“She looks kind of sad, don’t she?” Mike said, when the wings lay yellow and frail on the hay.
“Yeah.” I agreed only because I didn’t feel like talking. The machine didn’t look sad to me. It looked like a bunch of mechanical parts disconnected across the ground. The thing was no longer alive, was no longer a she, no longer a personality. There was no chance of it flying now, and the only life it knew was when it was flying, or able to fly. Now it was wood and steel and doped cloth. A pile of parts to load on a trailer and take home.
At last it was done and it was just a matter of sitting in the cab and pointing the truck down the road until we reached home. I still couldn’t understand why this was all happening, what important thing I would have missed if the engine had not failed.
We turned onto Interstate 80, all modern and highspeed pavement. “Mike, keep an eye on the trailer, will you, see if anything’s gonna fall off, now and then?”
“Looks all right,” he said.
We accelerated up to 40 miles an hour, glad to be on the fast road home. It would be good to get this game over with.
At 41 miles an hour, very slightly, the trailer began fish-tailing. I looked in the rear-view mirror and touched the brake. “Hang on,” I said, and wondered why I would say that.
The trailer took ten seconds to play its part. From a gentle fishtail, it swerved harder left and right, and then it lashed sudden and wild from one side to another behind us, a whale shaking a hook from its jaw. Tires screamed again and again, and the truck was slammed heavily to the left. We were out of control.
The three of us were interested bystanders, sitting together in the cab of the truck, unable to steer or stop. We slid sideways, then backward, and I looked out the left window to see the trailer smashed against the side of the truck, glued there, while we went off the road. I could have reached out and touched the big red fuselage for a while, but then we slid into the grass valley between the two highways of the Interstate.
The dead body of the airplane lurched up on one wheel, teetered there a second in slow motion and then slowly went crashing upside-down into the ditch. I sat idly and watched the centersection and its struts crush down in no hurry at all, bending, tearing, splintering away under the thousand-pound fuselage. It was all very quiet. How like a paper bag, I thought, the way it folds up.
We came to a stop, all in a neat row: truck, trailer, fuselage; like sea-creatures caught and laid side by side in the grass.
“Everybody OK?” Everybody was fine.
“I can’t open the door on this side, Mike, trailer’s jamming it. Let’s get out on your side.”
I was disgusted. The lesson escaped me entirely. If there is nothing by chance, just what in God’s name was this all supposed to mean?
The fuselage that we had just barely managed to strain onto the trailer through brute force was now upside down, wheels in the air. Gasoline and oil poured from the tanks. The lower wings were trapped between the trailer and the airplane body, holes torn through them. One engine rocker-box was pounded flat, where it had struck concrete. We might as well set the thing on fire, I thought, and drive home alone. It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead.
“The hitch busted,” Mike said. “Look, it tore right out of the bumper, tore the metal right out.”
It was so. Our trailer hitch was still firmly coupled and lashed, but it had been ripped bodily from the heavy steel of the bumper. It would have taken at least five tons on the hitch to shear it free, and the complete load on the trailer was a little over a tenth of that.
What were the chances of this happening, on the one time I had ever put the biplane on a flatbed trailer, on the only time she had not been able to fly herself out of a field, with a truck and trailer that had been designed for hauling airplanes? A million to one.
Cars and trucks stopped along the roadside, to help and to watch.
A truck driver brought a heavy jack, and we lifted the pickup free of the trailer, undamaged, and drove it up to the edge of the highway. By now it was full dark, and we worked in the beams of headlights; it all felt like a Dante nightmare.
With ten men, and with a heavy rope tied from truck to fuselage, we finally dragged what was left of the biplane back onto its wheels, and forced it again onto the trailer. I wondered how we were going to tow a trailer without a hitch, or even move the trailer out of the low grass valley.
A great boxy truck stopped by the plane, and the driver got down. “Can I help you?” he said.
“Kinda doubt it; can’t do too much more, I guess. Thanks.”
“What happened?”
“Hitch broke off.”
