A Bad Case of Dry Mouth
Ever caught a case of the Dry Mouth? At least that’s what my Dad called it. You know, a case of the Dry Mouth, better known as ‘abject fear’, those times when you’re scared witless to the point of non-salivating, bug-eyed, stark terror. Anyone that has flown any length of time has had a bout of Dry Mouth, or several bouts like a case of recurring malaria. And therein the problem with Dry Mouth – No matter how many times you get it you never adequately prepare for its coming on. No nose or mouth swabs will do. No quick fix pills or shark cartilage can prevent it. It either hits you like lightning or creeps up on you like the foul stench of Limburger cheese. The lightning type goes something like this: The prop stops dead in its arc inciting an immediate constriction of the larynx, dilation of the pupils, and an instantaneous feeling that your mouth is as dry as the Gobi Desert in mid-August. Your brain leaps into a continuous loop revolving around a natural, yet absurdly asinine question. “Why did it do that?” Although it seems forever as your internal synapses melt down in what could only be described as “sensory overload”, it really only constitutes a few milliseconds. A wisp of a second before reality hits you like a surprise tax audit. Then you brain bypasses the pile-up of confusion, shifts into overdrive and either takes the off ramp to ‘Actionville’, or stops dead in its tracks - “Welcome to Resignation City”. Let’s face it; Actionville is a better place than Resignation City. At least there’s always something to do and see there. Now sometimes you feel a case of dry mouth is lurking just ahead. Like the time I felt so faint a rumble in my left heel resting on the cockpit floor of my old Taylorcraft, that it should have gone unnoticed like a babies sigh in a crammed nursery. However, packed away in my temporal cortex was historical data indicating that my old Eisemann magnetos were beginning to show their age and instead of ignoring the mile marker ahead, I decided to let the altimeter creep up a couple of hundred feet. Just as a pad against a tangible feeling that my old tractor magnetos were about to retire. They did. Fortunately I was a mile from the airport at 2500 feet when the prop stopped. The cockpit became awfully quiet, as my wife’s eye grew big as saucers. The dry mouth wasn’t as bad as if it had happened at 500 feet, and without warning. C.G. Taylor built an efficient wing since I had plenty of inertia left over to make a straight-in three-point kisser and turn off the runway; so impressing the airport bums, they thought I was showing off airshow style with a dead stick landing. In such a case you can quickly recover from that old dry mouth and even climb out of the cockpit looking like Roscoe Turner after blitzing the field at the Cleveland Air Races. “Ah Shucks, tweren’t nuthin’, you know…just one of those things.” Not like a severe case of dry mouth like when you have an aileron hinge break loose. Yeah, let me tell you when you see that old aileron start flapping around out on the end of the wing like a beached carp, you not only get the dry mouth but it proves to be the next best diuretic to castor oil. Once safely on the ground – by the grace of God and a braided steel cable with bolt – you soon realize that it is dang near impossible to leave the comfort of that warm stinky seat since not only is your mouth as dry as talcum powder on a Indian elephant’s rump, but your legs have the consistency of over boiled linguini. If you have any spit left after all of the fun is over, all the controller will ever hear is a muffled and weak rasp that may sound like a request for slow taxi to the ramp. You sound like Truman Capote on a 4 pack a day habit. But that’s the way it is with dry mouth. It either hits you slow or hits you hard and fast. Of course, there’s the joker that claims they never had a run in with dry mouth. And to that I say; that pilot has less time in an airplane than I’ve been on fire; he is a purveyor of unexpurgated bovine ramp droppings, or the man is not a man at all, but Gabriel the Archangel come to give me my final checkride.
By Steve Bill Hanshew