Perhaps because I remembered the six years we had flown together. I remembered the dawn in Louisiana when everything went suddenly wrong, when all of a moment she had to fly after an impossible hundred-foot ground roll, or be torn apart by a dike of earth. She flew. She had never lifted off so quickly before, she never did since, but it happened that one time—she touched the dike and flew.
I remembered the day of the handkerchief pickup, barnstorming in Wisconsin, when I had flown her hard into solid ground that I thought was only grass, slamming her propeller a hundred miles per hour into the dirt, smashing a wing, tearing a wheel loose. She didn’t crush into a ball; that instant, she bounced off the ground, turned into the wind, and eased down into the shortest, softest landing we ever made together. Twenty-five times the propeller blades hit the ground, and instead of flipping on her back or cartwheeling to splinters, the biplane bounced and flew to that marshmallow featherdown landing.
I remember the hundreds of passengers we had flown from cow pastures, who had never in their lives seen a farm from the air until the biplane and I came along to give them the chance, three dollars the ride.
It was sad to part with that airplane, in spite of knowing that one never owns anything, because that flying was finished for me now, because a full good time of my life was finished and done.
The airplane I took in trade is an 85-horsepower Clip-Wing Cub. A completely different personality from the biplane, light as thirty feet of spruce-framed Dacron; that doesn’t even blink at the concrete; that lifts me from takeoff to a thousand feet over the trees in one length of the runway. It flies aerobatics happily that the biplane never could honestly enjoy.
Still it was all rationalization, still I felt a gray melancholy, a wistful sadness that the biplane and I had parted and that it was my fault.
It happened one day, after a practice of slow rolls out over the sea, that I realized a simple fact that most people discover who have to sell an airplane. I learned the fact that every aircraft is two separate life-forms, not just one. The objective frame, the steel and spars, is one airplane. But the subjective, the airplane with which adventures have been shared, with which we forge this intense personal bond, is another machine entirely. This machine, flying, is our breathing past, is as truly our own as thought itself. It can’t be sold. The man whose name is now on the registration papers of the biplane does not own the biplane that I do, that one hushing down through dusk to a summer hayfield in Cook, Nebraska, wind signing in her wires, engine a soft windmill, gliding over the road at the edge of the hay. He doesn’t own the sound of Iowa fog changing to raindrops on the top wings, pomming down on the drum-cloth of the lower wings to wake me, asleep by the ashes of last night’s campfire. The new owner didn’t buy the delight-terror cries of young lady passengers at Queen City, Missouri, at Ferris, Illinois, at Seneca, Kansas, who found that steep turns in an old biplane feel the same as stepping off the roof of the barn.
That biplane will always be mine. He will always keep his own Cub. I learned this from the sky as well as Sam from his guru, and it was no longer necessary to be sad.
A lady from Pecatonica
Remember when you were a kid, how important it was to be loved and admired? How great it was, now and then, to turn up the hero of the game, with the girls watching and the other guys glad because you scored a point or brought glory upon the team? A strange thing, flying, to come along and reverse all that.
I was barnstorming Pecatonica, Illinois, in the summer of 1966. It had been a good weekday, we had flown thirty passengers from supper to sunset, and there was time for just one more flight before it would be too dark to fly. The crowd was still there, parked in cars or standing in groups of friends, watching our planes.
I stood at the wing of my biplane and called to them in the twilight. “One more ride, folks; last ride of the day—best ride of the day, coming up right now! No extra cost, just three dollars! Room for only two passengers!”
Nobody moved.
“Look at that sunset, all red up there! Twice as pretty when you see it from the sky itself! Step into this cockpit and you can be right in the middle of it all!”
The hills and trees were already dark silhouettes on the horizon, like the cutouts along a planetarium rim before the lights go down for the star show.
But nobody wanted to fly. I was helpless—the keeper of a magnificent beautiful gift, trying to share it with a world that wasn’t interested.
I tried one more time to convince them, and gave up. I started the engine and took off to see the sunset all by myself.
It was one of those startling times when I hadn’t known how truly I had spoken. The ground haze topped out at fifteen hundred feet, and from the crystal air above, in the last of the sun, it was a sea of liquid deep gold, with the hilltops rising green-velvet islands out of that sea. It was a sight that I had never seen so purely, and the biplane and I climbed alone, watching, soaked in the color of that living time.
Somewhere around four thousand feet we stopped our climb, unable to take the moment all so passively. The nose came up, the right wings went down, and we fell away in a power-off wing-over that melted into a loop that eased into a barrel roll, the silver propeller just a slow fan whisking away in front of us as we came down, earth beneath us, earth over our head. It was flying for the pure joy of being in the air, and for thanks to the God-symbol sky for being so kind to us both. We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.
The clear wind streamed around us in that airy shriek it has at the bottom of loops and rolls and then it went soft and calm, gently flowing over us at the tops of our great lazy hammerhead turns when we almost stopped in the sky.
