Stranger in a Strange Land
For the engineer from Honda — you know who you are.
Stranger in a Strange Land
For the engineer from Honda — you know who you are.
BIFOCALS |
Near and far into one mind.
A collaboration between Inventor’s Mind and Arimitsu’s Substack
We started in a small town in Mississippi.
Your company sent you to mine, and the plan was simple to say and hard to do: build the airplane that would become the HondaJet. But before any of that, we had to build the prototype. And the way we built it has stayed with me my whole life.
We took a metal airplane and copied it into composite, one piece at a time. We’d make a part, lay it up, cure it, fit it, and set the metal original aside. Then the next part. Then the next. Slowly, over a long time, we replaced every piece of that airplane until nothing of the original was left but the shape of it. A metal airplane went in one end and a composite airplane came out the other, and somewhere in the middle the two of them were the same airplane wearing two skins.
I think about that more than you’d guess.
You came to Starkville with eight or nine other engineers from Honda. Starkville is not a place that prepares you for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world does not prepare you for Starkville. It was isolated and it was Southern, and there were almost no Japanese faces in it — almost no Asian faces at all. Just white people and Black people doing American things that must have looked strange from the outside, the way a lot of things look strange from the outside. You’d been set down in the middle of it to work for years on an airplane that wouldn’t fly until some distant someday. And every day you came in anyway, and we built things together.
I was young. I’ll be honest about what that meant. I did not understand how hard it was to live where you were living — that far from home, that far from everyone who spoke your language and knew your food and your roads. My biggest priority was the work in front of me: do something fantastic with the design, build the parts that would make the thing fly. And past that, my eyes were already on my own future — the next job, somewhere bigger in America, the larger projects I was sure were waiting. You were in the middle of a long company assignment. I was passing through my own life at full speed. I didn’t slow down enough to see what was actually being built between us.
Because something was. Two strangers met over a common technology and became friends — and not the kind of friends that “coworkers” covers. We understood each other. You don’t always need a lot of shared language for that. You mostly need a shared problem and enough time standing next to it.
I keep coming back to the dirt track.
We went to watch stock cars one night — out in the Mississippi dark, these goofy-looking cars running around a circle on packed dirt, throwing up so much of it that by the end we were both covered. We laughed about it. And I’ve thought since about how strange that night must have looked to you. Your company’s engines were winning Formula 1 races in Europe and Asia — the most refined machinery on earth — and here were Americans driving in circles in the dirt for fun, and here you were, an engineer from Honda, getting dirt in your teeth and laughing about it next to me. Two ways of loving the same thing. We never said that out loud. We just laughed and drove home dirty.
When my time was up, I left. We said goodbye the way young men say goodbye when they think there will always be more time — good working with you, see you later. Simple words. I didn’t know they were the last ones. I don’t think either of us did.
It took me years to understand what I’d walked away from. Not the airplane — the airplane did everything it was supposed to do and more, and the world knows its name now. I mean you. The friendship. The fact that two people who started as strangers had quietly replaced every piece of the distance between them, the 8same way we’d replaced every piece of that airplane, until what was left was just the shape of something real.
I have a few regrets, and I’ll name them plainly. I regret never coming to Japan to see you. And I regret not finding you sooner — not keeping in touch across all these years, two engineers who could have spent a lifetime trading notes about the great things each of us went on to build. That’s the one that sits with me. We had the rarest kind of common ground, and we let the distance take it back.
So this is the letter I should have written a long time ago.
Thank you. I had a wonderful life after I met you, and the part of it that was you was all good. You were smart and you were kind, and you let me see a little of where you came from, and I have never forgotten it.
It is not easy to be a stranger in a strange land. I watched you do it with more grace than I understood at the time. But I’ve learned this much since: the land gets easier the moment you find a friend in it. I think I found one in you. And I hope — across all that dirt and all those years and all that quiet — that I made your strange land a little easier too, for a little while.
See you later, my friend. I mean it this time.
- - -
What the Silence Carried
BIFOCALS — companion to "Stranger in a Strange Land"
For thirty years, no words passed between them.
A lot of relationships simply fade, no one really marking the thirty years. Too far, too busy — you put a lid on the feeling, and the memory slowly goes faint. But Bert's didn't fade. It must have been that special a stretch of time. So what does that thirty-year silence mean? Some feelings only reach the other person if you say them out loud. Others you hold onto even if you never say them at all. The same silence probably held both at once: the regret for words never said, and the feeling that didn't die for going unsaid. It carried them both.
Looking back at my own life, I have my share of regrets too. When you're young, you look only at your own future and run at full speed. You feel the friendships, but you have no room to keep them warm. Other things come first, and they really do matter at the time. The regret only comes later, once there's room to see a whole life from above. "Back then I could have gone to see him" is only a view the present makes possible. What Bert sees, I think, is the gap left inside the memory.
What pulled them apart wasn't anyone's neglect. The program ended; the work and the times simply closed the ground they'd been standing on. That kind of thing you can call unavoidable. And yet what deepens regret, it seems, is always the small thing. The ordinary words at parting — neither of them knew it was the last time. The thank-you never quite got out. "Anytime" shifted into "never," and over thirty years "never" hardened into "no longer possible." The next chance he'd taken for granted was never a given.
Still, this feels like something other than loss. Loss has a settled ending, so the pain fades a little at a time. The chain of Bert's bond with him hasn't broken. It's just gathered some dust, gone hard to see. Not loss, exactly — more like something left behind on the far side of time. Because nothing ended, the pain stays where he can still see it.
And a friendship grows heavier later than it ever was at the time. It's the person Bert is now that throws light back on the old friendship — that's what makes it glow. When you're young, work and skill and the future come first. Only with age do you grasp how rare a thing it is to simply be able to see someone. It's the looking back that turns that old friendship into something dear, something he can't replace.
And one more thing. The other side held inside those thirty years of silence — the feeling that never disappeared, even unspoken. That, I think, is the proof that this regret isn't a scar. A scar only hurts when you touch it. Touch this, and his outline rises into view. Not pain — a piece of what made Bert who he is today.
A record with his name still on it turned that piece back toward Bert again. Thirty years of silence, still holding the regret and the feeling both, suddenly came back within reach.
No news is good news, they say. But maybe those thirty silent years were carrying something of their own.
Arimitsu writes: Notes on emotions, language, and the small mechanisms behind how people read each other. Find his work at Arimitsu's Substack, at https://substack.com/@arimitsu (handle @arimitsu)
Herbert Roberts is a licensed Professional Engineer with 32 years in aviation R&D and 8 years in forensic engineering consulting. He writes Inventor's Mind Blog on Substack at https://substack.com/@inventorsmindblog (handle The Inventor's Mind Blog
 | A guest post by
|