A Gift of Wings

  “We’re born,” he said calmly. “This is what it means to be born.”

  He took the controls without asking, flying clumsy at first with those great long wings, porpoising a bit behind the towplane till he got used to flying high-tow formation again. He did a fair job of it—not excellent, but not too bad. He was an average pilot, I’d say. Average low-time pilot.

  Harris Hill fell away behind us. The Cub turned to follow the ridge, climbing, and though we felt some lift and perhaps could have released a minute after takeoff, we stayed meekly on tow, considering it wise to use the extra help while we had it.

  “You ever noticed,” he said, “how much being on tow is like growing up, like a kid growing up? While you get used to the feel of living, the towplane-mother is out ahead of you, protecting you from sinking air, getting you up to altitude. Soaring’s a lot like living, don’t you think?”

  I sighed. He talked this way, and he ignored the fine little tricks of competition. We could turn the towplane toward our course by tugging left on the tail of the Cub, with the towrope. We could keep him from climbing too fast by tugging up on it. Tricks like that can give you a free ride another few hundred yards on course, and that can make a difference, in a meet. But he ignored everything I knew, he went on about what he knew.

  “A kid can take it easy, not much pressure, not many decisions, taking his tow into the air of life. Doesn’t have to worry about sink, or about finding lift for himself. Being on tow is what you call security.”

  “If you’d turn a little left …” I said.

  “But as long as he’s on tow, he’s not free, there’s that to consider.”

  I was restless to get a word in. I wanted to urge him to nudge the towplane to give us that extra push in the right direction, it’s not cheating. Any pilot can do it.

  “I’d just as soon be free,” he said.

  Before I could stop him, he pulled the towline release—VAM!—and we were loose in the sky. The high-speed noises of tow fell off to the gentle hush of a glider at cruise.

  “That wasn’t too smart,” I said. “You could have worked another two hundred feet out of that tow, and herded him around …”

  “I wanted to be free,” he said, as if that was some kind of an answer.

  To his credit, though, he did turn directly on course, pointing the nose into the wind toward the goal, forty miles distant. It was not an easy task, an upwind goal in a 1-26. To make it worse, there was a great blue hole of dead air between us and the first cumulus across the valley.

  It was going to be a long tough glide to reach them, and by then we might well be too low, we might glide in beneath their rising air. He kept the nose on course, and increased airspeed to best penetration through the sinking air. Most of the other sailplanes, I noticed, stayed around the hill after release, working the ridge lift; and waiting for a thermal to give them safe altitude for a leap across the valley. A lovely sight, they were, wheeling and soaring in the quiet of the sun. Yet all the while they circled, I knew, they were watching us, to see if our try to penetrate at once would pay off. If it did, they’d follow.

  I wasn’t sure what I would have done, if I were flying. It is all very romantic and daring to go blasting off on course directly after release, but if you don’t make it, if the sink presses you right down to the ground, you’re dead, you’re out of the game. Of course, you’re dead if you spend all day in the ridge lift on Harris Hill, too. The game is to reach the goal, and that takes just the right blend of bravery and caution. The others had opened with caution; my friend had chosen bravery. We flew directly away from the hill, sinking three hundred feet per minute.

  “You’re right,” he said, reading my doubt, “Another minute in this sink and we won’t be able to glide back to the hill at all. But don’t you agree? Sooner or later, doesn’t a man have to turn his back on the safety of towplanes and ridge lift and set off on his own, no matter what?”

  “I guess.”

  But maybe if we had waited, some thermals would have cooked off in the valley. As it was, we could stay in the air for another five minutes, and then we’d be forced to pick a field and land. I started looking for fields, a little sullen. maybe, thinking more that we should have waited, like the others. I like soaring. I don’t like to throw away what might have been a two- or three-hour flight in some seven-minute speed dash for the ground, just because this guy feels daring. Four hundred feet per minute down.

  “A man’s got to do his best,” he said.

  “Your best is different from my best. Next time, let me fly the sailplane, OK?”

  “No.” He meant it, too. He flew every flight we made together, except for a minute or two, now and then. He has made some terrible mistakes, in his time, but there have been some beautiful good flights, too, I have to admit. Mistakes or not, beauty or not, he never lets me fly.

  Three hundred feet per minute down, nine hundred feet over the ground.

  “This is it,” I said. “Get your harness tight as it will go.”

  He didn’t answer, turning toward a paved parking lot in the sunlight. “Maybe not.”

  The game was over. I knew it. We were dead. Set up for the parking lot, which was too short to land in, and he’ll scatter sailplane all over the place. No other place to land … wires, trees, roads. Two hundred feet per minute, sliding through seven hundred feet.

  “You did it this time, buddy, you really did it!” It was all over but the crash. He wasn’t a good enough pilot to land a 1-26 in that space without bending it. A.J. Smith could bring it off, maybe, but this guy, with just a few hours in a 1-26, not a chance. I pulled my harness tighter. Blast, I thought. If I was flying, we would have been safe now in the ridge lift at the hill. But he’s flying, with all that romantic bravado, and now we’re one minute from disaster.

