While climbing up on Isthmus Peak I met Ben from Hawea. He was one of those guys which I have so far only met in the former German Democratic Republik and in Finland. He is an engineer, working for some aircraft company and told me, he had bought a little house in Hawea, which had a little man’s shed (what a lovely expression!) next to it and some ground, which was important, because he has inherited his father’s dream (and the plans to realise it): he is building his own helicopter for his father. The plans apparently have been bought, when he was a child, but now he has devoted his spare time to make his daddy happy, who is a professional pilot but won’t be working much longer. I really loved that story and the way he told it. So far I have only a couple of times had similar encounters. One was in Finland, where the boys bought parts of VW cars and tried to reassemble them even before they were old enough to actually drive a car. But the dream was to own their own VW. The other guys were from the Erzgebirge, a very remote part in the former GDR, where nearly everyone dreamt of building their own airplane in their garage. Which in their case was probably a way to express their dreams of being free…
Beim Aufstieg zu Isthmus Peak habe ich Ben getroffen. Er gehoert in eine Reihe von Jungs oder jungen Maennern, die ich bislang nur in Nordfinnland oder in der ehemaligen DDR getroffen habe: Maenner mit einem Traum. Ben arbeitet fuer eine Firma, die Flugzeuge wartet und baut, und ist daher meist in Australien. In seinen Heimat-Aufenthalten ist er meist in seinem Haeuschen, das er gekauft hat, weil es einen Maenner-Schuppen hat (was ich ja fuer einen total genialen Ausdruck halte!). Den braucht er, um seinen und den Traum seines Vaters in die Realitaet umzusetzen: einen eigenen Helikopter zu bauen. Anscheinend hat der Vater die Plaene schon gekauft, da war Ben noch ein Kind. Und nun basteln sie gemeinsam an dem Geraet, weil der Vater nicht mehr lange professionell fliegen darf. Aehnliche Geschichten habe ich nur in Finnland erlebt, wo die Jungs, noch ehe sie einen Fuehrerschein hatten, sich Teile von VW Golf (was ist denn da der korrekte Plural???) besorgt haben, um am Ende hoffentlich ein ganzes Auto zu haben. Golf war damals das Must-Have in Finnland. Oder die jungen Maenner in der DDR, die in ihren Garagen Flugzeuge bauten, vermutlich, um ihren Drang nach mehr Freiheit auszuleben…. Ich war begeistert.
