I promise: I really do work. I actually do work a fair bit. Keeping the farm running. Heading up that open source software project. A bunch of other little things, too.

But those things aren’t really the sort of things you write home, or blog about. “Today I fixed the mower.” “Today I sorted a bunch of feature requests, and cleaned up some documentation.” So the things I tend to write about are the non-work things, when I’m out, playing.

I went out playing again yesterday.

There are all sorts of different levels of pilot communities. At one end are the casual I recognize the guy from the hangar across the way, or familiar faces sitting around the big-airport flight school communities. At the other end are the folks who carve out an airstrip between their houses, get up every morning to fly loose formation with each other on their way to coffee, and throw a big annual fly-in camp out barbecue bash for all their friends.

Curtis Field, south and west of Chehalis, WA has that corner of the spectrum pegged.

I’d heard of Curtis (0WA2 for you pilotfolk) before, but it had always been a vague reference to something happening some time in the future. A few days ago, though, a friend from two hangars down sent me email telling me that it was coming up this weekend. That he might be going, and that he felt certain that I’d be welcome, too.

Our annual two weeks of cold and wet Juneuary was forecast to linger until Saturday morning, but the skies looked clear for afternoon, so I hauled out the camping gear and consulted my charts.

Curtis is not a trivial field to fly into. At 2100′, it’s not particularly short, and the grass is well-maintained, but there’s a big imposing hill climbing out past the north end of the field, and big tall trees (albeit with well-positioned notches) to the south. So you need to watch the wind and mind the store on your way in.

If you take off to the north, you take off uphill, into that.

Oh, and there’s an almost invisible little jump in the runway just about where it looks like you should touch down that – if you land before it, will launch you an embarrassing six feet back into the air for a series of inauspicious bounce bounce bounces as you roll past the flight line of knowing onlookers. “Hey,” said Nate, “We’ve got to have some way to tell who’s a first timer.”

But once I was firmly down and parked, I was welcomed in like a new-found cousin at his first family reunion. I was told that there might still be some hamburgers left over from lunch, and if not, there were brownies and more than a couple of pies that needed prompt attention.

All afternoon, friends and strangers landed, took off, loaded up other friends for a lap or two around the neighborhood, settled in the hangar or shade tents to eyeball landings and admire fly-bys, or wander plane to plane asking about the Helio’s slats, or whether what’s his name figured out a solution to that carburetor problem he’d been wrestling with. And stories – pilots are incurable storytellers, you know, and these folks were no exceptions. And for me, a whole new community of stories to hear! (Okay, and a couple to tell.)

Sooner than I thought, it was 6:00 and dinner was called out: hot dogs, oysters, half a dozen different potluck salads, and more pie and brownies.

More conversation, more take-offs and landings and flybys as the sun nudged the horizon and the golden hour set in. Then there was word that the fire pits – massive iron cast things salvaged from old mining equipment – had been fired up, and we all shuffled over and continued the conversation.

It was a much more age and gender diverse community than I usually associate with aviation these days. Rather than just being a few knots of old gray men, both genders were fairly equally present, and it was clear that the women weren’t just “wives along for the ride.” At one point I sat eavesdropping on a passel of “boys and girls” who couldn’t have been past their second decade, sitting on the grass, trading horror stories about their commercial and flight instructor checkrides.

Eventually, bed time. I’d had the rare self-control to set my tent up before dark, but those who hadn’t made their excuses, and soon headlamps were bobbing out into the darkness, quietly cursing wayward poles and uncooperative rain flys.

Morning at any fly in always begins with someone flying “dawn patrol,” taking off with the prop flat, at full throttle to generate the most possible noise to wake everyone up. But not here. Someone did depart around 7:00, but by luck of their choice of aircraft or dint of departure technique, I wasn’t even sure it was a plane I was hearing until I saw him turn out to the west.

Bit by bit people emerged from their tents and gathered around the coffee, or migrated over to where a circle of locals was expanding to accommodate us strangers as they swapped flying stories. By 8:30, everyone was back into the fly in groove taking off, landing, leaning back in the shade grading/wincing at others’ landings, and talking airplanes.

I had to get back to some farm work (see!) so made a circle around the hangar, said my goodbyes and thanks, then saddled up and headed north. They made me promise I’d be back next year.