Cinnamon Clouds

Once when I was on one of the islands of the Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I dreamed I was flying through the sky populated by cinnamon-colored clouds kind of in the shape of un-sliced bread loaves.

I told Bill, a friend of mine who was a P-3 naval aviator, what I had seen in the dream, and he said that in all the hours he had ever flown over the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic  -- or even in the Southern Hemisphere, he had never seen clouds like I was trying to describe.

Bill headed back to his home base several days before many of us who were involved in operations out of Midway were able to, and I didn't think I would see him again for a while.  But then there was the chaos created by the necessity of getting about three hundred people off the islands of the atoll and back to Oahu where each person could catch a flight back to his or her home airport.  We were flown from Naval Air Station Midway to Oahu on many different varieties of military aircraft.

Hickam Air Force Base and Honolulu Airport share a runway system, but the buildings for each organization are as far away as they could possibly be from each other on the large airfield.  So to help out, volunteers from some of the units we had worked with, who had already made it back to Hickam or to Barbers Point Naval Air Station, ferried people by car from the military side of the airfield to the passenger terminal at Honolulu Airport.

After arriving at the airport terminal, several friends of mine and I were walking down a long brightly sunlit  hallway during the bag drag phase of our journey to check into our flights.

I was struggling with my suitcases, my purse and my carry-ons in a very un-military way.  One of the first things I remember being taught at Air Force Officer Training School is that an officer should never be "encumbered".  It was explained to us that we always needed to have our right arms free to be able to salute a fellow military member, and that we needed both hands free to help anyone who needed help.

I involuntarily laughed out loud when I first heard this having just come from my life as a young mother where I always had at least a purse, over my shoulder, a child in my arms or in a back pack, another child by the hand or in a stroller and most likely shopping bags and/or diaper bags.

Anyway, I was not in the least unencumbered at that moment trying to get to the check-in desk.

One friend used to say that when you go somewhere remote, it doesn't matter how difficult it might be to bring everything you need.  You really only have to deal with it on the way there and on the way back.  If you left something at home that you needed you would be out of luck for a long time, or maybe for the total amount of time you spent in the remote location.

In order to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere with limited supplies for an indeterminate amount of time takes a lot of planning and some coping and survival skills that begin with your attitudes.  (And I had long since taken my Girl Scout training to "Be Prepared" to heart.)

So, again, there we were, walking down the long corridor when all of a sudden from the corner of an intersecting hallway, there was my P-3 naval aviator friend, Bill, coming straight towards us with a big grin on his face!

It was mid-January, but the weather on Hawaii was warm and beautiful.  I laughed when I first recognized Bill.  He was wearing a green plaid wool shirt/jacket, and I understood why the minute I saw him.

When we first met, we had found an easy friendship and we told each other long stories about our lives.  Perhaps it was kind of like when you talk about personal things to a stranger seated next to you on a long flight.  (Or maybe you don't do that, but I often do.)  I think it has something to do with and assumption that I will never see the person again.  Somehow I rely on a special intimacy encouraged by the sound and vibrations of the jet engines and the cocoon-like atmosphere of the close space in which I find myself during my travels.

At the time I met Bill, I had told very few people about the near-death experience I had had when I hemorrhaged and almost died right after my daughter was born.

Nevertheless, over the days we spent waiting for the activity we were on Midway to monitor, Bill and I walked down many pathways all over the island and spent time wandering on the beaches.  In the course of that period as we got to know one another, I told Bill everything I could remember about that traumatic but very life-changing encounter with my sub-conscious or the Divine, or whatever it was.

One of the visions I had in the near-death experience was that there was a tall man who had his arm around me as we gazed at a beautiful view of a river flowing alongside some craggy, steep mountains.  The man was tall enough so that when his right arm was draped over my shoulders, I was tucked under the warmth of his limb as he looked down into my up-turned face and we talked together.

As I remembered this scene, I felt enshrouded by a deep sense of peace and joy.

For some reason when I told Bill about this, he asked what the man was wearing.

"It was either a green or a red wool lumberjack shirt," I answered slowly, my mind drifting back to the retrieved image of what I could recall from that part of the near-death experience.

Bill came quickly towards us, and as he grabbed several bags I was carrying, he joked with my compatriots about how he didn't have anything better to do than help to make sure we got on our way back home without any delays.  When I yielded my burdens to him, he looked down at me and winked.  I laughed in return and looked mockingly surprised while giving a quick tug on his lumberjack shirt sleeve with a question in my eyes.

I didn't think that by wearing the green wool plaid lumberjack shirt, that he was trying to tell me that he thought he was the man in the near-death experience.

I was sure he was communicating that he believed in my vision, and that he knew what it had meant to me.  Bill was happy to remind me of the hopes bound up in the vision.  He wanted to encourage me to keep believing that I would one day have the kind of security and joy foreshadowed by the impressions I had trustingly relayed to him.

And maybe he was hinting that if he could be that man, it would be OK with him.  Or maybe not.  We talked about it several months later, but I am not sure I was ever able to fully communicate to him how much his gesture meant to me.

As Bill, my friends and I continued to scurry toward the check-in counter, he leaned down  to me and whispered, "I saw the cinnamon clouds, Kath!  We were flying from Diego Garcia to Barbers the other day, and about an hour before sunset we flew into a weather system with kind of chunky cumulo-nimbus spread out like white rounded bricks on a wall with thick blue mortar between them.  As we continued to head east while the sun began to set behind us, the clouds turned pink, then red, then they became just that cinnamon color you were telling me about.  And the mortar between then turned from blue to dark grey."

Bill was the first person ever to say, "Be gentle on your self," to me.  It's been many years since we have been in touch, but every time I am near military folks and one of them says he worked on P-3s in the Navy, I always ask if he or she knows Bill and six or seven other dear friends I only knew in that pressure cooker of the operations in the Broad Ocean Area of the Pacific, flying out of NAS Midway.

Only one former naval aviator I met in the years since my time on active duty had ever heard of Bill, though.  Strangely enough, he was the chair layperson on the Missionary Approval Committee of the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church. It's always interesting when my life in the Air Force and my life in ministry intersect somehow.  For me it goes beyond what is commonly said under those circumstances,

"It's a small world!"

Like so many other things that happen to me that maybe I shouldn't take personally, those encounters seem to me much more like serendipity.  By that I always mean that it was somehow divinely planned and executed for whatever reason God may have.  Another way to name it might be "God-incidence," rather than "coincidence," as I have mentioned earlier.

Well  . . .  I offer all this up to you without any further explanation, or justification.

Just memories and ruminations that come out of that time between sleeping and waking, especially when I am in a spiritual/emotional state like the one I have been living in lately because of grief and stress.

Thanks for being willing to entertain these musings, however strange they may sometimes seem.

Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?

Well, did you?


Kathleen Ware Harris  © 2013
kwharris777@gmail.com