Personal recollections shared by Carlisle and Mary.
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For several months in the late 1950s or early 1960s, my piano teacher Faye Miles and her husband Guy Miles rented the large house at their ranch near Micanopy, Florida, to a U.S. Air Force pilot and his family. I learned about the pilot’s residency at the house and his experiences from my parents, who were told of these things by Guy and Faye. Guy and Faye lived in Gainesville where Guy was a professor of English literature at the University of Florida and Faye offered piano lessons. They lived in a mobile home on the backlot of the ranch while the pilot and his family occupied the house.
The pilot was flying a B-52 strategic bomber out of Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida, and he valued the quiet and beauty of the ranch because of the stress of his missions. When the pilot left the base and flew toward the Soviet Union, he and his crew conducted the flight as an active mission to strike targets in the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. Only when the bomber was over the Pacific Ocean near the border of the Soviet Union would the Air Force advise the pilot by radio that the flight was a training mission and that he could return to base. The ranch provided rest and quiet between these missions.
Guy himself had stressful missions for the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War 2. He participated in the Himalayan Hump Operation, in which the United States airlifted supplies over the Himalayas from India to China. Except for the pilot, who had a supply of oxygen, the participants on each mission would fall unconscious as the plane passed over the mountains because of the lack of oxygen at the high altitudes, regaining consciousness again only when the plane returned to lower altitudes.
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One of the great pleasures I found at the Miles ranch when I was in junior high school was the opportunity to ride a quarter horse that Guy and Faye had purchased. On an early ride, I was trotting along the eastern shore of the large pond behind the ranch house when the horse broke into a gallop. I pulled the reins but the horse continued to gain speed, reaching an astonishing pace and approaching a horizontal tree limb that would pass only a few feet over the saddle. The horse apparently hoped to sweep me off the saddle, but I grabbed the pommel and leaned as far as I could to the right, bending toward the right stirrup, and I passed under the limb. After I regained my balance in the saddle, I jerked the reins sharply and the horse came to a stop. I was furious, and I became fiercely strict with the horse for the remainder of the afternoon. It would be years before I learned two things that would help me understand the experience. One is that quarter horses are faster than thoroughbreds. My impression that the horse ran at a breathtaking speed was correct. The other is that riding any horse is a relationship. I should have spent more time developing mutual respect and trust with the horse, rather than treating him merely as a vehicle that could offer a pleasant ride.
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I had one of my most humbling experiences at the Miles ranch pond. Water hyacinths for years had increasingly clogged the pond. My friend Nik Eschbach and I thought we might help fight the infestation by pulling some of the hyacinths out of the pond with a tractor. I attached one end of a long cable near the bottom of a vertical bar on the back of the tractor, walked the other end into the pond and around a large clump of hyacinths and returned to attach this to the bar on the back of the tractor, again near the bottom. Each of us tried several times to drag the clump of hyacinths out of the pond, but each time the tractor stalled. The clump was too heavy. Thinking the clump might be stuck against the shoreline, I attached the two ends of the cable to the top of the vertical bar, so the angle of the tractor’s pull might lift the hyacinths over the shoreline. I started the tractor, put it in gear and promptly found myself on my back looking at the sky. With the cables attached at the top of the bar, the large back wheels of the tractor had rotated the front up until the tractor stalled, resting against the wheels’ fenders with the front pointed straight up. I rolled out of the seat and onto the ground, astonished at my stupidity.
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My family visited Guy and Faye at the ranch one summer day while I was in college. In the late afternoon several of us were standing in the lot behind the house, looking into a pasture where another quarter horse Guy had purchased was grazing. As we were watching the horse, the sun began to set. To the west, several dark cumulonimbus clouds had risen in towers, like pillars of a temple. Edges of the clouds carved shapes in rays of sunlight as they streamed past. Lightning could be seen in the clouds, turning them into flickering lanterns. The sunset filled the sky in every direction, and it contained many hues: red, yellow, purple and even green. The scene was so vivid that we stopped talking. Someone said simply, “That’s an impressive sky.” That particular sunset has remained in my memory as a vivid experience of the divine, specifically of God the Father in my religious tradition.
That evening we were sitting in the ranch kitchen after supper. One of the thunderheads was passing over the house, and rain lashed the windows. Faye turned from the kitchen counter and said, “Would anyone like some more pie?” Christ was present in Faye’s gentle and loving spirit.
That night I was lying in bed in the attic of my childhood home, and I could hear my parents speaking in the bedroom below. I could not make out what they were saying, but they spoke in happy and satisfied tones. I was warmed by their voices and by my memories of the day. For me, that warming was the presence of the Holy Spirit, responding to the beauties of nature and of people I knew well.
In later years I would often remember those few hours for my sense that they provided vivid encounters with God the Father, Christ and the Holy Spirit, all on a single Florida day.
It was a good day.
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