[Flightgear-devel] OT: Saturday night movie review

[Curtis L. O. <cur...@fl...>]

I suspect that most of you probably don't care too much about my life 
story, but it's Saturday night, things are slow, I just got back from 
seeing "End of the Spear", so it's movie review and story time. 

If anyone wants to know where my love of aviation comes from go see this 
movie.  I've never flown in a cub myself, but as a kid I've flown to 
similar remote regions of the amazon jungle in a Helio Super Courier 
both wheeled and floated, and once even in a WWII vintage Catalina.  
Even though I've lived in the USA for many years now, I still have some 
jungle blood pumping through my veins.  If you want to see some great 
Piper Super Cub footage, and some pretty intense bush flying, it's there 
in the movie.   These guys were doing this back in the 50's with no gps, 
probably few or no navaids, and flying over hundreds of miles of raw 
jungle where if you went down, you literally would never be found.   The 
movie is about missionaries and does have some religious undertones, but 
it doesn't get in your face about it.  They don't stop the movie in the 
middle and pass around an offering plate or anything like that. :-)  It 
tries to be an inspirational story about halting endless cycles of 
violence and finding ways for peace to emerge -- something this world 
could use just a bit more of if you ask me.  The movie is a true story, 
and from what I know and what I've heard, and based on what I've seen in 
my own life, it does a pretty good job of being right on.

The movie takes place in Ecuador.  I was born in Peru, one country south 
of there, but the trees, the animals, the rivers, the clouds, the 
weather, the terrain, the houses, the people ... are all very similar 
between Ecuador and Peru, and the movie does an excellent job of 
capturing an authentic view of all of these things.  In 1999 I was able 
to travel back to Peru for a 2 week visit with my wife and brother and 
parents.  As part of that, my wife and I were able to take a small float 
plane (another helio courier) way up to the Alta-Maranon in Northern 
Peru and spend the night in a community that was at least as remote as 
the one in the movie.  On that same trip we got to visit the small 
village where my crazy parents were living when I celebrated my first 
birthday.  We got to run up and down the maranon river in a speed 
boat--the same river my dad used to run up and down back in the day.  I 
remember once when I was about 5 we were heading up some pretty 
significant rapids in his boat and had a prop strike halfway up and 
broke the shear pin (which is what attaches the prop to the drive 
shaft.)  That was the day I learned my dad could change a shear pin 
faster than a nascar pit crew can change a tire ... well once he dug the 
replacement out of the jar holding all his spare nuts and bolts...

Picture time:

Here's a shot out of the front window of a Helio.  The pilot was 
attempting to sneak us under the cloud layer and over the oncoming ridge 
...  however as you can see if you look closely, there are places where 
the clouds extend below the ridge.  We snuck through ok, whew!  That 
wasn't the only tight spot we got ourselves in on that trip...

http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/tmp/ridge.jpg

Here's a picture of me when I was a geeky kid, probably about 12 years 
old.  It shows some uncanny parallels to the movie.   Come to think of 
it, I even had a pet bird similar to the one in the movie:

http://www.flightgear.org/~curt/tmp/plane-curt.jpg

So there you go. I'm a pretty odd mix of different cultures and 
background, not really feeling 100% at home anywhere.  I'm a white guy 
who looks very out of place in the jungle, but a jungle boy who feels 
very out of place in frozen Minnesota ... fondly remembering the days of 
my youth when I couldn't have told you the last time I put on a pair of 
shoes.

Curt.

-- 
Curtis Olson        http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project  http://www.flightgear.org
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