A spider climbed a tall grassblade and threatened to jump down onto my sleeping bag and torment me. Easily met, that challenge. I uprooted the blade and moved the spider two feet south. I rolled over and looked up at the bottom of the wing for a while, and drummed my fingers on its tightness.
One-thirty. In half an hour I’d be on my way … the people here were just too frightened. That little town of Lemons, on the way to Centerville, might have some chances.
A pickup truck clattered down toward me. Like every pickup in every town, it had its owner’s name painted on the door. William Cowgill, Milan, Mo. I read upside down, under the wing. A black pickup truck.
I got up and rolled my sleeping bag; it was time to leave.
An interested sharp mind peered at me from under a shock of white hair, through quick blue eyes.
“Howdy,” I said. “Lookin’ to fly at all today? Nice and cool up there.”
“No thanks. How y’ doin’?” Next to him sat a boy of twelve or so.
“Not too good. Not too many people feel like flyin’, ’round here, I guess.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Think you’d probably get quite a few this evening.”
“This is too far out,” I said. “You got to be close to town, or nobody even sees you.”
“You might have better luck over at my place,” he said. “It’s not too far out.”
“Sure didn’t see it from the air. Where is it?”
The man opened the door of the truck, took a wide board from the back and drew a map. “You know where the cheese factory is?”
“No.”
“Lu-Juan’s?”
“No. I know where the school is, with the race track.”
“Well, you know the lake. The big lake, south of town?”
“Yeah. I know that.”
“We’re just across the street from that lake, on the south. Ridge land. There’s some cows in the place now, but we want ’em out anyway and you can land there. Fact, I’ve been thinking of making an airport out of it. Milan needs an airport.”
“Guess I could find that. Just across from the lake.” I was sure that the pasture wouldn’t work, but I had to be on my way anyway, and I might as well have a look at it.
“Right. I’m driving the truck, and Cully here’s got the jeep at the corner. We’ll go on over and meet you.”
“OK. I’ll look at it, anyway,” I said, “’f it don’t work out, I’ll be on my way.”
“All right. Cully, come on.” The boy was standing by the cockpit, looking at the instruments.
In five minutes, we were circling a strip of ridged pasture. A flock of cows clustered around the center, apparently eating the grass. We dropped down for a low pass, and the land looked smooth. The pasture was on the side of a long hill, and rose like a gentle roller-coaster to the crest. Just beyond the crest was a barbed-wire fence and a row of telephone poles and wires. If we rolled off the ridge-line, we’d be in trouble, but then if we did that it would be our own fault. Carefully used, this would be a good strip to work from. We could take off downhill and land uphill.
Best of all, there was a hamburger stand a hundred yards down the road. If I carried only one passenger, I could eat!
The cows galloped away after the first pass over their horns. There was one scrap of paper on the whole strip, a crushed newspaper just by a place where the ridge turned right. As soon as I saw that paper go by, I’d touch right rudder, just a little.
It was more difficult than it looked, and our first landing was not as smooth as I wanted it to be. But cars were already parking by the fence to watch the biplane fly, and passengers came out at once.
“How much do you want for a ride?”
“Three dollars. Nice and cool up there, too.” Passengers before the sign went up, I thought. A good omen.
“OK. I’ll fly with you.”
Haha, I thought, lunch. I emptied the front cockpit again, feeling that I had spent the whole day loading and unloading that front seat, and strapped my passenger aboard. The view from the ridge-top was a pretty one, rolling hills away off to the horizon, the trees and houses of the town they called “My-l’n” resting easy on a soft rise of ground. Taking off downhill, the biplane leaped ahead, was airborne in seconds, and climbed quickly over the fields.
We circled town, the passenger looking down at the square and the county courthouse centered there, the pilot thinking that he just might have found a good place to barnstorm. A circle to the left, one to the right, a turn over a private lake and boat dock, a gliding spiral down over the pasture, with a gathering row of automobiles waiting, and our second landing on the ridge-top. It went smoothly. The place would work. Finding this field was finding a diamond hidden in a secret green jewel-box.
It was a different town, here. The people were much more interested in the airplane, and they wanted to fly.
“You might go out east, over the golf course,” Bill Cowgill said as he arrived in the pickup, “get some folks out there, maybe.” He was more interested in making the flying a success than anyone we had worked with. Probably because he wanted to see how the land worked as an airport.
“How are you fixed for gas, Bill?” I said. “There a filling station around, have a five-gallon can of gas, regular car gas?”
“Got some down at the house, if you want. Got plenty.”
“Well, I might take you up on ten gallons, maybe.”
Two more men stepped from the cars. “You giving rides?” they said.
“Sure thing.”
“Well, let’s go.” We went..
Circling to land, I saw that the cars had parked exactly across the end of my strip. If we touched down too long, and rolled straight along the ridge-line, we’d run right into the middle of them all. I cut the throttle back and decided that if we were rolling too fast, I’d turn left, down the side of the ridge, up the side of the crest and then deliberately ground-loop right. If everything went well, I wouldn’t even damage the airplane. Still, I didn’t want to land long.
