A Gift of Wings

The truck has Adams Flying Service painted on its door, and the driver is smiling and wearing an old felt hat with the brim turned up in front.

“Thought you were a Stearman at first when you went over my farm, but you were too little to be a Stearman and that didn’t sound like any 220 engine. What kind of airplane is that, anyway?”

“Detroit-Parks. Just like a Kreider-Reisner 34, if you know that airplane.”

The talk started about airplanes and the man was Lyle Adams, owner of his own crop-dusting company, once a bronc-rider, bulldogger, charter pilot to the wilderness for parties seeking to fish and hunt in unsullied lands. Over dinner Adams talked of flying and crosswinds and ground-loops, asked some questions, answered some. He invited the cold, oily barnstormer to his home, to meet his family, to look at photographs of airplanes and flights gone by.

At five-thirty the next morning he was down to take the aeronaut to breakfast, and to help him start the engine. Another takeoff, a wing-rocking farewell, and long cold morning hours in the twisting knife-wind as the sun pulled itself into the sky.

We followed U.S. Highway 80 for several hundred miles through the wilderness of western Texas, most of it at a five-foot altitude above the deserted road to avoid an ever-present headwind. The big land is always there, always waiting, always watching every turn of the propeller of airplanes that dare cross it. I thought of my survival rations and water jug, and was glad they were along.

Ahead, a thunderstorm, standing upon its wide slanting pillar of hard gray rain. “An adventure waits!” I said to the Parks, and pulled the seat belt tighter. I could follow the railroad to the right and avoid the rain, or the road to the left and fly through it. I’ve always thought it a good practice to pick up gauntlets when they’re thrown, so we followed the highway. Just as I had completed tying myself to the mast, as it were, and the first drops of rain slashed across the windscreen, the engine stopped. One adventure at a time, I quickly began thinking, and as we wheeled hard to the right, I was thinking of the survival kit. The desert looked terribly empty. On her own, the Whirlwind gasped back into life, sputtering and choking. Fuel was on, mixture rich, plenty of fuel in the tank. The magnetos. The magnetos were wet. Switch to right mag and the Whirlwind ceased her coughing and purred along, blinking her eyes. Switch to left mag and she stopped cold, misfired, backfired. Switch quickly back to right mag. Map, map, where’s the map? Nearest town is, let’s see … (wind roar increasing in the wires) … is Fabens, Texas, and twenty miles west: between here and Fabens … (wind screaming now) … Oh, not now, airplane. I’m just looking at the map! Isn’t that all right? Pull the nose back up to the horizon, move the stabilizer trim up a notch … Fabens is twenty miles and if I follow the railroad it will turn to the left … (wind dying away, going soft and quiet, shadows shifting across the map) … OK! OK! Please don’t give me a hard time here. Can’t you see that desert down below? Do you want to lose a wing or a wheel on one of those rocks?

The Parks settled down to follow the railroad, but whenever I wanted to scare myself, I twisted the magneto switch to LEFT and listened to the engine choke and die away. It was a comfort, minutes later, to land in the blowing sand of Fabens, Texas. I spread a sleeping bag under the wing, with parachute and jacket for a pillow, and dreamed no dreams.

In the morning the magnetos were dry and ready for business, and business was seven hundred miles of desert. Our country certainly does have a lot of sand in it. And rocks. And weeds growing brown in the sun. And railroad tracks straight as fallen pines stretching away to the horizon.

As we were crossing the border into Arizona, the left mag began complaining again. So it was five hundred miles on the right mag, between the gunnery ranges south of Phoenix, through the dust storm over Yuma. It got so that the left magneto didn’t scare me at all. So that one magneto can run the engine if the other one quits. Airplanes used to have single-ignition engines. If the right magneto fails, I land on U.S. Highway 80 and break out the survival kit. By Palm Springs, California, the left mag was working again. Must be when it gets hot it quits; let it cool for a while and it’s OK.

