push down on the yoke to lower the nose once we reached altitude, and I had this fear that the plane was gonna fall, so I wouldn’t push down on the yoke. Is that a common feeling among newbies? And are there other counterintuitive things that you have to learn or fears you have to overcome as a pilot?

CAROLINE: Well, first of all, why only one lesson, Walter?

WALTER: Oh, that’s a long story.

CAROLINE: Well, I’m glad you got up in a plane and had that experience of piloting a plane. You know it’s counterintuitive to push the nose down. This is one of the biggest things that you have to learn as a new pilot. Like, pushing the nose down does not lose altitude; it increases speed. The power of the engine is what controls altitude, and of course, there’s some interplay.

But learning that was hard, and honestly, I think one of the biggest things for me is that, in an open cockpit, I’m really intuitively telling myself that the higher I go, the safer I am. Because, as earthbound, non-feathered creatures, our feet on the earth feel safer, so the closer to the ground you are, the safer it feels. Look, I can see my home, like, that’s home.

You get up high, like, it’s a higgly piggly, like I explained. And I think that sense of getting really high can induce fear, but in fact, you’re safer. So that’s counterintuitive. And you’re safer because you have more time to make decisions.

WALTER: How long does it take to learn those things that might go against your intuition from living on the ground? Like, how long does that take? Years? Months?

CAROLINE: Well, you know, there is an intuition.

I actually flew hang gliders with motors called “trikes,” and the controls are exactly the opposite of a gyrocopter. And so I went from a trike to a gyrocopter. I can tell you that it takes, I mean, it definitely takes weeks of concentrated effort, because I realized, you know, in my situation, if I input the wrong controls in the gyrocopter close to the ground, because my body thought I was flying a trike, I would crash. And I never touched a trike again after I started gyro lessons, because I didn’t want my brain to be confused.

WALTER: And you did. I don’t want to belabor this point, but you did crash once.

CAROLINE: Yes. Yes, I did. And sadly, one of the most humiliating episodes of my life, but, you know, a real learning experience.

I was not a detail-oriented person. I was ignoring a big issue with my trike, and I had the common afflictions of humans. I had optimism bias, this idea that, “Oh, I’ve flown this trike with its problem before. Nothing bad is going to happen,” because nothing bad had happened before. People don’t really crash that much.

So, I was afflicted with all those, and we call it “pilot error,” which I kind of love, because pilot error is the series of decisions you make that are wrong and eventually lead to that bigger issue.

And I had made a series of pilot error mistakes.

I mean, it was traumatic for me, I did have a crash, I lived, but I take full responsibility for that, because in flying, you know, it’s almost always your fault, whereas on the ground, I think we’re all like, no, you did it, you did it.

Nope, nope, wasn’t me, wasn’t me. But when you’re flying, it’s like, no, you really should have checked your plane better, or you really should have, you know, done that maintenance that you knew needed to be done.

WALTER: And if you want to know more about what exactly happened, get the book. I recommend it.

So Caroline, how wide-ranging have your travels in the gyrocopter been? And like, what’s the typical distance that you fly, and what long-range destinations have you visited? You told us about Death Valley, but have you gone anywhere else on a special jaunt?

CAROLINE: Yes. I love having a gyrocopter partner who wants to fly too.

So he usually flies the one leg out to wherever we’re going, and I fly back.

So the latest one we went on, I flew into Salt Lake City in a passenger plane, and then flew the gyrocopter back to California.

So that’s, you know, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, am I missing a state somewhere? Wyoming? And it was amazing to see our landscape.

I mean, we have the best wilderness in the world, in my opinion, and I’ve been  to a lot of places.

WALTER: I mean, as an East Coast person, I just find the West so exotic, and love to go to the mountains and deserts anytime I can.

So you, Caroline, like me, are a late baby boomer, born in the early 60s, and you’re engaged in an exhilarating but risky activity, though, admittedly, flying is statistically safer than driving. I rode motorcycles for 10 years and was lucky to never have a real accident. I’m wondering what your advice is to other boomers about balancing risk with the rewards of adventure.

