A Gift of Wings

Then I came to own a crazy old biplane, with an old-fashioned round engine on its nose, and it didn’t take long to discover that this machine was not about to tolerate a pilot who didn’t know something of the personality in a 175 horsepower Wright Whirlwind, something about the repair of wooden ribs and doped fabric.

That was how the rarest event in life came to me … I changed the way I thought. I learned the mechanics of airplanes.

What everybody else had known for so long was brand-new adventure to me. An engine, for instance, torn apart and scattered across a workbench, is just a collection of odd-shaped pieces, it is cold dead iron. Yet those same pieces, assembled and bolted into a cold dead airframe, become a new being, a finished sculpture, an art-form worthy of any gallery on earth. And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and the dead airframe come to life at the touch of a pilot’s hand, and join their life with his own. Standing separately, the iron and the wood and the cloth and the man are chained to the ground. Together, they can lift on up into the sky, exploring places where none of them has ever been before. This was surprising for me to learn, because I had always thought that mechanics was broken metal and muttered curses.

It was all there in the hangar to see, the moment I opened my eyes, like an exhibit in a museum when the light is turned on. I saw on the bench the elegance of a half-inch socket set; the smooth, simple grace of an end-wrench, wiped clean of oil. Like a new art student who in one day first sees the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Augu

ste Rodin and Alexander Calder, so I suddenly noticed the work of Snap-On and Craftsman and the Crescent Tool Company, gleaming silent and waiting in battered toolbox trays.

Art of tools led to art of engines, and in time I came to understand the Whirlwind, to think of it as a living friend with whims and fancies, instead of a mystic sinister unknown. What a discovery that was, to find what was going on inside that gray steel case, behind the spinning flash of the propeller blade and the flickering bursts of engine roar. No longer was it dark inside those cylinders, around that crankshaft; there was light—I knew! There was intake and compression and power and exhaust. There were pressure oil bearings to hold whirring high-speed shafts; carefree intake valves and tortured exhaust valves darting down and back on microsecond schedules, pouring and drinking fresh fire. There was the frail impeller of the supercharger, humming seven times round for every turn of the propeller. Rods and pistons, cam-rings and rocker-arms, all began to make sense, clicking to the same simple, straight logic of the tools that had bolted them in place.

I went from engines to airframes in my studies, and learned about weld clusters and bulkheads, stringers and rib-stitching, pulleys and fair-leads, wash-in, offsets, rigging. I had been flying for years, and yet this was the first day I ever saw an airplane, studied it and noticed it. All these little parts, fitting together to make a complete aircraft—it was great! I raged in the need to own a field full of airplanes, because they were so pretty. I needed them so that I could walk around and look at them from a hundred different angles, in a thousand lights of dawn and dark.

I began buying my own tools, began keeping them on my desk, just to look at and touch, from time to time. The discovery of the mechanics of flight is no small discovery. I spent hours in the hangar absorbing Michelangelo airplanes, in shops studying Renoir toolboxes.

The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own. Yet I learned, courtesy of a crazy old biplane, that to see beauty and to find art I don’t have to fly every moment of my life. I have only to feel the satin metal of a nine-sixteenths-inch end-wrench, to walk through a quiet hanger, simply to open my eyes to the magnificent nuts and bolts that have been so close to me for so long.

What strange, brilliant creations are tools and engines and airplanes and men, when the light is turned on!

Anywhere is okay

It was just as if somebody had thrown a hundred-pound firecracker, had lighted the fuse two hours after midnight, thrown the thing high in the dark over our airplanes, over us asleep there in the hay, and run like crazy.

A ball of dynamite fire shattered us alive, bullets of hard rain burst like hail across our bedrolls, black winds tore us like animals gone wild. Our three planes leaped frantic against their ropes, strained up hard against them, tugged and kicked and clawed at them mad to go tumbling in the night with that maniac wind.

“Get the strut, Joe!”

