A Gift of Wings

And so, after teetering on her own quiet brink for days I could not number, my wife told me she wanted to ride the wild roaring front cockpit of my 1929 barnstorming biplane, on a flight planned to cross thirty-five hundred miles of spiky western America—across the Great Plains into the low hills of Iowa, and back to California through the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.

I had a reason to make the flight. Once a year a thousand clattery slow harp-wire flying machines, antiques out of old skies, converge for a week at a grasscarpet airfield in the middle of summer Iowa. It is a place where pilots talk of dope-and-fabric joys and oil-sprayed sorrows, each glad for friends as mad and as loving of aeroplanes as himself. They are a family, these people, and I was one of them; the reunion was to be, and that was all the reason I needed to go there.

It was harder for Bette. She had to admit, as she arranged for two weeks of child-care, that she was making the flight because she wanted to go, because it would be fun, because she could say that she had done it. That took courage, of course, but I wouldn’t help but wonder whether she could make it, and I was convinced that she hadn’t the first idea of what that flight was going to be like.

I had made one long flight in the biplane, bringing it home to Los Angeles from North Carolina, a week after I bought it from an antique airplane collector. During that flight I had one minor crash, one engine failure, three days of freezing cold, and two days over the desert that were so hot the engine temperatures rose to their limits. I had fought winds that pushed the biplane backward, and one time had to fly so low under clouds that my wheels were brushing the treetops. I had more than enough to worry about on that flight, all by myself, and this one, with my wife, was to be a thousand miles longer.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” I asked as I rolled the biplane from the hangar, the sun lifting its first faint dawn-light into the sky. She was intently rummaging under our sleeping bags, adding one last item to the survival kit.

“I’m sure,” she said absently.

I have to admit that I held a certain savage curiosity to see how she would handle the adventure. Neither of us have much interest in camping or roughing it; we like to read, to see a play now and then, and, because I was a pilot in the Air Force, we like to fly. I enjoy my airplane, but I have a great deal of respect for it. Only the day before, I had finished repairing the engine after its fifth failure in as many months. By now, I hoped, it had all its troubles repaired out of it, but nevertheless I vowed to fly so that I could always glide to some kind of level ground if the engine failed again. I was not taking bets on whether we would make it to Iowa at all—the odds were about fifty-fifty.

None of this turned her head.

Now, I thought, as I cranked the old engine into its deafening blasting blue-smoke life, as I checked its instruments and let it warm, I’ll find out just what kind of wife I married, seven years ago. For Bette, strapped in the open cockpit, dressed in a 1929 flying costume beneath a huge furry coat, lashed already by propeller blast, the test had begun.

An hour and a half later, at a temperature of twenty-eight degrees, we were joined in flight by two other antiques, both of them closed-cabin monoplanes, both, I knew, with heaters. Cruising at five thousand feet and ninety miles per hour, I moved closer to my friends’ airplanes, and waved. I was glad to have them there. If our engine quit, we wouldn’t be alone.

Flying within a few yards of the monoplanes, I could see the wives were dressed in skirts and blouses. I shivered under my scarf and leather jacket and wondered in that early-morning air if Bette was already sorry for her decision.

Though our two cockpits were only three feet apart, the wind and the engine roared so furiously about us that even a shout couldn’t be heard. We carried no radio, no intercommunication system. Whenever we had to talk to each other, it was in sign language, or by passing a wind-battered scrap of paper with words scrawled in bouncing letters.

In that moment that I was shivering and wondering if my sheltered wife was about ready

to admit that this was all a foolish mistake, I saw her reach for her pencil. Here it comes, I thought, and I tried to guess how she would word it. Would she write “Let’s quit,” just like that? Or “Can’t stand the cold”? Our breath came in white frost-puffs swept instantly overboard. Or just “Sorry”? Depends on how cold and wind-blasted she is. I could see the spray of engine rocker-box grease across her windshield and I saw it on her goggles as she turned to hand me the note, her tiny, thin-gloved fingers extending from the huge furry sleeve. Holding the airplane control stick between my knees, I reached for the scrap of folded paper. We were only one hundred fifty miles from home, and I could fly her back in two hours.

