Gaining control, courage

As 10-year-old Grant Mason concentrated on pulling the stick back, the plane’s engine roared into the gray November sky. Though he could just barely see over the dash, Grant pulled the Cessna off the runway. It was only his second time in a plane.

Grant is not a pilot. But for a moment he felt like one, with all of a pilot’s responsibilities.

“It was cool,” Grant said. “I didn’t expect to go that high. I didn’t expect to be that nervous.”

The flight was part of the aviation therapy program called SOARING that caters to troubled youth. The flight served as Grant’s graduation after six months of counseling sessions aimed at helping him get control of his anger and make better decisions.

“It’s an aviation affirmation and an aviation metaphor to address issues in life and making choices,” said Joe McCarron, a licensed family therapist, pilot and SOARING’s founder.

SOARING stands for Special Opportunities Affirm Recognition in Noteworthy Goals. McCarron founded the program 10 years ago as a way of reaching his clients. McCarron, who also founded the Idaho Drug Free Youth program in 1990, has a private practice in Coeur d’Alene, where most of his clients are kids who have trouble at home, often arising out of custody battles. Many of the kids have been through therapy before and are wary of traditional counseling approaches, something that makes connecting with them a challenge.

“How can I get their attention without sounding fake?” McCarron said. “It’s a chess game. A lot of those kids are treatment smart.”

So, he began drawing on his personal life, talking about being a private pilot and a Vietnam veteran with the Air Force. The walls of his office are covered in pictures of planes from jets to ultralights. McCarron said the kids start looking around and eventually they ask him about flying.

McCarron leverages that interest, using it to teach vital life skills. He brings in a model airplane and explains how it works. He tells the kids that pilots have to do many things to ensure their flights are safe: from inspecting the plane on the ground, to filing flight plans, to safety checklists.

“I have them memorize the checklist,” McCarron said. “You don’t go flying with SOARING without showing me (an equivalent) checklist at home.”

Adapting flying procedures to the home life is part of teaching kids responsibility and initiative, according to McCarron.

Grant had trouble with anger management when he started working with McCarron. Grant’s younger brother has learning disabilities that require extra attention from Grant’s parents.

“It was like he was 4 years old and he was on his own,” said Joan Mason, Grant’s mom. “He had a lot of anger about that.”

Compounding the problem of abandonment, Grant’s dad, John, lost his job and had to find work out of town. Currently, he returns every five weeks, according to Joan.

With slightly curly red hair and a round face, Grant is big for his age. Joan said she worried that he might harm his smaller classmates if he did not learn to control his emotions and actions.

“It’s like with the horses,” Joan said. “They don’t mean to (hurt anyone), but because of their size, the consequences are greater.

“I want him to think more: ‘What’s going to happen if I act?’ “

Making good decisions is the basis of McCarron’s therapy. It’s also the heart of his own life path.

McCarron got involved with flying as a teenager in Long Beach, Calif., where he worked at the local airport, washing planes in exchange for flying lessons. When McCarron was 16, a teenager driving drunk killed McCarron’s father in a car crash.

“I was very angry,” McCarron said. “I knew where he lived.”

McCarron said he got in his car and headed out, intending to confront the other teenager or get even. He made it to an intersection with one road leading to the other teenager’s house and another leading out to the airport. Sitting in his car he faced a choice, each with different consequences.

“I went to the airport,” McCarron said.

Instead of facing the teen and doing something that would have a negative effect on the rest of his life, McCarron followed his love of planes into the Air Force, where he eventually became a navigator on KC-135 tankers. He served in Vietnam, moved through the ranks, and later became a counselor. In his spare time he flies small planes and ultralights and sky dives.

He said he asks kids whether he would have been able to do all those things if he’d taken the road to the drunk teenager’s house instead.

“I tell the kids it’s about choices,” McCarron said.

The message seems to sink in.

In August, Grant received the SOARING Youth of the Month Award for his progress in therapy. His name went on a trophy, and the trophy went on display at his school.

“I think I’ve made a lot more progress,” Grant said then. “Like, I’m ignoring my sister more.”

His mom agreed.

“What I think is that he’s getting a little better. I think it’s a positive thing,” Joan said. “I think he’s been thinking more, which is a good thing.”

The award helped motivate Grant, as did the promise of the graduation flight, according to Joan. Grant applied some of the techniques that McCarron taught him, such as keeping a journal to see what types of things make him angry.

Grant said he reads books as another way of disentangling from conflict. His first full-length book was “Stormchaser” from a series of books called “The Edge Chronicles.” Grant said his dad brought him the book from the library. The fantasy series centers on Captain Twig, a daring captain of a dirigible-like airship powered by mysterious magical stones. Twig and his sky pirates battle slavers and have adventures across the skies of The Edge. Grant said he likes Captain Twig for his bravery and because he helped free slaves.

“My dad thought I wasn’t going to make it (through the book),” he said.

However, he did finish it and has gone on to read six other books in the series, as well as others in the genre.

“I was really excited,” Grant said of his first conquest. “I felt like, ‘Now I can read!’ “

Reading and the SOARING program have helped Grant accept that he can’t control everything, according to McCarron.

“It’s letting go of wanting to be the dad,” McCarron said. “It’s been Grant deciding not to take over and just being a kid when he can.”

The kid in Grant oozed out of him at the graduation flight Nov. 4. He brimmed with excitement before the flight, nervous and expectant. Mike Kohl, a flight instructor who volunteered to be the pilot for the flights, took Grant and other graduates on a “walk around” of the plane to make sure there were no mechanical problems. In the cockpit Kohl and Grant went through the safety checklist.

And then it was Grant on the stick as the plane powered down the runway. The flight went over Coeur d’Alene, circling the lake and passing over Grant’s house in Cougar Gulch. As they flew, Grant got to pilot the aircraft again, taking it through a lazy circle back toward the airport.

“I steered a little,” he said. “It was scary. I thought I might do something wrong and make us crash.”

The responsibility and excitement, though, sparked something else in Grant — courage.

“It was just like finishing the book,” he said of the flight. “I accomplished something I didn’t think I could do.”

According to McCarron, that courage helps his clients make better life decisions. However, he said that flying is not the only way to do it.

“My intention is not just flying,” he said. “It could be fly-fishing or anything.”

McCarron, who beat skin cancer 15 years ago, has worked with cancer patients and with the kids of cancer patients. He started a program for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder this summer. He said the SOARING program is working on developing a curriculum and training others to do what he does.