As a result of all this thinking, we dropped in to a hard landing, bounced up into the air again, and staggered along the ridge to a stop. It was a reminder that we didn’t want to land too short, either.
From these first passengers I now had $9 in my pocket, and I left the airplane to her spectators for a while and walked across the street to the hamburger stand, Lu-Juan’s. Ah, food! As the gasoline was precious to the biplane, so those two hot dogs and two milkshakes were precious to the pilot. I was happy just to sit there quietly and eat something more filling than hay.
The airplane now had a good crowd of spectators standing around her, and I began to worry about her fabric. I ordered an orange drink to go and then walked back to the airplane. There were passengers waiting to fly.
From time to time during lulls in the afternoon, Bill talked again about his field. “If you were going to make an airport out of this strip, what would you do to fix it up? For less than five hundred dollars, say.”
“Wouldn’t have to do much to it at all. Maybe fill that part right down at the end, though that would be a lot of fill. Wouldn’t have to do that; all you’d have to do would be to mark out the levelest ground. That’s the biggest problem, picking just where to touch down and roll out.”
“You wouldn’t say to level the place up?”
“I don’t think so. Nothing better than takeoff downhill and land uphill. Just put down some lime or something like that, to mark where to land. Put in a gas pump later, if you wanted. With the lake there and the place to eat, this would be a nice little airstrip.”
“How wide would you think it might be?”
“Oh, maybe from about here … over to about … here, would be wide enough. Be plenty wide.”
He took a double-bit axe from the bed of the pickup and chopped a mark into the earth at each edge of the landing area.
“I’ll just mark this off here and maybe some day we’ll have something going.”
As it happened to
the first barnstormers, it happened to me. An axe marks the place where the first airplane lands, and someday in the future there are many airplanes landing. I didn’t think till later that if this field were turned into an airstrip, there would be one less pasture in the world for barnstormers to fly from.
“I’ll fly with you if you promise to fly real smooth …”
It was my red-Ford-driver and self-styled coward, Ray.
“You want to go up in that dangerous thing,” I said, “that dangerous old airplane?”
“Only if you promise not to turn her over.”
I had to smile, for despite all his words of fear, the man wasn’t afraid at all; he rode the airplane like a veteran, the circle over the golf course, the two circles of town, the steep spiral over the strip, looking down, looking down, like it was all a dream of flying.
“That was really fun,” he said, and went back to his car, happy.
“Free ride for the owner, Bill,” I said to the elder Cowgill, “Let’s go.”
“I think Cully wants to ride more than I do.”
Cully did, and pulled his own leather flying helmet from the jeep as he ran for the airplane. “Dad got it for me at the war surplus,” he explained, climbing by himself into the front teat. He liked his ride before we ever got off the ground.
With my debts paid, and the last ride flown, I poured two five-gallon cans of Regular gas into the tank. Enough to fly alone, and to check the effect of car-gas on the engine. It worked just as smoothly as aviation fuel, if not a tiny bit smoother.
So, by sundown, I had flown twenty passengers and had $49 in my pocket after food and fuel. A good feeling from the hayfield noon, with a dime to my name.
I knew now, without question, that the land of yesterday does exist, that there is a place of escape, that a man can survive alone with his airplane, if only he has a wish to do so. Milan had been good to me, and I was happy. But tomorrow it would be time to move on.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE DAYS FOLDED ONE INTO ANOTHER, and into events of August and September. County fairs, with special brushed cows and combed sheep waiting for judgment, dining only on the cleanest of polished straw.
Coins raining down on glassware with the sound of wind chimes in the night, above the song of the barker: “Nickel in the crystal glass, folks, and it’s yours to take home. Toss a nickel and win a glass …”
Quiet streets, old towns; where the Vogue Theater had been turned into a machine shop, and finally closed.
People with memories of old airplanes flying, and of droughts and floods, the good and bad of decades.
Foot-tall jars of Mrs. Flick’s Oatmeal Cookies, three for five cents.
Pioneer-dressed women in small-town celebration, and square dances in the streets.
Music amplified and echoing through the starlight, rippling across the still wings of a biplane and through the silken hammock of a barnstormer listening, watching the galaxy.
A great burly grizzled mountain of a man, Claude Shepherd, tending his monster-iron Case Steam Tractor, built 1909. Twenty tons of metal, barrels of water, bunkers of coal, giant huge bull gears driving wheels seven feet tall. “I got to love steam power from the time I was a little tad, on my grandfather’s knee. Smoothest power in the world, steam. When I was five, I could set the valves … never got over it, never got over lovin’ steam.”
Passengers, passengers, men and women and children rising up to see the sky, to look down on the water towers of towns everywhere Midwest. Every takeoff different, every landing different, every person in the cockpit ahead a different person, guided into gentle adventure. Nothing happened by chance, nothing by luck.
Sunrise into sunset into sunrise. Wild clear air, rain and wind and storm and fog and lightning and wild clear air again.
Sun fresh and cool and yellow like I’d never seen. Grass so green it sparkled under the wheels. Sky blue and pure like skies always used to be, and clouds whiter than Christmas in the air.
And most of all, freedom.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THEN CAME A DAY when we took off, the biplane and I, into Iowa.
