A Gift of Wings

The biplane swept down, losing height quickly, crossed the fence, and slammed hard onto the ground. It bounced one time back into the air, then came down again, bumping and thundering across the rough hard field. I hoped there weren’t any hidden cows. There were some on the hillside. In a few seconds’ rolling, my question about the cows became an academic thought, for we were down, and stopped. It was utterly quiet, and I waited for my wife’s first comment after her first forced landing. I tried to guess what she would say. “So much for Iowa”? “Where’s the nearest railroad”? “What are we going to do now”? I waited.

She lifted her goggles and smiled.

“Didn’t you see the airport?”

“WHAT!”

“The airport, dear. A little field over there, didn’t you see it? It has a windsock and everything.” She hopped down from her cockpit and pointed. “See?”

There was a windsock, all right. The only minor balm I held was that the single dirt runway looked shorter and rougher than the pasture we had landed upon.

That part of me that was watching and checking and grading my wife, and that was all of me, at that moment, broke down and laughed out loud. Here was a girl I had never met, I had never seen before. A beautiful young lady with tousled hair and engine oil edging a big white goggle-print around her eyes, smiling impishly up at me. I have never been so helplessly charmed as I was on that afternoon by this incredible young woman.

There was no way to tell her how well she had passed her test. The test was over and done in that moment, and the book thrown away.

For a second the ground shook as our companions roared low overhead. We waved that we were all right, and pointed that the biplane was undamaged. They dropped a message, saying that if we signaled, they would come down and land. I waved them away. We were in good shape. I had some antique-airplane friends in Phoenix who would be able to help with the engine. The monoplanes flew low one more time, rocking their wings, and disappeared over the mountains to the east.

That night, after the engine was repaired, I said hello to the lovely young woman who rode the front cockpit of my airplane. We unrolled our sleeping bags in the icy dark, heads together, and looked out at the whirling blazing center of our galaxy, and talked about what it felt like to be a creature that lived along the edge of so many suns.

My biplane had carried me back into its own year, into 1929, and these hills around were 1929 hills, and those suns. I knew what a time-traveler felt like, to drift back into the years before he was born, and there to fall in love with a slim dark-eyed young mistress in flying helmet and goggles. I knew that I would never return to my own time. We slept, that night, this strange young woman and I, on the edge of our galaxy.

The biplane thundered on across Arizona and into New Mexico, without the monoplanes at its side. Long hard flights it made; four hours in the cockpit, a moment out for a sandwich and a tank of fuel, a quart of oil, and back again into the wind. The windswept notes that my new wife handed back showed a mind as keen and bright as her body. They reflected a girl looking on a new world, with eyes bright for seeing.

“The red balloon-sun bounces up from the horizon at dawn as if a child has let go of its string.”

“Pasture sprinklers in early morning are white feathers evenly strung.”

These were the sights I had seen in ten years of flying, and had never seen, until someone else who had never seen them either, framed them on scraps of notepaper and passed them back to me.

“The free-form ranches of New Mexico give way only gradually to the precise checkerboard pattern of Kansas. The top of Texas passes by underwing incognito. Not even a fanfare or oil well to mark it.”

“Corn from horizon to horizon. How can the world eat so much corn? Corn flakes, corn bread, corn muffins, corn on the cob, corn off the cob, cream corn, corn puddin, corn meal mush, corncorncorn.”

Now and then, as we flew, a utilitarian question. “Why are we headed for the only cloud in the sky, answer me that!” Question answered with a shrug, she went back seeing and thinking.

“Kind of takes the fun out of passing a train when you can see the engine and caboose at the same time.”

A prairie city moved majestically toward us, steaming in from the ocean of the horizon. “What city?” she wrote.

I mouthed the name.

“HOMINY?” she wrote, and held up the paper in front of my windshield. I shook my head and mouthed it again.

“HOMLICK?”

I said it over and over again, the word whipped away in the slipstream.

“AMANDY?”

“ALMONDIC?”

“ALBANY?”

“ABANY?”

I kept saying the name, over and over, faster and faster.

“ABILENE!”