A Soaring Vision

“The typical expression at the opening of a friendship is like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
—C.S. Lewis

I love listening, imagining, writing, and I know a lot of that came from my grandfather, the family storyteller. 

Yet as I’ve grown older I realize how much our friends shaped what we become, and that a lot of my inspiration and courage to be a little different came from my best friend, Rob Huntington.

Rob and I met in the third grade. I was new in school, and shy—scared, really. He was confident, gregarious, and funny. And even then welcoming, like no one I’ve known since. As a kid, and throughout his life, Rob was this remarkable combination of hilarity and kindness. 

I don’t remember our first encounter, but I’ll bet it was over something we both laughed at. Probably something no one else was laughing at, that might have gotten us into trouble with Mrs, Rowe, our teacher. 

.But I remember that feeling: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”

Suddenly what had made me weird and turned inward felt acceptable, at least to one other person, and a new world opened up to me. Not just all the adventures we had riding bikes and would have later driving cars all over the streets of Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona, but that inner world of the imagination, too. We would exchange drawings of fantastical creatures, battles, and sometimes jokes and our own lines for songs when we were supposed to be paying attention in class those third grade, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade years. One of those exchanges, not long after we discovered the marsupials and monotremes in the “Animals” section of the “A” World Book Encyclopedia, included a sort of newspaper, which we called the Platypus Review. I did the stories, Rob drew the art. I wish I’d saved even just a year’s worth of that call and response of craziness and imagination.

We stayed close through high school, cheered each other’s romantic first loves, and were there for those first hard break-ups. We started to drift apart in college when I left Arizona for the Midwest, but when I came back to be best man in his wedding, we picked up where we left off. We could always do that. 

But the world wasn’t as kind to a guy with Rob’s open-heartedness as it should have been. We both struggled, lost track of each other for years, finally re-discovering our friendship the last year and a half of his life. 

That’s when I found out that Rob had become an excellent photographer since I’d last hung out with him. And almost every photograph he sent me has something to do with flying. 

Rob had been obsessed with flying since I’d known him. What music means to me, flying meant to Rob. He flew Cox model airplanes and convinced me to try (I crashed mine). He and his dad built a biplane in their garage when he was in high school, and they flew it across the country. He learned to fly himself, could tell the incoming weather in the patterns of the clouds, went on to build planes professionally and eventually founded his own experimental aircraft company, XPro Aviation.

The world looks different from the cockpit of one of those planes (they’re fast, too), and Rob had this belief in unlimited horizons that translates into his photography. He had a hopeful and gracious way of seeing the world, and I sense him there in the outstretched wing of a cooper’s hawk, the skyward angle of a rebuilt P-51 Mustang, or the kaleidoscope of monarch butterflies migrating home.

Before he died on July 3, 2021, we talked about doing something together that might combine writing and photography, but talk was as far as we got. Still, you can see Rob’s work here and on the front page of this New Platypus Review—I couldn’t imagine starting it without him—and in his gallery under the “Look” pages.