Luckily I wrote this out for somebody a few days ago:

When I was still fairly new in the air and about 22 years old, I was flying from Montreal to Winnipeg by myself in a rented Cessna as part of my pilot training. Because a Cessna 172 goes about 200 KPH and has enough fuel for four hours maximum, and the total distance was over 2,000 km, this meant many hours of flight and a lot of fuel stops.

Nearing the Quebec-Ontario border, I landed in Val d'Or to refuel and get a new weather briefing for my route. I called the weather service and they said I could probably expect to get to Timmins, ON, an hour away, without the three thousand foot ceiling coming down on me. I took off and flew west, and after about half an hour, it sure as hell did.

A hard rain drummed so intensely on my wings that it drowned out the loud drone of the engine and the cloudbase fell rapidly so that I couldn't see far at all. I had just passed Rouyn-Noranda with its airport and I turned back towards it, but by the time I was over downtown the weather made it so I couldn't see the airport anymore even though it was only four miles away. At the time I wasn't qualified to fly by instruments only and I was already in a pickle, and if the weather lowered much more then I would be basically blind and with diminishing hopes of getting to terra firma since only helicopters can land without at least a bit of forward visibility.

I was on the radio with the unicom operator at the airport, but as with most medium-small airports, he was no air-traffic controller, basically just a guy with a radio and a couple other gizmos but no radar and no real training when it came to helping a pilot in trouble -- which I was on the verge of becoming.

I was beginning to fly a sort of ersatz search pattern looking for the airport and I was starting to just head for whatever lights I could see through the darkening fog but they kept turning out to be this farm or that one and the weather seemed to be getting worse, with its attendant visibility loss and my odds slowly but steadily falling off more yet. It was a bit like going 100 on the freeway in fog when you can only see one second in front of you but no way to really slow down or otherwise make things safer. The rainclouds were creeping into the cockpit, damp and cold, and I couldn't help thinking it was the kind of air you find in a tomb.

Then all at once the next cluster of lights turned out to be the Noranda airport and I shouted my glee and relief over the radio. The landing itself was utterly simple and I taxiied to the apron and got out and got wet in the steady rain as I tied the airplane down. As I was finishing up, the rain came down much harder and the sky fell much more and I thanked God I wasn't still up there because getting down without a crash would've been twice as hard. I visited the stubby aerie where the unicom guy sat alone -- we were about the same age -- and I thanked him for his help and hung out for a little while, unwinding, before I called a cab to take me to a hotel in town.