“What?” His voice was blown away in wind, drowned in rain and thunder. In the lightning flash he was frozen the color of ten million volts, as were trees, leaves flying off, and the horizontal raindrops.

“THE STRUT! GRAB THE STRUT AND HANG ON!”

He threw his weight on the wing in the instant the storm snapped branches from the trees—between us we held the Cub from taking both of us under its wings and cartwheeling across the valley.

Joe Giovenco, a hippy teenager from Hicksville, Long Island, from the shadow of New York City, whose total understanding of thunderstorms had been that they made faint rumblings beyond the city in summertime, clung to that strut with python strength, personally battling wind and lightning and rain, his hair blowing in fierce dark tangles about his face and shoulders.

“MAN!” he shouted a second before the next dynamite went off, “I’M REALLY LEARNING A LOT ABOUT METEOROLOGY!”

In half an hour the storm rolled by and left us a warm dark calm. Though we saw the sky flickering and crunching in the hills to the east, and though we looked warily west for other lightnings, the calm stayed and we snaked at last back into our ragged wet bedrolls. Moistly though we slept, there was not one of the six of us out there in the night who didn’t count the Invitational Cross-Country Adventure with the best wishes of his life. Yet it was nothing tried against great odds. All that brought us to it, or it to us, was that we shared a certain curiosity about the other people who live on our planet and in our time.

Maybe the headlines started the Adventure, or the magazine articles or the radio news. With their ceaseless talk of alien youth and generation gaps grown into uncrossable deep chasms and the only hope the kids have for the country is to tear it down and not rebuild at all … maybe that’s where it started. But considering all this, I found that I didn’t know any such kids, didn’t know anybody unwilling to talk to those of us who were kids ourselves, yesterday. I knew there was something to say to one who says “Peace” instead of “Hello,” but I didn’t know quite what that might be.

What would happen, I thought, if a man with a little cloth-wing airplane came down to land on a road to offer a knapsacked hitchhiker a ride? Or better, what would happen if a couple of pilots made room in their planes for a couple of city kids for a flight of a hundred miles or so, or a thousand miles or so; a flight of a week or two across the hills and farms and plains of America? Kids who have never seen the country before, outside their high school fence or expressway overpass?

Who would change, the kids or the pilots? Or would both, and what kind of change might that be? Where would their lives touch, and where would they be so far apart that there could be no calling across the gulf?

The only way to find out what can happen to an idea is to test it, and that is how the Invitational Cross-Country Adventure came to be.

The first day of August, 1971, was a misty dim day—afternoon, in fact, by the time I landed at Sussex Airport, New Jersey, to meet the others.

Louis Levner owned a 1946 Taylorcraft and liked the idea of the flight sight unseen. For a target we chose the EAA Fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, reason enough to fly even if everybody else canceled out at the last minute.

Glenn and Michelle Norman of Toronto, Canada, heard about the flight, and though they weren’t quite hippy kids they were strangers to the United States, eager to see the country in their 1940 Luscombe. And waiting there at the field when I landed were two young men who had labeled themselves Hippy for all the world to see. Hair down to their shoulders, headbands made of rags, dressed in faded dungarees, knapsacks and bedrolls at their feet.

Christopher Kask, thoughtful, nonviolent, almost non-speaking among strangers, had won a Regents scholarship out of high school, a distinction reserved for the top two percent of the student body. He wasn’t sure, however, that college is America’s best friend, and to get a degree for the sake of finding a better job did not sound to him like real education.

Joseph Giovenco, taller, more open with others, noticed everything with a careful photographer’s eye. He knew there was a future in video tape as an art form, and video tape he’d be learning, come fall.

None of us knew just what would happen, but the flying sounded like fun. We met at Sussex and we cast anxious looks at the sky, at the mists and clouds there, not saying much because we were not yet sure how to talk with each other. We nodded at last, packed our bedrolls aboard, started engines, and rolled fast along the runway and into the sky. Over the noise of the engines, there was no way to tell what the kids thought, airborne.