Whoosh, there goes your serenity

Hey YOU, DOWN THERE IN THE FOREST WITH THE backpack. I can’t see you, but I can imagine your eyes turned to the skies, the veins bulging in your neck, the steam rising from your ears. After hours or days of hiking into the raw high country, you pause to rest on a rock, your own little John Muir moment. And then the sky fills with a sinister machine scream.

And you know: It’s those nimrods from Edwards Air Force Base again, playing games or shooing off Chinese warplanes or whatever they do. As veteran Southern California outdoorsman and author Paul Hellweg likes to say, there’s nothing like a military overflight to take the “wild” right out of the wilderness.

But enough about your pain. Let’s talk about my nausea. Because as you sit on the rock, I’m in a cockpit with one of those nimrods, trying to put down a revolt among my internal organs and pushing away thoughts of fiery death.

Strapped into an Air Force T-38, we flash across the dusty flats of the Antelope Valley, nip through valleys, bank and dive over the Sierra. I do not think much about hikers below, or national security, or the $3,800 an hour taxpayers spend to keep airborne the 12,000-pound hunk of hurtling metal around me. Instead, pinned to a bucket seat behind an affable 38-year-old pilot named Walter Jablow, I mostly blink and gulp.

The T-38 is by no means the Air Force’s shiniest toy. Some of these twin-engine, two-seater jets have been in service for more than 40 years and now mostly serve as training aircraft. But they can do plenty, like routinely breaking the sound barrier and executing rapid rollovers. If you misjudge a turn, it’s time for the rocket-powered ejection seats.

As for their handling: Next time you’re on the road doing 50 miles per hour, look at the car in the next lane. Now imagine your two vehicles, just as close, speeding 10 times as fast, a few thousand feet over a dry lake bed. Sideways. Look right and all you see is desert-floor wallpaper, a sandy maze of dirt roads and sagebrush stubble. To your left (which is to say: up) there’s the other guy and a big blue sky.

Of course, I’m a tough guy, generally untroubled by either acrophobia or claustrophobia. So my stomach handled all this just fine, except for brief lapses at the beginning, middle and end.

The beginning: Desert slides past like a yanked tablecloth. Climbing and veering, we hop the Tehachapis, lament the haze and dip to follow the Kern River. I gape at the boulder-studded canyon walls on either side -- we’re allowed as low as 500 feet here -- until a great blue blob spreads before us, then shrinks as, gulp, we nose up. Lake Isabella. Now on to the Sierra.

I signed on to get a geography lesson, and not the short course you get from a $69 hop from Burbank to Oakland. This is the California landscape seminar in which you dance across and between mountains, lakes, deserts and canyons at a rate approaching the speed of sound. Gravity dwindles, then triples, wholly untethered from the center of the earth. And the only way to get this lesson is by being a reporter and making nice with the Air Force, which is looking to promote the open house and air show at Edwards Air Force Base this weekend (Saturday and Sunday; more info at www.edwards.af.mil/oh2003).

Checking me out before takeoff, an Air Force doctor said, “You’re gonna feel some different forces on your body.” These forces tend to push blood from your head toward your feet, which can dim or narrow your vision unless, like a human toothpaste tube, you flex lower-body muscles to force the blood back up. But while you’re forcing the blood up, of course, you’re trying to hold other things down.

The middle: Now we buzz past the lookout tower at the end of the Kern River Valley (word is that the lady there actually likes it), then climb and bank and slip over Mt. Whitney. We have to stay 3,000 feet above ground here, but even so, the clear air and uncluttered landscape mean we can clearly make out the jagged and bleached rocks, the steadily climbing white line of the trail, the deep blue high-country ponds, even the humble hut at the peak, not quite 15,000 feet above sea level.

If you were 24 hours from strapping into a T-38, wouldn’t you Google T, 38, and fatality? You would, wouldn’t you?

The first hit was an account of a logging truck rollover in 1998. (Bad news for the truck driver but reassuring for me.) A page from the Connecticut state budget. Then there was this from March 19: Air Force authorities at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas report the death of one reserve instructor pilot. Cause: crash landing in a T-38. Some games these guys play.

The end: With Whitney shrinking behind us and Owens Lake flashing past below, we see the Panamint Mountains now, and Death Valley. Here, as at Whitney, we have to stay 3,000 feet above ground, but there are no clouds, so we see the many-hued hills, then the salt flats. And right about there, near Furnace Creek, is Badwater, nearly 300 feet below sea level. Just like that, we’ve skittered over and around the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States.

The whole thing takes less time than a Santa Clarita-Los Angeles commute -- about an hour -- and leaves me wanting to camp in the desert, raft the Kern and climb Whitney. Winding up, we drift down a few miles from where the space shuttles usually land, in the dry bed of Rogers Lake. The desert floor eases up, our wheels ease down. The mountains grow tall, the desert widens. We are again low, slow and earthbound like the rest of you hikers and other mere mortals, but one of us is queasier. Muir’s Revenge.