THE FIRST THING I SAW WAS A PLANE FISHING

How can I remember the first thing I saw? Perhaps my mind reinvents its memories. Perhaps my memory selects what left its mark the most. But my first memory is when I was three years old. In 1976, my father took me to Popayán on vacation, for this was his hometown and the land he loved. My aunt, his sister, lived in a neighborhood called “El Recuerdo.” And there appears the first image of the world. The first thing I remember looking at. Looking and perhaps loving. At the corner of my aunt’s block was the head of the runway at the city’s airport. Once a day, an orange plane would arrive. It would load and take off again.

I remember the vacation routine. Walking with my father and watching this orange monster land, defying the laws of the world, gently landing on the runway in my aunt’s yard. Every day we saw it arrive, and for me, it was a feeling of wonder. A connection with my father and the origin of the most intimate desire I can remember in my life: to fly.

But the wonder that giant tin can monster stirred in me by defying the laws of the world would be the seed that would drive that child to become a pilot. Soaring through the sky would be the outline of my life and what I loved most. But that orange Aero Pesca plane that visited my playground every morning would also make me understand the reality of its flight status.

It’s not clear how, whether a newspaper or perhaps the image on a black-and-white newscast on a television, an image came to me that challenged my understanding and raised questions about the reality of what was happening, going beyond a child’s imagination.

The orange plane was sailing down a river. It looked like a boat. It wasn’t flying. To me, it was fishing. That’s what the orange monster did every time he went on his trips. The plane collected the fish like the pelican painted on the airport docks. The plane traveled along the rivers, and I watched it fish.