A Gift of Wings

My own thought was that we weren’t going to get very far in the first flight. Clouds swirled up deep gray broths on the ridges west, with chunks of fog steaming in the branches of the trees. Blocked to the west, we flew south for ten miles, for fifteen, and finally, with the soup boiling and thickening all about us, came down on a little grass strip near Andover, New Jersey.

In the silence of that place, the rain began ever so gently to fall.

“Not what you mi

ght call an auspicious start,” somebody said.

But the kids were undampened. “All the land in New Jersey!” said Joe. “I thought it was populated!”

I hummed the tune to Mosquitoes, Stay Away from My Door as I unrolled my blanket in the grass, glad that we weren’t all gloomed by the terrible weather, hoping that tomorrow would dawn bright and see us on our way over our horizons.

It rained all night long. Rain with the sound of gravel pouring on drum-fabric wings, thudding into grass dryly at first, then with splashings as grass became marsh. By midnight we had given up hope of any star or of any sleep in the marsh; by one a.m. we were huddled and folded into the airplanes, trying at least to doze. At three a.m., after hours without a word, Joe said. “I have never been in rain this hard in my life.”

Dawn was late, because of the fog … we had fog and clouds and rain for four days straight. In four days of taking to the air with every small break in the sky, in four days of dodging rainstorms and detouring them and hopping from one little airport to another we had flown a grand total of sixty-two miles toward Oshkosh, one thousand miles away. We slept in a hangar at Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; in an airport office at Pocono Mountain; in a flying-school clubhouse in Lehighton.

We decided to keep a journal of the flight. Out of this, and out of our talks under the rains and amid the fogs, we began to know each other, ever so slightly.

Joe was convinced right off, for instance, that airplanes had personalities, that they had characters like people, and he didn’t mind saying that the blue-and-white one over there in the corner of the hangar made him nervous. “I don’t know why. It’s the way it sits there looking at me. I don’t like it.”

The pilots jumped on that and told stories of airplanes that lived in different ways and did things that couldn’t be done—took off in impossibly short distances when they had to, to save somebody’s life, or glided impossibly long ones with engines stopped over jagged lands. Then there was talk about the way wings work, and flight controls and engines and propellers, and then about crowded schools and drugs on campus, then of how it is that sooner or later what a person holds fast in his thought becomes true in his life. Outside, the black rain; inside, the echo and murmur of voices.

In the journal we wrote whatever we didn’t feel like saying aloud.

“This is really something!” Chris Kask wrote on the fourth day. “Every day is a string of surprises—some really unbelievable things have been happening. A guy lends us his Mustang, a guy lends us his Cadillac, everybody’s letting us sleep in the airports and really going out of their way to be nice. It doesn’t matter where we are or if we ever get to Oshkosh. Anywhere is okay.”

The kindness of people was something the kids couldn’t believe.

“I used to walk with Chris in a store or follow him down a street,” Joe said, “and watch people watching him. His hair was as long as it is now—longer. They’d pass him and they’d look, sometimes they’d even stop and make some face or some remark. Condemn him. You could see the distaste in their eyes, and they didn’t even know who he was!”

After that I took to watching people watching our hippies. Always there was a shock there, seeing them for the first time, the same startlement I had felt when I first saw them. But if either of them had a chance to talk, though, a chance to show that they were gentle people who did not plan to whip out bombs and blow everybody to pieces, that flicker of hostility vanished in something less than half a minute.

Once we were trapped by weather over the ridges of western Pennsylvania. We fell back from it, then circled and landed our planes in a long field of mown hay by the town of New Mahoning.

Scarcely had we stepped out onto the ground when the farmer arrived, his pickup truck rolling soft and crunchy on the wet stubble.

“Having some trouble, are you?” He said that first, and then he frowned when he saw the kids.

“No, sir,” I said. “A little. The clouds were getting a bit low and we thought it might be better to land than to maybe fly into a hill up there. Hope you don’t mind …”

He nodded. “It’s OK. Everybody’s all right, are they?”

“Thanks to your field. We’re fine.”

In minutes three other trucks and a car nosed down the dirt lane and onto the field; there was curious lively talk everywhere.

“… saw them flying low over Nilsson’s place there, and I figure he was in trouble. Then the two others come around and they went down and it got quiet and I didn’t know what was going on!”

All the farm people with haircuts, all of them smooth-shaven, they flickered their eyes over the long hair and the headbands and they weren’t sure what they had, here.

Then they heard what Joe Giovenco was saying to Nilsson.

“Is this a farm? A real farm? I’ve never seen a real … I’m from the city … that isn’t corn is it, growing out of the ground?”

Frowns vanished in smiles like slow candles lighting.

“Sure that’s corn, son, and that’s the way it grows, right there. Sometimes you worry. This rain, now. Too much rain, and then a big wind right after, and the whole crop gets knocked flat and you’ve got troubles, sure enough …”

Somehow, that was a good scene to watch.