  “Well. How about that,” he said. “Lift at last! Two-fifty, three hundred feet per minute up!”

  He banked the Schweizer hard to the left, circling in a tight narrow thermal over the parking lot. It was quiet for a long while, as he worked the lift.

  “Notice,” he said at last, “six hundred feet per minute climb, and we’re through twenty-five hundred feet!”

  “Yeah. Sometimes you have the most fantastic luck.”

  “Think it’s luck? Maybe so. Maybe not. Believe in lift, never give up the search for it, and I bet you turn out luckier than the man who gives up at a thousand feet. And a fellow hasn’t a prayer of reaching his goal unless he somehow learns to find lift for himself, don’t you think?”

  We rode the lift to four thousand five hundred feet and he set off again on course.

  “That little thermal saved your neck,” I said, “and you leave it, turn your back on it without so much as a fare-thee-well.” I was mostly joking, making a little fun of his dreamer’s ways.

  “Right. No farewell. Does us no good to stay around after we’ve gone as high as we can go. Clinging to old lift is for the nonbelievers. Happens over and again. The only real security for a glider is knowing that the sky has other thermale, invisible, waiting. It’s just a matter of learning how to find what’s already there.”

  “Hm,” I said. It sounded logical enough with four thousand five hundred feet in our bank, but the philosophy was no comfort back there when I thought we had bought us a parking lot.

  We pressed along in zero sink for a while, then even that faded and we started down again. We reached the cumulus, all right, but there was no lift there at all. There should have been lift, but there wasn’t. I felt hot, suddenly. Below us was the edge of a vast pine forest, hard mountain country—we needed that lift.

  “Two-hundred-foot sink,” I said. “What do you plan to do now?”

  “Guess I’ll stay on course. I think that’s the right thing to do, sink or not.”

  The right thing. It’s always hard to do the right thing, soaring cross-country. In rising air, for instance, you’re supposed to slow down, just when you feel like pushing along on course with the no
se down for speed. In falling air, when you feel like holding the nose up, that’s when you have it put down, to increase speed and get through the sink as fast as you can. To his credit, then, he set the nose down and penetrated, though we were well out over those hills all spiny with trees, dropping through twenty-five hundred feet with no place to land. He flew as if he had studied textbooks on soaring. Further, he flew as though he trusted that the textbooks were true.

  “There’s a time,” he had told me once, “when you have to believe the people who have already done what you want to do. You have to believe what they tell you, act on it until you’re out there proving it for yourself.”

  I didn’t have to ask; that was just what he was doing this moment—believing the diagrams of lift over hills crosswind.

  We lost altitude.

  “Looks like that cloud might have some lift, off the right wing, couple of miles,” I said.

  “It might.”

  There was quiet, for a time.

  “Then why don’t we cut over there while we still have the altitude to reach it?” I felt like a first-grade teacher with a slow pupil.

  “Yes. Well. Look off to the left, too. There’s great lift, ten miles off in that cu. But it’s not on course. If we made it over there we could climb, all right, but we’d be ten miles off course, and use all our altitude getting back on. So why make the detour? All we’d do is waste time, go nowhere. That’s happened to a lot of good pilots. Won’t happen to me, if I can help it.”

  “Get high and stay high,” I quoted at him. He didn’t even blink.

  What a lousy day! We were down to fifteen hundred feet, in the middle of a bunch of sink, and no place to land but trees. The air was stagnant heavy stuff, like clear granite rock. This was worse than ever. In the parking lot, at least, there would have been people to help us pick up the wreck. Here there wasn’t even a lookout tower in the forest. We’d crash unseen.

  “What do you know,” he said, rolling the glider hard to the right.

  “What’s up? What are you doing?”

  “Look. A sailplane.”

  It was a pure white 1-26, circling in a thermal not half a mile away. I thought we had been alone, when we left the hill, but there had been somebody out here ahead of us all the time, and now he marked a thermal.

  “Thanks, fella, whoever you are.” Maybe we both said that.

  We slipped in beneath the other Schweizer, and at once the variometer showed two hundred feet per minute climb. It doesn’t look like much, on paper, but two hundred feet per minute over a horizon-wide pine forest is a lovely sight. We worked that lift all patient and careful, and by the time we left it, we had had another four thousand feet in the bank. The other sailplane had long since departed on course.

  “That was kind of him, to mark that thermal for us,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” He sounded annoyed. “He didn’t mark it for us. He found the thermal for himself and used it for his own climb. You think he made that climb for our sake? He couldn’t have helped us an inch unless we were ready to be helped. If we didn’t see him, back there, or if we saw him and didn’t believe we could use the lift he found, we’d probably be sitting on some pine branch by now.”

  Just as we left the thermal, we looked down and saw another sailplane gliding down low into the base of it, finding the lift, turning to climb in it.

  “See?” he said. “That fellow there is probably thanking us for marking the lift, but we didn’t even know he was there till now. Funny, isn’t it? We make our own climb, and it turns out that we’ve done somebody else a favor.”

  The mountains gave way to flatland toward the end of the day. I was riding along, not thinking much, when he said, “Look there.”

