Big things from little Jake Garn

It's the middle of a weekday and Jake Garn is racing down the runway, about to do what he loves most in the world: Fly. He's never happier than when he's sitting in the cockpit of his own silvery 1948 Navion, a plane he has spent entire days polishing and admiring.

"Where do you want to go?" he asks as the plane lifts off the ground. That's the way most of his flights are. He has no clue where he's going. When the urge strikes or he has an open morning, he climbs into his BMW convertible sports car at his home in the foothills above Salt Lake City, and 15 minutes later he's at his hangar. "Where are you going?" friends ask him. "I don't know — I'm not up there yet," he tells them.

His longtime assistant, Alvina Wall, always tries to leave him a morning or two to fly when she makes up his weekly schedule. "As long as I'm in the air I'm happy," he says. "I'm really an irritable person if I haven't been flying. It's expensive, but it's cheaper than a psychiatrist and more effective."

He flies north over Bountiful, banks left and heads for the Great Salt Lake. For the next 90 minutes, he flies wherever the urge takes him, free as the seagulls below him. He explores islands. He playfully banks his wings back and forth over the lake, looking out the side of the plane at the water below.

Some mornings, the old Navy pilot will buzz mountain ridges and pretend he is strafing the enemy. "I'd do that today, but you wouldn't enjoy it," he says to a passenger. "Too bumpy." He likes to fly low over remote areas or fly up Weber Canyon to check his cabin. Sometimes he just explores the clouds, or shoots touch-and-goes, or flies to Richfield for a malt at the Ideal Diary or to Jackson Hole for lunch.

Mostly he just flies and thinks and takes in the scenery of his home state. He has a childlike love of flying and airplanes. There are times when his wife, Kathleen, will say, "OK, let's go down to the hangar; you can fondle your airplane and I'll watch TV." Usually he flies alone — the engine noise puts Kathleen asleep, so what's the point?

"How did little Jake Garn from Richfield, Utah, get to do all these great things?" he says, looking at the landscape below. He says this frequently. Here's the other thing he often says: "I still don't know what I'm going to do when I grow up."

Which begs the question: What's left to do for a 71-year-old former U.S. senator, Salt Lake mayor, Navy pilot, brigadier general, astronaut, water commissioner, businessman?