The biplane and I, we who had shared so many adventures—storms and sun, rough times and smooth, good flights and bad—plunged at last together into that pure golden sea. We sank far down into it, wings going level, and we glided to the bottom, to land on the dark grass.
Switch off, and the propeller clanked sadly around to a stop. I stayed for one long minute in the cockpit, not even unbuckling the parachute. It was very quiet, although the crowd was still there. The high sunlight must have been flashing from our wings, and they must have stayed to watch.
Then in the middle of that silence I heard one woman say to another, her words loud across the night air:
“He has the courage of ten men, to fly that old crate!”
It was like being slugged with an iron pipe.
Oh, yes, I was the hero. I was loved and admired. I was the center of attention. And I was disgusted, instantly, with every bit of it, and with her, and I was terribly deeply sorry. Woman. Can’t you see? Can’t you even begin to know?
So it was in Pecatonica, Illinois, in the summer of 1966, in the cockpit of a biplane just landed, that I found it is not being loved and admired by other people that brings joy to living. Joy comes in being able, myself, to love and admire whatever I find that is rare and good and beautiful—in my sky, in my friends, in the touch and the soul of my own living biplane.
“… the courage of ten men,” she had said, “to fly … that old … crate …”
There’s something the matter with seagulls
I’ve always envied the seagull. He seems so free and uninhibited in his flying. In contrast with him I fuss and figure and clutter up the sky with noise just to stay in the air. He’s the artist. I’m the tyro.
Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder about the gull. Although he zooms and dives and turns with a grace that leaves me green-eyed, that’s all he does—zoom and dive and turn. No aerobatics! Either he lacks initiative or he’s faint-hearted. Neither of these conditions is becoming to a top hand in the air. I don’t want to be hard on him—don’t expect eight-point rolls and clover-leafs initially but it doesn’t seem too much to ask for a simple loop or an easy slow roll.
Many times as a confirmed gull watcher, I’ve been sure some young ace was
going to show me something. He’d come screaming down toward the water, building up speed enough to satisfy any pilot and pull up … up … up … till I would be sure he was going over the top. I’d stand there muttering “Pull it in!” but something always seemed to happen. You could see him slackening off the G’s and the pullup arc would widen. He would roll out and lose himself in the crowd of his fellows as if thoroughly ashamed that he had dogged it.
“You look so lordly,” I’d think, “but put a sparrow on your tail and I’ll bet you couldn’t shake him.”
Other birds have developed some precision flying and a few aerobatics. Geese sometimes fly a passable formation, and that’s worth mention. Some geese, though, evidently fear the mid-air collision. Many a formation has been spoiled by number four or five taking too much spacing and straggling all over the sky. Add to this the quacking of the others telling him to close it up, and it’s just plain sloppy flying. No wonder hunters shoot them down.
The unlikely pelican is almost a candidate in the aerobatic field. He can execute a neat split-S, but he doesn’t meet a prime requirement of the maneuver: pulling out. He doesn’t even seem to try to pull out, and ends in a geyser of white spray in the water. This isn’t even playing the game.
So we come back to the seagull. We can excuse pelicans and geese, robins and wrens, but a seagull was plainly designed for aerobatics. Consider these qualifications:
1. Strong wings and spars properly proportioned.
2. Slightly unstable design.
3. High limiting Mach.
4. Low stall speed.
5. Rugged construction.
6. Extreme maneuverability.
But all these factors are useless because he isn’t aggressive in his flying. He’s content to fly his life away practicing fundamentals that he learned during his first five hours in the air. So, although I do admire the seagull and the free way he flies, if I had to forego an aggressive spirit to trade places with him, I’d choose my noisy cockpit any day.
Help I am a prisoner in a state of mind
Something must have gone wrong at the very first, when I was learning to fly. I remember that I had a very difficult time believing that these little machines actually lift up off the ground; that one minute they are all solid on the earth like a pool table or an automobile or a bright-fabric hot-dog stand and the next minute they are in the air, and you can stand beneath them at the airport fence and they go right over you and there is nothing at all connecting them to the ground, nothing there at all.
It was hard to grasp that, to take it in. I’d walk around an airplane, touch it, knock on it, rock it a little bit by the wingtip, and it merely stood there: See, student? Nothing up my sleeves. No gimmicks, no tricks, no hidden wires. It’s real magic, student. I happen to be able to fly.
I couldn’t believe it. Maybe I still don’t believe it, today. But the point is that there was something spooky going on, eerie and mystical and otherworldly, and maybe that’s how I got myself walled into this corner and now I’m trapped in here and can’t get out.
It’s all gone worse, there’s nothing about flying that I can take for granted, there is nothing there that is common and everyday. I cannot just drive down to the airport and step into my airplane and start the engine and take off and navigate somewhere and land and let it go at that. I would like very much to do this. I want to do this desperately. I envy the pilots I see who casually hop into their machines and go flying out on business or charters or instructing, or the ones who fly for sport and don’t have to make such a big thing about it. But I’m a prisoner in this state of mind that sees flight so all-fired awesome and cosmic that it won’t let me do the simplest things at an airport without insisting that stars are changed in their course because I do them.
