A Gift of Wings

I learned, when I began flying, that boundaries between countries, with all their little roads and gates and checkpoints and Prohibited signs, are quite difficult to see from the air. In fact, from altitude I couldn’t even tell when I had flown across the border of one country into another, or what language was in fashion on the ground.

An airplane will bank to the right with right aileron, I found, no matter if it’s American or Soviet, British or Chinese or French or Czech or German, no matter who’s flying it, no matter what insignia is painted on the wing.

I’ve seen this and more, flying, and it all falls under one label. Perspective. It is perspective, it is getting above the railroad track, that shows we needn’t fear for the safety of locomotives. It is perspective that shows us beyond the illusion of a sun’s death, that suggests if we lift ourselves high enough, we’ll realize that the sun has never left us at all. It is perspective that shows the barriers between men to be imaginary things, made real only by our own believing that barriers exist, by our own bowing and cringing and constant fear of their power to limit us.

It is perspective that stamps itself upon every person up for his first flight in an airplane: “Hey, the traffic down there … the cars look like toys!”

As he learns to fly, the pilot discovers that the cars down there are toys, after all. That the higher one climbs, the farther he sees; the less important are the affairs and crises of those who cling to the ground.

From time to time, then, as we walk our way on this little round planet, it’s good to know that a lot of that way can be flown. We might even find, at the end of our journey, that the perspective we’ve found in flight means something more to us than all the dust-mote miles we’ve ever gone.

The pleasure of their company

“You’ll want to press that little brass plunger there … flood the carburetor before she’ll start.”

It was a month into summer and a minute into sunrise. We stood at the edge of a sixteen-acre meadow, a mile north of Felixstowe on the Ipswich road. David Garnett’s Gipsy Moth was fresh-dragged from her shed, wings unfolded and locked in place, tailskid hidden in grass. Across the field the first birds were coming awake, larks or something. There was no wind.

I pushed the plunger and the frail metal squeak of it was the only man-made sound of morning, until the petrol fell from the engine and hit the dark grass.

“You can take the rear cockpit, if you wish. I’m up for the ride,” he said. “Careful of the compass, getting in. I’ve smashed the thing twice now, myself. If I wasn’t right at home with it set down there on the floor, I’d thro

w it out and get a better. Switches off.”

He stood by the propeller in his tweedy-cloth flying clothes, in no particular hurry, enjoying the morning.

“You do have switches in this machine, David?”

I felt like a dumb Colonial. Supposed to be an airplane pilot and I can’t even find the magneto switch.

“Oh, yes. Sorry I didn’t say. Outside the cockpit, next the windscreen. Up is on.”

“Ah, so.” I checked that they were down. “They say off.”

He pulled the propeller through a couple of times, calm and easy, with the detachment of one who has done this a thousand times over and still enjoys it all. He had learned to fly rather late on in life, and it had taken him twenty-eight hours of dual instruction before he finally soloed the Moth. He neither brags nor apologizes over it. One of the best things about David Garnett is that he is honest with himself and the world, and therefore is a happy man.

“Switches on,” he called.

I clicked them up. “OK. You’re hot.”

“Pardon?”

“Switches on.”

He pulled the propeller quickly down with one hand and a practiced turn of wrist, and the engine caught at once. After a brief little roar it settled to perk quietly at 400 rpm, with the sound of a small inboard Chris-Craft at idle on a blue-morning lake.

Garnett climbed rather awkwardly into the front cockpit, fastened his leather helmet down over his head, and adjusted his Meyrowitz goggles—of which he is quite proud, for they are first-rate goggles. When he isn’t flying his helmet and goggles hang on a hook just over his fireplace at Hilton.

I let the Gipsy engine warm for a few minutes, than touched the throttle forward and we scraped and teetered to face the longest way across the field. The Moth had no brakes, so I checked the magnetos quickly on takeoff, and, full power, the machine leaped up into the air.

It was a little like that moment in a spectacular motion picture when for visual effect they run the film in black and white, and then flick it over into color. As we came off the grass, the sun burst and sprayed yellow light all over England, which strangely made the trees and meadows go full, deep British green, and the lanes gold and warm.

I played about with the airplane a bit, a lazy eight and a steep turn, but most of all just little turns and a climb up to one thousand feet and a rush back down to sea level below the cliffs by the ocean, dodging gulls.

The haze came up an hour later, and clouds capped it down to earth, so we pulled up into the gray, keeping the airspeed between sixty and seventy and the sun overhead, till we broke out on top at three thousand feet, “… above a plain of vapour,” as David would say. The sun shone brilliantly, black shadows of struts and wires striped the wings. We were alone with the cloud and with our thoughts that morning. Only an occasional triangle of green slid below to remind us that the earth still existed, somewhere.

At last I shut down the engine and duplicated a flight that he had told me about: “… yes, there were the hangars and the aerodrome … (and there they were, and two miles beyond, our meadow) … I did a big sideslip, but even so I overshot and went round again … (so did I—we were still two hundred feet up when we came across the fence) … This time my approach was perfect and my landing curiously soft and dreamlike. I was on the earth, but the earth was unreal, a limbo of haze and softened sunlight. Reality was far above me …”

I’ve done a lot of flying with this soft-spoken fellow, and in this day of few real friends, when a man is fortunate to go past three counting them, David Garnett is a real friend. We like the same things: the sky, the wind, the sun; and when you fly with somebody who puts his value on the same things that you do, you can say that he is a friend. Anyone else in that Moth, bored by the sky, would no more have been a friend than that businessman twelve rows down the aisle of a 707, though we share our flying a thousand times.