In the RCAF, according to my trade training I was an aerial photographer. Earlier, at basic training I once caught hell from my physical training corporal for having a pink tee shirt. This was a result of my washing a red shirt with my white tee shirt, but it was also an early entry in my three years of uniform shortcomings. I could write a book about them.

At trade training I was eighteen years old, and able to make calculations that would simply baffle me now. Not for the first time: I would be totally lost at the grade ten algebra I once whizzed through. But when I was eighteen I calibrated a camera the size of a washing machine inside the fuselage of a DC3 flying over Lake Simcoe and surrounding counties. I had to calculate the plane’s air-speed, its drift, its yaw, its altitude, and the usual settings of the camera, focus and so on, as well as the speed of the 5-inch film as it scrolled behind the open lens of the miraculous machine under my control. Or another assignment setting the shutter speed and f-stop for a series of five-by-eight stills. The plane flew east, then turned and flew west, just a tad north of its eastward flight. And so on.

This was the first step in making an aerial map. Back at Camp Borden I would spend a few hours developing the aerial photographs, then standing over a table while I tore and spliced the uneven edges of my wet photos, assembling my black and white map. The sadistic sergeant who assigned our areas had made sure that mine was largely made up of featureless Lake Simcoe. I was afraid of messing up, of course, but I was also in an addlepated way having fun.

I finished at the top of my class, so I got first pick of air stations, except for the married guy with a family. He took Comox on Vancouver Island. I could have taken one in the Maritimes and spent part of the winter in the Caribbean. But I was a going-on-nineteen dolt, and took the farthest west station available—Macdonald, Manitoba. I arrived there in a snowstorm and stayed for three winters, taking the bus seventeen miles to Portage la Prairie most weekends. The land was flat and usually white.

Macdonald was a NATO air gunnery training station, so we aerial photographers spent most of our time servicing T33 jets with 16-millimetre film in gun sight and wing cameras. It was more boring than photographing caribou herds in the Arctic or beaches in Jamaica, but safer. I mention safety because there were always some prangs on NATO training stations, “prang” being a cute service word for airplane crash. A prang provided some variation in a young photographer’s life, a respite from the collecting and developing of the little movies showing how well a young NATO pilot could shoot machine gun bullets through a large piece of canvas towed behind a plane in the sky over Lake Manitoba. Fatalities in RCAF planes were expected, built into schedules and plans. My friend Fred started his air force career as a student pilot. He told me that one of the first speeches he heard from an NCO informed a hundred young listeners that three of them would get their wings and three of them would be dead.

The prang I am going to refer to involved a French gunnery student who had panicked and released his canopy lock. When his instructor told him to relock the canopy so that his expulsion seat could operate, the young French pilot panicked even more and rode his T33 right into the Manitoba ground. The aerial photographs I made showed that the engine of his kite made a straight swatch through some young trees while the airframe veered to the right, creating something between a vee and a right angle.

I shot these pictures with the wrong camera, and here’s why. There was a big rush on cameras and cameramen that day. Some of the latter had jumped into a truck and headed for the crash site, about twenty miles northwest of the base. I don’t know where the others had gone, but some of them had taken all our aerial cameras. The photo section was bossed by a sergeant named Armitage, and he was among the missing, along with both our corporals. All at once I, a less-than-shiny leading aircraftsman (equivalent of a PFC), was the superior rank in this outfit. Ridiculous. I hadn’t even got around to sewing the propellers on my sleeves.

So when the call came to get over to the tarmac, I grabbed a Speed Graphic, a knapsack full of 4×5 film holders, and a knapsack of flashbulbs. You remember the Speed Graphic; it was that camera you saw 1940s newspaper guys aiming at boxers in the ring. You should know that the Speed Graphic was not known for its speed. For every shot, even if you weren’t using those big flash bulbs, you had to slide out and slide in the film sheet holder, focus the lens, and cock the shutter. Then you aimed and pressed the shutter and started again. But if you did everything right you got a nice sharp four-inch-by-five-inch negative with resolution to die for.

I didn’t give a lot of thought to dying for anything when I climbed into the Expeditor. In case you don’t remember, the Beechcraft Expeditor was an eight-seater with two propellers and two tailfins. This one would contain a single pilot and a single LAC photographer with a Speed Graphic. Usually when I got a ride in an Expeditor some guy would fit me with a parachute. Not this time. Instead, I got a headset, so the pilot and I could send instructions to each other. It was my job to take pictures of the prang site from above—an uncomplicated job if you have a proper aerial camera, even a K17. But with a press camera, I had to be inventive. I should have been scared out of my wits, but I was too busy.

Did I mention that I had instructed the ground crew to remove the door? Well, not exactly. With a DC3 you had to remove the whole door. With an Expeditor, you just took away the top half—sort of like Dutch doors. I was supposed to attach a cable to myself and the plane, but I was buys, and, you might say, winging it. I just hoped that when I stuck that camera out the door the wind wouldn’t take it out of my hands.

Get lower, I kept telling the pilot, and bank to the left, I mean portside. I was using a press camera, after all. I needed detail. I think we got it down to four hundred feet. The Expeditor was complaining. I saw guys on the ground waving us away. I loaded and reloaded film while my body was pressed hard against the half door. I remember wondering how well it was latched.

An hour later I was in the darkroom. Not once did I feel like puking. I was working. That night while I tried to get to sleep in the barracks I thought I would get serious and start saving the poems I wrote.

Originally published in White Wall Review 37 (2013)