Like … look. I come out to fly, and before I’m even out of the car, before I’m even in sight of the field, I look at the sign AIRPORT and it sets me off. AIRPORT. A port of the air, as a seaport is a port of the sea … And I think about the little ships of the air sailing through the sky to this one port of all the possible ports that they could go to, choosing this one place, now, to return to earth. Touching down at this island of grass that has been waiting all special and patient for them here, and then taxiing in and being tied to their moorings, rocking gently in the wind as little ships rock in their harbors.
I’m not even there yet, I’m just seeing the airport sign, and maybe a Cessna 172 off in the distance, hushing down final approach, disappearing behind the trees of the roadside foreground onto what I know is a large level place for landing. Where did that Cessna come from, and where is he going? What storms and adventures has that pilot faced in his time, and his airplane? Perhaps many adventures, perhaps few, but they’ve been out in that vast tremendous sky somewhere, and they’ve been changed by it and now they’ve come from it to this one little harbor, the very port of the air that I’ll see the moment I turn this last corner.
I can’t just say “airport,” like that, simply, and go on to the rest of a sentence. It is always “airport … airport …” and I get going on it that way and either make the wrong turn or run off the road or frighten some innocent person pulling out of the gas station. It’s such an exciting place, an airport, that if I dare to stop and think about it or even use the word, the chances of having a routine flight are pretty well out the window before I even stop the car.
Car stopped at last, though, having avoided collisions-by-daydream with the thousands of things they put along roadsides to collide with, the first thing I see is my little airplane, waiting for me. And I can’t believe it … That is an AIRPLANE, and it belongs to ME! Incredible. All those special-formed pieces and parts fitted so carefully together into such a beautiful clean sculpture, they can’t be mine! An airplane is a thing too beautiful to own, like the moon or the sun. There’s so much there! Look at the curve of that wing, the sweep of the fuselage into the vertical stabilizer, the sparkle of the glass and glint of the sun on metal and fabric … why, that belongs in the main gallery at the Museum of Modern Art!
So what, if I worked my heart out for the money to buy it, or if I rebuilt the whole thing up from sticks in my basement, or if I cared for it to the exclusion of every other element of a normal life. So what, if I spend nothing on liquor or cigarettes or movies or bowling or golf or boating or eating out or new cars or stocks or savings. So what, if I value this airplane when no one else in all the world has valued it, it still makes no difference, it’s still unbelievable that anything so beautiful could happen in the world to make an airplane mine.
I get to thinking about this, looking at the instruments and the radio, touching the control wheel, the fuel selector, the navigation-light switches, the upholstery of the seats, the little numbers on the airspeed indicator and the way the altimeter needle moves when I turn the adjusting knob, listen to the wind sliding ever so gently over the grass and around the curves of the airplane, and half an hour’s gone past, whap, like that. I sit there all alone in the airplane on the ground without moving much or saying a word, just looking at it and touching it and thinking about the thing and what it can do, that it can fly, and half an hour is half a second, it’s gone before one tick of the aircraft clock.
It can fly. Anywhere. And I know just what to do with my hands and feet on all the knobs and controls and pedals, in just which order, to make the airplane come alive and actually leave the earth and point anywhere on the globe, anywhere at all, and if I really want to get there, get there. Anywhere. From right where I’m sitting this moment. In this airplane. New York. Los Angeles. Canada. Brazil. France, if I want to install an auxiliary fuel tank, and then Italy and Greece and Bahrein and Calcutta and Australia and New Zealand. Anywhere. It is so very hard to believe that, and yet it is true without the shadow of question by anyone who flies airplanes. Anybody else can take it as fact proved a thousand thousand times over; I sit there in the cockpit and another half hour goes tick on the clock and it is impossible to believe. I un
derstand it, all right, but I cannot honestly say that I can grasp it, that I can believe it, all at once, that an airplane can fly.
That’s just a start, that’s not even getting off the ground. That one word “airplane” means so much! How can anyone not like an airplane, or fear it, or find it less than beautiful to behold? I’m unable to accept that there can be a person alive, any human being anywhere, who can look upon this creature of curves and wings and walk away untouched.
The time comes, eventually, when I can force myself to get the engine going, the propeller turning, but I tell you it takes superhuman concentration to do it. Because I reach down to that handle and it says on it STARTER. Starter. That which starts, that which begins the whole journey up into the sky, across any horizon in the world. Starter. Touch that and my whole life changes again, events are set in motion that otherwise would never happen. Sounds will sound on the planet when otherwise there would have been silence; winds will twist and blast when otherwise there would have been calms; motions and blurs when otherwise there would have been still sharpness. Starter. It is so momentous that I sit there, hand suspended in mid-reach toward it and I have to swallow and tremble and ask whether I am man enough, whether I have the divine Permission of God to set all these galaxy-changing events in motion. The handle waits there, and the word on it is STARTER, all right, black letters on ivory plastic, letters faded from being touched so often over the years.