Almost home, I thought. “Almost home,” I said to the Parks. “Won’t be long now.”

But there were storms west of the mountains, and rain, and great winds swept down the passes. If only I had the Fairchild with its instruments and radios! We tried the pass at Julian, the Parks and I, and were shaken and whipped and thrown back into the desert for our audacity. We tried to pass to San Diego, and for the first time in my life, indicating seventy-five miles per hour, I was flying backward. An eerie feeling, one that makes one look quickly to the airspeed indicator for assurance. But assurance notwithstanding, the Parks was simply incapable of flying west against the wind. Then north again, to a long and personal battle with the pass at Banning, and with Mount San Jacinto. You big bully! I thought, and glared up at the mountain, its peak swirling in storm cloud and snow. We tried the rain again, and this time the magnetos, angry at the mountains, didn’t mind it at all.

Still it was fight and fight and fight till we finally clawed our way to land on the rain-slick runway at Banning.

An hour later, rested and ready for more fighting, I saw a break in the clouds to the west, over a low range of hills. We took off and caught the rain again, rain that stings like steel pellets thrown and rain that washes one’s goggles bright and clean. And with it, turbulence from the wind over the hills so that the engine stopped time and again as negative G pulled fuel from the carburetor.

And suddenly it was all over. The last range of hills was past, and ahead were clouds broken with giant shafts of sunlight streaking down. Suddenly, like flying over into the Promised Land, as though a decision had been made that the little Parks had fought hard enough, had proved herself, and now the fight would not be necessary. One of those moments a pilot doesn’t forget: after the gray whistling steel-shot rain, sunlight; after the smashing turbulence, mirror-smooth air; after glowering mountains and furious cloud, a little airport, a last landing, and home.

Miss that Big Briefing In The Sky, and you have to find out for yourself about flying coast to coast in old airplanes. If you don’t get the word from someone else, an airplane has to teach you.

And the lesson? People can fly old open-cockpit biplanes thousands of miles, can learn things of their country, of the early pilots to whom aviation owes its life, and of themselves. Something perhaps, that no Briefing could ever teach.

There’s always the sky

I was supposed to write a story about the man, not to kill him in cold blood. But somehow I couldn’t make him believe that—it was one of those rare times that I had met a person so frightened he was alien, and I stood helpless to talk with him as though I spoke ancient Urdu. It was disconcerting, to find that words sometimes have no meaning, and no effect at all. The man who was to have been the central figure of the story advised me clearly that he was on to me, he knew that I was a puppet, a boor, an ingrate, and a mob of other unsavory characters all wrapped in a faded flying jacket.

A few years earlier, I might have experimented with violence to communicate with him, but this time I chose to leave the room. I walked out into the night air, and in the dim moonlight by the shore of the sea—for this was to have been a story of the man and his resort paradise.

The brea

kers boomed along the dark beach, flickering blue-green-phosphorous like gentle peaceful howitzers firing in the dark, and I watched the salt ocean rush in swift and steady, slow and back, hissing softly. I walked half an hour perhaps, trying to understand the man and his fear, and finally gave it up as a bad job. It was only then, turning away from the ground, that I happened to look up.

And there, over the elegant resort lands and over the sea, over the oblivious guests at the indoor bar and over me and all my little problems, was the sky.

I slowed, there on the sand, and at last stopped and looked way on up into the air. From past-horizon north to past-horizon south, from beyond land’s end to beyond the depths of the western sea, lived the billion-mile sky. It was very calm, very still.

Some high cirrus drifted along under a slice of moon, borne ever so carefully on a faint, faint wind. And I noticed something that night that I had never noticed before.

That the sky is always moving, but it’s never gone.

That no matter what, the sky is always with us.

And that the sky cannot be bothered. My problems, to the sky, did not exist, never had existed, never would exist.

The sky does not misunderstand.

The sky does not judge.