There was one word written. “FUN!” With a little laughing face drawn alongside.

She was watching me read, and when I looked up, she smiled.

What can you do, with a wife like that? I smiled back, touched my glove to my leather helmet, and saluted.

Three hours later, after a brief stop for fuel, we were over the heart of the Arizona desert. It was almost noon, and even at five thousand feet the wind was hot. Bette’s coat was piled on the seat beside her, the top of it whipping in the heated propeller blast. A mile below, and as far as we could see, the meaning of “desert.” Barren piles of jagged rock, mile on mile of sand, utterly and completely empty.

Once again I was glad for our companions. If the engine chose this moment to fail, it would be simple to come down on the sand, not even damaging the airplane. But it was blazing, rippling hot down there, and I was grateful in the thought of the water jug that we had packed into our survival kit.

Then it struck me full force, in delayed action. By what right did I even consider allowing my wife in that front cockpit? If the engine stopped, she would be five hundred miles from her home and children, standing by one tiny speck of a biplane in the center of the biggest desert in America. With sand and snakes and a scorching white sun and not a blade of grass or shred of tree as far as she could see. What kind of blind, unthinking, irresponsible husband was I, to allow that girl, my own wife, to be exposed to this? As I stormed at myself, Bette looked back at me, and gave her hand signal for “mountain,” all her gloved fingers together and pointing upward. Then she scowled dark, over the top of her signal to show that this was an especially mean mountain, and pointed down.

She was right. But the mountain was only a fraction meaner than all the rest of the dead land about us.

In seeing the land, though, I found my right to bring her there. In her mountain signal, the wife that I had tried so hard to shelter and protect was discovering her country, seeing it as it was. As long as she could see it this way, and with joy instead of fear, with gratitude instead of concern, that was my right to bring her. In that moment, I was glad that she had come.

Arizona rolled by, and the desert gave grudging way, an inch at a time, to higher land and scrub pine. Then in a rush it surrendered to broad forests of pine, and tiny rivers, and some lonely pastures, with far-set ranch houses.

The biplane rolled smoothly through the sky, but I was concerned. The engine oil pressure was not behaving properly. It slowly fell back from sixty pounds pressure to forty-seven. This was still within its limits, but it was not right, for oil pressure in an airplane engine should be a very steady thing.

Bette was asleep now in the front cockpit, letting the wind sweep over her head as she rested on a mound of furry coat. I was glad she slept, and concentrated on mental diagrams of the inside of the old engine, trying to think of what the trouble could be. Then, two thousand feet above the ground, the engine stopped. The silence was so unnatural that Bette awoke, and looked down for the airport where we must be landing.

There was none. We were fifty miles from any airport, and the more I worked over the engine, moving fuel selectors, setting ignition switches, the more I knew that we would never make it to an airport.

The biplane sank swiftly out of the sky, and I rocked the wings to our friends, telling them that we were having a little trouble. They turned toward us immediately, but they could do nothing more than watch us go down.

Forests carpeted the mountains behind and the mountains ahead. We were gliding down into a narrow valley, and along the edge of that valley, a ranch, and a fenced pasture. I turned toward the pasture. It was the only strip of level ground as far as I could see.

Bette looked back at me, and raised her eyebrows. She didn’t seem frightened. I nodded to her that everything was all right, and that we were going to land in the pasture. I was ready to allow her to be frightened, for I would have been had I been in her place. This was her first forced landing; it was my sixth. One part of me stopped to watch her critically, to see how she took this engine failure—this event that, as far as the newspapers told her, inevitably resulted in a gigantic fatal crash and tall black headlines.

There were two fields, side by side. I chose the one that looked the smoothest, making one final gliding circle to land. Bette pointed near the other field, raising her eyebrows in question. I shook my head no. Whatever you are asking, Bette, no. Just let me land the airplane now, and we’ll talk later.