CAROLINE: You know, my previous book looked into the science behind adventure for us as we age. It’s called Tough Broad. I wrote it for women, but it’s great for men too.

And what I really talk about there is that psychologically, we tend to really narrow our lives as we age because we think we’re less, we’re more physically fragile, we’re more mentally fragile, and this is exactly the wrong thing to do. So it’s really important to push your own comfort zones and learn new things as we age.

It’s important for our brains and our emotional health, both of which can get precarious as we age. There’s no question about that.

I’m not a Pollyanna about aging, but what I say to people is like, define your own adventure.

I went birdwatching, and it is an adventure because it’s physically vital, emotionally exhilarating, you’re on a quest, and there’s excitement.

So it’s physically vital.

And I was pushing my comfort zone. And that’s what you want. You want to trigger your exploratory nature and be physically vital. And that’s an adventure. So find whatever sparks that in you. It could be hiking or just walking in a park. Take full advantage.

So risk, I mean. People ask me a lot about risk. I mean, bravery is important because it opens our lives up. We don’t want to get hurt, but you know, honestly, we could get hurt just walking across the street.

So you just use your own risk assessment skills.

WALTER: Right.

CAROLINE: But, if you’re saying to yourself, “I’m too scared to do it,” you should look closer, because often fear is very reactive and there’s often nothing to fear.

WALTER: No, I love that answer. So if one of our listeners is similar to our age, you know they’re over 55, maybe they’re nearing retirement, and they’re like: “Hmm, this flying stuff is pretty cool. I’ve never been a pilot, but maybe I’ll try it.” What kind of physical and mental shape do you have to be in in order to do the kind of flying you do?

CAROLINE: So I fly under a ticket called “sport pilot,” which means that your health has to be comparable to driving a car. Okay, and so if you have a driver’s license — and obviously you have to assess your own health — but in terms of flying, I mean, I think flying sharpens you and makes you physically more vital.

So if you wouldn’t drive a car 80 down a freeway, then maybe you shouldn’t be flying, but a lot of people are way more capable of flying than you think.

WALTER: Gotcha. So, you are not only a pilot. You have such an impressive, eclectic background. You have been: A whitewater raft guide, you competed in the US Nationals for the sport of luge, mountain biked in China and Vietnam, and skied the back country of Denali and the Sierras. How does one person do all that?

CAROLINE: I mean, I just always wanted to be an adventurer. You know, I’ve got 62 years behind me, and I was a firefighter in San Francisco for many years.

So, it’s a schedule that allows you to go on expeditions. I did go on expeditions around the world, also in my sea kayak, paraglider, and stand-up paddleboard.

For me, getting outside is pharmaceutical, it’s just… It’s the biggest bomb for me. When I was young, I thought I was searching for adrenaline.

Now that I’m older, I realize what it offers me is this opportunity for awe, and awe is really good for us.

I go over the science of that in Tough Broad as well, but now, every time I fly my gyrocopter, I just let my brain and my heart be blown by the views, by the beauty of it.

WALTER: I did feel that sense of awe on the motorcycle, especially riding through Oregon and Arizona, for example. So I know exactly what you mean.

You were one of the first women to join the San Francisco Fire Department. You wrote the book fighting fire. Based on your experiences. That seems like a whole other kind of courage and commitment. What did you take away from that experience?

CAROLINE: What I learned is that when you lead in your life with bravery, your life opens up. If you lead with fear, it closes down, but bravery offers life lessons like risk assessment, confidence, and teamwork. As a firefighter, I became very clear how bravery was what I wanted as my guiding light. It’s not like I didn’t look at my fear and my. It’s not like I didn’t have it, though I probably had less of it, and I should have. I mean, I was young, we all are like that, but it’s.

It’s that bravery was my final arbiter.