  There was a wide green field, by the road, and in the center of the field was a sailplane, landed.

  “Too bad,” he said, with an odd sorrow in his voice.

  It startled me to hear him say that.

  “Too bad? What do you mean?”

  “The poor guy came all this way, and now he’s out of the contest, sitting down there in that field.”

  “You must be tired,” I said. “He’s not out. The distance he made counts for score, and those points add on to the points he’ll make tomorrow and the next day. Anyway, that’s not a bad feeling, once in a while, to be down at last and out of the competition for a time, just lying on the grass, resting, knowing you’ll fly again.”

  As we watched, a blue station wagon drove carefully from the road into the field, towing a long narrow sailplane-trailer. It would be a good time. The ground crew would chide the pilot for not doing better, till he lived the flight again for them and proved that he had done his best, every minute. Some things he probably learned, so he might fly a little more skillfully next time. Tomorrow the same pilot would be born again to the competition, at the end of a different towline.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s not bad at all. It’s exactly right. Forgive me for being so blind.”

  “That’s OK.” I couldn’t tell if he had been testing me or not. He does that, sometimes.

  We tried to stretch our long final glide to the goal, but the sink was worse at dusk and we didn’t make it. We touched down in the evening on a lonely pasture, a mile short of goal, but we had done our best and there were no regrets. Even I had no regrets, at the end.

  It was still as death when our bright sailplane finally stopped in the green, when the breath of wind about its wings sighed away and was gone.

  We opened the canopy, then, I the practical and he the romantic, both in our one pilot-body, stepping free of the body of the sailplane that had taken us through the adventure of the afternoon.

  The air tasted light and fresh. We could hear birds in the meadow.

  We’d fly again tomorrow, of course, but for the time it was kind of fun to lie down and stretch out in the grass and know that we were alive.

  Gift to an airport kid

  In my life I had been to four cocktail parties and this one was the fifth and the voice within offered me no mercy. What possible reason, it said, what possible excuse under the name of heaven can there be for you to come to this place? There is one person, clear across the room, who has the mistiest idea of flight, you have one friend in a roomful of strangers intent on paper-thin discussions of national economy and policy and society. You are a long way out of an aviator’s element.

  A man stood by the mantel this moment, tailored in a double-breasted blazer with polished gold buttons, and talked of a motion picture.

  “I liked Trash,” he said in a cultured tone, and described in detail a scene that would bore a toad to stone.

  What was I doing here? Not fifty feet away, just on the other side of the wall, was the wind and the night and the stars, yet there I stood, soaked in light from electric bulbs and pretending to listen to this man talk.

  How can you stand this, I asked me. You are a fake. Your face is turned toward him but you think he’s duller than rock and if you had a shred of honesty you’d ask where he finds a point for living if he has to find his values in Trash and you should just quietly leave this room and leave this house and get as far away from cocktail parties as you can get and learn your lesson at last and never appear at one of these things again. These affairs are fine for some people but they are not, not for you.

  Then the crowd kind of swirled, as it does every once in a while, and I was isolated with a woman crushed with worry over her son.

  “He’s only fifteen,” she said. “He’s failing high school and he’s smoking marijuana and he doesn’t care about living at all. He’s blaming me. He’ll be dead in a year, I know it. I can’t talk to him, he threatens to disappear. He just doesn’t care …”

  It was the first sound of emotion that I had heard all evening, the first hint that anybody in the room was a living human being. Saying what she was saying, casting a line to a scarce-met stranger for help, the woman rescued me from a sea of boredom. I flickere
d back to when I was fifteen, was eighteen, thinking the world a cold lonely place with no room for newcomers. But about that time I discovered flight, which for me was challenge, was I dare you to survive alone in the sky, and I offer you inner confident quiet if you’re good enough to do it, and if you do you’ll have a way to find who you are and never be lonely again.

  “Has your boy ever flown an airplane, by any chance?”

  “No. Of course not. He’s only fifteen.”

  “If he’s going to be dead in a year, he sounds like a pretty old man.”

  “I’ve done everything I can think of. Racked my brain to get across, to talk to Bill …”

  I kept thinking of me, age eighteen, changing my life with a two-seater lightplane, with the sound of a small engine at seven a.m., dew in the grass, thin blue smoke from suburban chimneys going straight up into air calm and clear as autumn sky.

  “Look. I tell you … I have an airplane at the airport, I’ll not be leaving till tomorrow afternoon. Mention that to Bill, why don’t you? If he’s interested, I’ll fly him in the Cub, he can get the feel of the controls, how it all works. Maybe he won’t like it, but then maybe he will. And if he does, we could go from there. Why don’t you tell him there’s a flight waiting for him, if he wants it?”

  We talked a while longer and there was some faint hope in the woman’s voice, clutching at twigs to save her son. Then the evening was over.

  I thought about the boy, that night. About the way that those of us who fly have our debts to pay. There’s no direct repaying our first flight instructor, for giving a new direction to our lives. We can only pay that debt by passing the gift along, that we were given; by setting it in the hands of one searching as we searched for our place and our freedom.