A Gift of Wings

I nodded, and she peered down over the side of her cockpit at the city, able now to properly inspect it.

The biplane flew three days into the east, content to have brought me back to its time and introduced me to this quick young person. The engine didn’t stop again, or falter, even when cold rain poured down upon it, on the last miles into Iowa.

“Are we escorting this storm to Ottumwa?”

I coul

d only nod and wipe the spray from my goggles.

At the fly-in, I met friends from around the country, my wife quiet and happy at my side. She said little, but listened carefully, missing nothing with her bright eyes. She seemed glad to let the wind play in her midnight hair.

Five days later, we struck for home again, I with the hidden fear that I must return to a wife that I no longer knew. How much I would rather stay and roam the country with this mistress-wife!

“A fly-in,” her first note read, hours out of Iowa and over the plains of Nebraska, “is individual people; where they’ve gone, what they’ve done, what they’ve learned, their plans for the future.”

And then she was quiet for a long time, looking out upon the two other biplanes with whom we returned west, the three of us flying together into great flaming sunsets every evening.

The hour came, as I knew it must, when we had crossed plains and mountains and desert once again, leaving them holding their challenge thrust silently into the sky. Her last note read, “I think America would be a happier place if every citizen, on reaching the age of eighteen, would be given an aerial tour of the entire country.”

The other biplanes waved goodbye, and banked in steep sudden turns away from us, toward their own airports. We were home.

Biplane once again back in its hangar, we drove quietly to our house. I was sad, as I am sad when I close a book and must say goodbye to a heroine that I have come to love. Whether she is real or not, I wish that I could spend more time with her.

She sat beside me in the car as I drove, but in a few minutes it would be all over. She would comb her midnight hair neatly into place, away from the wind and the propeller blast, to become once again the focus of her children’s demands. She would walk again back into the world of shelter, a routine world that does not ask her to see with bright eyes, or to look down upon desert mountains, or to fight lofty windstorms. A routine that has never seen a double or full-circle rainbow.

But the book was not quite closed. Sparkling now and then, here and there, at strange and unexpected times, the young woman that I discovered in 1929 and that I loved before I was born, looks up at me impishly, and there is the faintest hint of engine oil around the eyes. And she is gone before I can speak, before I can catch her hand and tell her wait.

Adrift at Kennedy airport

When I first saw Kennedy International Airport, there was no doubt that it was a place, a great island of concrete and sand and glass and paint, and derricks tilting their steel necks and taking rafters in their teeth and lifting them through the air to new constructions, to alloy roof-trees in a burnt-kerosene sky. It never occurred to me to doubt that. It was a sterile dark desert before dawn, it was pandemonium and a vision of the next century’s rush hour, when the jets lined up forty or sixty in rows waiting for takeoff, and arriving flights landed five hours late and children sat on baggage and cried and once in a while a grownup cried too.

But the longer I watched, the more I began to see the fact: Kennedy isn’t a place quite as much as it is a cement-and-iron thought, with solid sharp edges at the corners; a proud stone idea that we have some kind of control over space and over time, and here within these boundaries we have all decided to get together and believe it.

Somewhere else is abstract wonder about shrinking worlds and five hours to England and lunch-in-New-York-dinner-in-Los-Angeles. But here there is no abstract, there are no vague discussions. Here it happens. At ten o’clock on our watch we walk aboard BOAC Flight 157 and we expect, by three o’clock, either to have been killed in a monster crash or to be hailing a taxi in London.

Everything at Kennedy has been built to make that idea fact. The concrete is there for that cause, and the steel and the glass, the airplanes, the sound of engines; the ground itself was trucked in and poured over Jamaica swamps to make that idea fact. No lectures here about cutting space-time into shreds, here’s where we do it. We do it with the sweeping blur of a wing in the air, with that ground-rumbling full-throttle blast of mammoth engines leaning hungry into the wind, round metal mouths open as wide as they’ll go, devouring ten tons of air a minute, attacking it cold, torching it with rings of fire till it’s black with agony, blasting it a hundred times faster out carbon tailpipes, turning empty air to heat to thrust to speed to flight.

Kennedy Airport is a fine act, by an excellent magician. No matter what we believe, London will appear in five hours before our eyes, and, finishing lunch, we’ll have dinner in Los Angeles.

Crowds. I don’t like crowds. But why, then, do I stand here at the rush hour in one of the biggest airports in the world, and watch the thousands of people swirling about me, and find myself happy and warm?

Perhaps it is because this is a different kind of crowd.

The rivers of people anywhere else in the world, pouring along sidewalks, pressing through subways and train stations and bus terminals in the morning and evening, are rivers of people who know just where they are and just where they are going, they have passed this way before and they know that they will pass this way again. So knowing, not much humanity shows in the masks they wear—that humanity lies within, struggling with problems, contemplating joys of past and future. Those crowds aren’t people at all, but carriers of people, vehicles with people inside, all shades drawn. There is not much to be said for watching a procession of curtained carriages.

The crowds at Kennedy Airport, though, do not come this way every morning and every evening, and no one is quite sure of just where he is or just where he should be. With this, a misty state of emergency invests the air, in which it is all right to talk to a stranger, to ask for directions and help, all right to lend a hand to somebody a little loster than we. The masks are not quite so firmly in place, the curtains not quite so fully drawn, and you can see the people inside.

It occurred to me, standing on the second-floor balcony, looking down, that these are the people from all over the world who are making their nations run, these are the ones directing the path of history. It was startling, the intelligence to be seen in that humanity, and the humor, and the respect there for others. These are the people in control of the governments, the ones who protest wrongs, and change them; these are the members of the final jury of their land, with more power than any court or military, who can overthrow any injustice that reaches their combined hearts, these are they whose ideals are appealed to by men who seek the accomplishment of any good thing. For these, newspapers are printed, things are created, films are made, books are written.

There must be criminals in the crowds at Kennedy, too, there must be petty small men, and greedy and cruel. But they must be greatly outnumbered, else why that warmth I know, watching them all?

Here in the currents of the International Arrivals Building, for instance, is a dark-haired girl in wine-colored traveling clothes, moving slowly through a packed crowd that she wishes to move swiftly through. It is eight-fourteen of a Friday evening. She works her way toward the automatic doors at the north wall of the building, perhaps arriving, perhaps leaving. Her face is not quite set, she is paying some attention to the problem of moving, but not a great deal; she is patiently forging ahead.

Now from her right the crowd has given way to a heavy steel baggage cart, a moving hillock of leather and plaid. She does not notice it coming, bearing down upon her. It is her turn to give way to the cart, and still she does not see it as she moves toward the door.

“LOOK OUT, PLEASE!” The porter shouts and tries to brake the cart in the last instant before it gently rams her. He does turn it slightly, and the iron wheels roll two inches in front of her.

The dark-haired girl in the wine-colored suit sees the cart at last, stops instantly, in mid-step, and without making a sound she grimaces “EEEK!”