Chugging north, looking down. One town had a good hayfield, and we circled and landed. But the margin wasn’t there. If the engine stopped on takeoff there was only rough ground ahead. There are those who say that the chances of engine failure on takeoff are so remote that they aren’t worth worrying about, but those people do not fly old airplanes.
We took off again and turned farther north, into the cold air of autumn. The towns here were islands of trees, isolated by seas of cornfields ready for harvest. The corn grew right close in to town, and there weren’t many possible places to work. But I wasn’t worried. The question of survival had long since been answered. Some good place always showed up by sundown.
I had just discarded another small town when the engine choked, one time, and a puff of white smoke whipped back in the windstream. I sat up straight in the seat, tense as iron.
The smoke was not good. The Wright never acted strangely unless it was trying to tell me that something was wrong. What was it trying to say? Smoke … smoke, I thought. What could make a puff of white smoke? The engine was running smoothly again. Or was it? Listening very carefully, I thought that it was running the slightest bit roughly. And I could smell the exhaust more than I usually could. But all the instruments were pointing in their proper places: oil pressure, oil temperature, tachometer … just as they should have been.
I pushed the throttle forward and we climbed. Just in case something was wrong, I wanted more altitude for gliding if everything went to pieces and we had to land in the gentle hills below.
We leveled at 2500 feet in icy air. Summer was over.
Was there a fire under the cowl? I looked over the side of the cockpit, out into the wind, but there was no sign of fire forward.
There was something wrong with the engine. There! It was running rough, now. If the engine would stop, that would be one thing, cause for definite action. But this roughness, and the smell of the exhaust, and that puff of smoke. It all meant something, but it was hard to tell what …
At that instant, a great burst of white smoke flew back from the engine, a solid river dragging back in a dense trail behind. I looked over the right side of the cockpit and saw nothing but smoke, as if we had been shot down, in real combat.
Oil sprayed windscreen and goggles. We are in trouble, airplane.
I thought again that we were on fire, which would not be good in a wood-and-fabric airplane, half a mile in the air. I shut down the engine and turned off the fuel, but still the smoke poured overboard, a long helpless streak across the sky. Great Scott. We are on fire.
I kicked the biplane hard up on her wing, slammed full rudder, and we slipped wildly sideways toward the ground. There was an open field there, with a hill, and if we played it just right…
The smoke came thinner and finally stopped, and the only sound was the quiet whistle of the wind through the wires and the faint clanking of the propeller as it fanned around.
There was a tractor working the other side of the sloping field, mowing hay. I couldn’t tell whether he saw us or not, and at the moment, I didn’t care.
Level out, cross the fence, slip off a little speed, catch the hill on the rising side …
We touched, and I forced the control stick hard back, digging the tailskid deep into the ground. We rolled across the peak of the hill, rumbling, clattering, slowed, and stopped.
I sat in the cockpit for a moment, thankful that the airplane had been under control every second. Perhaps there was only something minor wrong. A valve, maybe, or a hole in a piston, pumping oil into a cylinder.
I got out of the cockpit and walked to the engine. There was oil streaming from every exhaust port, and when I moved the propeller, oil gurgled inside. This was nothing simple.
I unbolted the carburetor and remembered one of Pop Reid’s adventures. “Supercharger oil seal,” he had said, years ago. “She blew
three gallons of oil in two minutes flat. Had to tear down the whole engine.”
In a few minutes the answer was clear. A bearing in the center of the engine had come to pieces, and oil poured with the fuel into all cylinders’. That’s where we got the smoke, and the oil on my goggles.
The Whirlwind, at the end of summer, was finished.
I accepted a ride from the farmer and rode into Laurel, Iowa, on his tractor. A call to Dick Willetts, and he was on his way with the Cub. Thank God, again, for friends.
I went back to the biplane and covered her for the nights ahead. There was no spare engine. I could come here with a truck and take this engine home for rebuild, or I could take the whole airplane home on a trailer. Either way, it would be a while before she flew again.
The little yellow Cub was a beautiful sight in the sky, and Dick set her down on the hilltop lightly as a feather in a pillow factory. We would leave, and the Parks would stay in her field. I climbed into the back seat of the Cub, and we lifted over the hay and homeward. The plane looked lost and lonely as she dwindled in distance.
All the hour’s flight, I wondered about the meaning of the engine failure, why it stopped the way it did and where it did and when it did. There is no such thing as bad luck. There’s a reason and a lesson behind everything. Still, the lesson may not always be simple to see, and by the time we landed at Ottumwa, I hadn’t seen it. I had only one question about the engine failure: Why?
The only thing to do was to bring the biplane home. The first windstorm could hurt her, the first hailstorm destroy her. She did not belong out in the weather with winter rolling down upon us.
I borrowed a pickup truck and a long flatbed trailer from Merlyn Winn, the man who sold Cessna airplanes at Ottumwa airport, and three of us traveled the 80 miles north; a young college friend named Mike Cloyd, Bette and I. Somehow we had to find a way to take the airplane apart and lash it onto that trailer, and to do it in the five hours left before dark. We wasted no time at the job.