The man walked to look at the broken metal. “Hey, look,” he said. “I have a hitch on my truck, and I don’t have to be in Chicago for another couple days. Maybe I can tow you somewhere. I’m kind of interested in airplanes … airline pilot out of Chicago. Don Kyte’s the name. Coming home from California. I’d be glad to help you, if I could.”
About that time I came awake to what was happening. Again … what are the chances of this guy coming along this road in this month in this week in this day in this hour in this minute when I have no possible way to tow that trailer, and him coming along not only in a truck, not only in an empty truck, but in an empty truck with a trailer hitch on it, and he not only happens to like airplanes but he is an airline pilot and he has days to spare? What are the chances of a lucky coincidence like that?
Don Kyte backed his truck down into the valley, pulled the trailer straight, then hitched up to it and pulled it onto the road.
The police arrived, then, and an ambulance, red lights flashing in the dark. “Anybody hurt?” the officer said.
“Nope. Everybody’s fine.”
He ran back to his patrol-car radio to report this, and then came slowly out to see the trailered airplane. “We heard there was an airplane crash on the Interstate,” he said.
“Sort of, yeah.” I explained what had happened.
“Any cars damaged?” He began to write on a clipboard.
“No.”
He held his pencil, and thought. “No cars damaged, nobody hurt. This isn’t even an accident!”
“No, sir, it isn’t. We’re all ready to move on, now.”
We unhitched the trailer by the Ottumwa hangar at midnight, and Don came to stay the night with us. We found that we had mutual friends from one coast to another, and it was past two when we finally folded the couch down into a bed for him and let him alone to sleep.
The next day I went to the airport and unloaded airplane-parts, stacking them in the back of the hangar.
Merlyn Winn walked to meet me, his footsteps echoing in the giant place.
“Dick, I don’t know what to say. That hitch was welded into bad iron there, and it just picked this time to go. Gosh, I’m sorry about what happened.”
“It’s not all so bad, Merlyn. Centersection and struts, biggest part. Engine had to be overhauled, anyway. Some work on the wings. Be a good winter job.”
“Nice thing about old airplanes,” he said. “You just can’t kill ’em dead. Shame it had to happen, though.”
A shame it had to happen. Merlyn left, and in a moment I walked out from the hangar into the sunlight. It never would have happened at all if we had stayed home, if the biplane and I had only flown on Sunday afternoons, around the airport. I’d have no smashed airplane, then, no parts awaiting rebuild in the hangar. There would have been no crash at Prairie du Chien, picking up a handkerchief with a wingtip. No crash at Palmyra, as Paul met his challenge. No crash on Interstate 80, when a trailer hitch strangely failed.
There would have been no Stu plummeting down through the air, or puzzling us with his silent thoughts, or having the most continuous fun of his life. No mouse attacking my cheese. No passengers turning in the air for the first time, no “That’s great!” no “WONDERFUL!” no immortality in Midwest family albums. No crumpled money-piles, no proof a gypsy pilot can survive, if he wishes, today.
/> No Claude Shepherd, by his giant hissing monster engine, talking the wonders of steam. No county fairs, no mosquito-hum at midnight, no honey-clover for breakfast, no formation flying in the sunset or sorrow of a lone airplane disappearing in the west. No freedom tasted, none of these strange affairs I called guidance to whisper that man is not a creature of chance, pointed into oblivion.
A shame? Which would I rather have, the wreck in the hangar or a polished piece of a biplane that flew only on calm Sunday afternoons?
I walked across the concrete ramp in the sun, and for a moment I was in the biplane again and we were flying together beside the Luscombe and the Travelair, up in the wind, out over those green fields and towns of another time. I still didn’t know the why of the wreck, but some day I would.
What mattered, I thought, was that the color and the time still waited for me, as they always had, just across the horizon of a special free enchanted land called America.
EPILOGUE
IT DIDN’T take a winter to rebuild the biplane, it took two years.
