DATE: Sunday, July 6, 1997                  TAG: 9706260554

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

VIEWS FROM ABOVE OFFERS BIG PICTURE

We are more prone to dig deep in the earth for history than to look down upon it from a distance.

But a chair in the air can be at least as illuminating as a hole in the ground.

Mitchell Bowen offers a pilot's fresh perspective on the past in Where Banners Flew: An Aerial View of Virginia's History (StellaCorp Publishing, 88 pp., $26), supported by the dramatic color photography of David Doody, chief of photographic services for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Norfolk, Piedmont, Old Point Comfort:

Sand paintings.

``Aerial views,'' writes Bowman, ``reveal the topographical features that often directly influence historic events, and they show the physical condition of historic sites today.''

Talk about your Big Picture.

From the sky, sea-swept Hampton Roads displays the borderless unity that so eludes it politically below. We observe firsthand the sinuous omnipresence of water. We witness in wonder the serpentine, interconnected webwork of channel and tributary, riverbed, swampsprawl and beachfront.

Farther afield, the neat Tootsie Toy gridwork of Carter's Grove Plantation and spiny Jamestown palisade stretch away to the warping earthworks of Yorktown.

And, sudden amid the Blue Ridge foliage, a domed confection: Monticello.

If a scholar were to seek a salient core sample of American history - from early colonial settlement through the French and Indian Wars, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the massive embarkations out to all the major conflicts of the calamitous 20th century - our own moist turf would be the crucial spot to find it.

Bowen, 41, a former Air Force fighter pilot and high school teacher born and raised in Charles City County, circled the Virginia skies like a brooding eagle from 1989 to 1996 as owner of Williamsburg-based Historic Air Tours. His mission in a white high-wing Cessna 206 was ``to enhance the appreciation of historic sites through the added dimension of the aerial view.'' Now he's accomplishing it from the ground.

With this book, we can see what he saw and hear Bowman's running headset commentary, a relentlessly animated ``Hey - look at that!'' set forth in crisp declarative prose.

Once Bowman, a ropy 6-footer, was even lankier, growing up book-struck among his father's flock at Westover Parish Church. In high school he was working as a tour guide at Shirley Plantation when a National Geographic photographer stopped to ask for directions to the nearest airport. Bowman drove him there, and by way of thanks the photographer took the youth on a flight over the restored plantations along the James River.

``This,'' the photographer told him, ``is the way to see these houses.''

It was, too.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, Bowman taught school in Germany and Charles City County, then served six years in the Air Force, flying F-111s over England. He returned to establish his own classroom of the air in 1989. Last year, Bowman sold Historic Air Tours and took over as executive director of Virginia Civil War Trails, which links historic sites in ``one large statewide museum.''

He still flies, but for love not money. Bowman now can raise his three children with wife Fara without being occupationally bound to the exigencies of weather and tourist seasons.

``It was,'' Bowman reports in a major understatement, ``a heck of a responsibility to own my own airline.''

But we can now share a piece of that. For four years Bowen and his friend David Doody combed effulgent dawns, dusks and wedding-cake snowfalls to produce Where Banners Flew. The book is available at area bookstores or by calling (757) 258-5004.

It's airborne. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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