WALTER: And of course, it was a tremendous public service. Right? You’re saving buildings, you’re saving people.

CAROLINE: I mean, that job made me such a better person. I was around people who were brave and smart. I got to walk into people’s houses at their most intimate moments.

They were either very sick, they were injured, their house was on fire, and I got to be part of that, and that was such an honor in a way that, yeah, I can only say that it just made me a better person and I saw the the varied ways that we all live and adapt to the crises in our lives.

WALTER: You chose to interweave the story of your flying with the story of your relationship with your ex-wife. I’m just curious: why did you make that choice, and what were the metaphors between flying and relationships that were apparent to you either before writing the book or that you discovered while writing the book?

CAROLINE: I wanted to write a book about flight because I had become obsessed with flying in a new way when my marriage was dissolving, and that’s no coincidence. I think we do that so we can be distracted from what’s happening down on the ground. We find other ways, and it was like I’d found a new love, actually.

But it also helped me get over my grief because it did offer me this perspective on things, where you go that high up and you see down and you look — and I have a chapter where I talk about looking down at the Central Valley in California, where so clearly all the forces of nature, like earthquakes and the Sun and the wind, have shaped it —and yet there it is, still earth. It kind of taught me that I can survive this, too.

I didn’t want to talk about my personal life, but it was (my personal life).

I couldn’t talk about flying without talking about my relationship descending, because it was true. That’s how I fell in love with flying, because of what it offered me during that difficult time.

WALTER: I found the way you handled it to be honest but concise. You didn’t go on and on about it.

CAROLINE: Well, yeah, I wanted it to be universal. And also, this is a book for non-pilots. It’s not a book for pilots. I’m no expert.

I mean, if a pilot loves it, I’m honored. But I want non-pilots to read it, and I think they can really — even if they never want to go fly a gyrocopter — I think it will change the way you feel when you get on a passenger plane.

But more than that, everybody understands the vagaries of the human heart, and I think that’s what will keep people glued to the flying part of the book, because they can start to see how it mirrors my emotions.

WALTER: Amen, and I think that added a nice other level to the book.

Finally, Caroline, what advice do you have for folks — maybe they’re retired and have more time on their hands — who want to write a memoir or a book about their unique life experiences?

CAROLINE: First of all, I think you should, because I mean, maybe you won’t get it published, but there are people out there who you might want to pass on this legacy that is your life, to like your kids, or, or you know, younger friends. The thing is, you just need to write. You need to start writing. It’s hard to be a storyteller. It’s harder than you think.

You need to read and you need to write and take classes, and take memoir classes, and they’re out there. And then, hang out with people who are writing, and you will find your creativity will start to spark, and you will enjoy that journey so much.

WALTER: And I think anyone who reads this book will be inspired not only to go on some adventures, but maybe to write their own recollections too. I would be honored and please, please, shoot me a note if that’s the case, because I love talking about writing to young writers — young as in new, not young as in age.

WALTER: Well, I was gonna say as we wrap up: happy trails, Caroline. But what do you say to a pilot?

CAROLINE: Yeah, I think you say blue skies…

WALTER: Blue skies?  

CAROLINE: But I find blue skies and cloudy skies…

WALTER: Blue skies like the Irving Berlin song, or was it Gershwin?

CAROLINE: I don’t know this song, I don’t know. I’m returning to my fellow birds, but I don’t know.

WALTER: Anyway, you can’t do everything, Caroline. You’re already a firefighter, a loser, a pilot. Thank you so much, and I really appreciate your taking the time to sit down with us.

CAROLINE: Thank you, Walter. What a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you.

WALTER: And you can find Caroline Paul’s new book. Why fly? At Carolinepaul.com or at fine booksellers everywhere.

Our website for this show is youearned this.org.

Lots of great bonus content there. Our engineer is Shahab Shokouhi , our story editor is Donna Lack, our editor is Steve Lack, and our producer is Melanie Reilly.

I’m Walter Gottlieb, reminding you: “You earned this!”