Two years of saving dollars and working on the wreck-lifting away the smashed wood and fabric, the broken struts, the remains of the engine. In that time I finished and covered a new centersection for the top wing, replaced a dozen splintered sections in the body and wings of the plane, stood guard with water while torches replaced bent fittings with hot new steel, while new struts were formed from streamlined tubing.
Bit by bit as the months turned past. Fuel tank repaired—month, month—windscreen replaced—month, month—coaming formed from wrinkled metal back into a smooth curve, and painted.
In that time one part of my being was locked there in pieces and bolts across the hangar floor, no longer free, asking, over and again, “Why?” I was glad to pay the price for the discovery of my country, yet it seemed so unnecessary, and that part of me in the hangar was a heavy sad part indeed.
Friends. What a pure and beautiful word. Dick Mc-Whorter, in Prosser, Washington: “I still have a Whirlwind engine down in the hangar. It hasn’t run since 1946, and you’d better check it, but it looks good. I’ll hold it for you …”
John Howard, in Udall, Kansas: “Sure, I’d be glad to look at the engine for you. And say, I have some wing bolts …”
Pop Reid, in San Jose, California: “Oh, don’t worry, kiddo. We have a collector ring for that engine, and all the connections—never been used. You might as well have it, it’s just sitting around out here …”
Tom Hoselton, in Albia, Iowa: “I have more work than I know what to do with, but this is special. I’ll have the fittings welded up for you in a week …”
Very slowly, years passing while I struggled to earn a living with a bargain-basement typewriter, the biplane changed in the square cocoon of its hangar.
Fuselage finished. Wings attached and rigged. Tail on. Engine mounted. New cowling.
And then the day came that the old propeller on the new engine jerked around in a blurred silver streak, and very suddenly the biplane, two years dead, was alive again, bouncing hard echoes off the hangar doors. Up ahead in the roar and the wind, the black rocker-arms clicked up and down, spraying new grease back from their uncovered boxes.
So long dead, and I was alive. So long chained, and I was free.
At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.
And behind it, I thought, lifting the biplane up once again into the sky, lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand “coincidences” and friends come to show us the way when the problems seem too hard to solve alone.
True for me, true for my country America.
We turned gently about a cloud, and flashed sunlight, a mile in the air, setting course for the towns of Nebraska.
Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.
The Luscombe and the biplane in earlier days, as we were practicing landings in fields, wondering if it just might be possible to survive as modern-day barnstormers.
Sometimes it is devilish hard to pick up a handkerchief.
And sometimes it’s easy.
How it looks after you hit the thing, and climb away in triumph. That’s a smoke flare tied to the horizontal stick, which I could fire by pressing a button in the cockpit.
When you smash a wheel into a dike of earth at 110 miles per hour, you expect some inconvenience.
The beauty of friends, Part 1. Stu MacPherson and Johnny Colin, having welded the broken landing gear, begin on the wing. I’ve gone to Iowa after a spare propeller.
Part 2. Johnny, Dick Willetts, Stu and Paul Hansen worked through the rain to fix the biplane while I was gone. Paul took this picture (and all the others, too).
The last bits of repair, and Johnny is all set, drift streamer in hand, for his afternoon jump with Stu. By the time the jump was finished, the propeller I’m holding was installed, and the engine run.
One time all summer Paul Hansen was the first one awake. He took this picture. Then he went back to sleep under the wing.
Aerobatics and dogfights over the fields brought people to watch the sky-gypsies, and to fly with them, $3 the ride.
Anybody who likes to get down from the sky the way Stu does is not only out of his mind, but a valuable member of any flying circus.
After supper, we carried lots of passengers. But during the day …
Stu and I in Palmyra, Wisconsin. Except for the shape of its automobiles, Midwest America hasn’t changed much from the days of the first barnstormers.
Paul’s first attempt at flying the biplane was not exactly what we could call an unqualified success.
A few turns. Give the passengers a feeling of flight.
Midnight thunderstorms can smash windows, but a gypsy pilot and his plane discover, somehow, a way to survive.
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Richard Bach, Nothing by Chance
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