A Gift of Wings

You could see the thoughts in their eyes. The hippies a fellow sets his jaw against are the sullen ones that don’t care about the rain or the sun or the land or the corn … the ones that don’t do anything but cut the country down. But these kids, now, they’re not that kind—a man can tell that right away.

When the ridges cleared, we offered rides in the airplanes, but no one was quite ready to go up. We started engines, then, and bounced up from the hay into the sky, rocked our wings farewell and went our way.

“Amazing!” Chris wrote in the journal that night. “We landed in a field and talked to farmers with Swedish and Irish accents—I didn’t know this existed in Pennsylvania. Everybody is so nice. Friendly. It’s really opened my eyes. A lot of my natural defenses are broken down. Just don’t worry and trust things to work out. All my little plans for the future have really been shaken. I’m just not sure of anything anymore and that’s good because it teaches you to go with the flow of things.”

From that day we wafted west in pure blue air over the pure green land and farms like sunlight growing.

After all our explaining on the ground, Chris and Joe were ready to take the controls themselves. Their first hours of dual instructions were given in formation flying.

“Small corrections, Joe, SMALL CORRECTIONS! You want to hold the other plane just about … there. OK? You’ve got it, you’re flying. Small corrections, now. Add a little power, close it in a little. SMALL CORRECTIONS!”

Before many hours were gone, they could actually hold the airplanes in formation with each other. It was hard work for them, they made it much harder than it had to be, but still they soaked it in and waited like vultures after takeoff to pounce on the controls and practice some more.

Next they began making takeoffs themselves … squirrely weaving panic-stricken disasters at first, leaping in the last instant over runway lights and snow markers along the sides of the strip. When they got smoother, we practiced stalls and a spin or two coming down from formation, and at last they began making landings, learning, absorbing like sponges dropped in the sea.

Every day, too, we learned of their life and their language. We practiced talking Hippy, my notebook becoming a dictionary of that tongue. Joe insisted that I had to slur my words much more carefully—we practiced saying “Hey, man, what’s happening?” over and over again, but it was harder than formation flying … I never did get it right.

“ ‘You know,’ ” Joe said, “means ‘Um’ or ‘Duh.’ ‘Right on’ means ‘I agree emphatically,’ said only to obvious statements and usually said by dummos.”

“What is it,” I asked, “when you ‘make the scene’?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never made it.”

Though my dictionary had much about the language of drugs (marijuana is also Mary Jane, grass, pot, stuff, smoke, and Cannabis sativa; a ‘nick’ is a five-dollar bag of grass, ‘spaced out’ is how one feels while smoking it), neither of the kids had brought any along on the Cross-Country Adventure. This puzzled me, since I thought that any hippy in good standing had to smoke a pack of marijuana a day, and I asked about it.

“You smoke mostly out of boredom,” Chris said, which explained why I missed seeing them with any drugs. Fighting storms, landing in hayfields, learning formation and takeoffs and landings—boredom was not a problem that we had to face.

In the midst of my language practice I noticed the kids had begun to pick up flying jargon without any dictionaries at all.

“Hey man,” I asked Joe one day, “this word ‘rushing,’ you know, I don’t quite dig it. How do you, you know, use it in a sentence?”

“You can say, ‘Man, I’m rushing.’ It’s the feeling you get on smoke when the top of your neck feels like it’s going into the back of your head.” He thought for a while, then brightened. “It’s exactly like how you feel pulling out of a spin.” I suddenly understood about rushing.

Words like “tail-dragger,” “rag-wing,” “touch-and-go,” “loop,” “hammerhead” popped up in their talk. They learned how to pull a propeller through by hand to start an engine, they followed us on the dual controls through every slip, skid, short-field landing, and soft-field takeoff we made. Even details, they picked up. Joe had his hands full flying formation one morning and called to me in the back seat of the Cub. “Could you give me a little up trim, please?” He didn’t hear, but I had laughed at that. A week earlier, “trim up” had been something you did to a Christmas tree.

Then one evening around the fire, Chris said, “How much does an airplane cost? How much do you need to fly one for a year, say?”

“Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred dollars,” Lou told him. “Fly it for two dollars an hour …”

Joe was astonished. “Twelve hundred dollars!” There was a long silence. “That’s only six hundred apiece, Chris.”

The fly-in at Oshkosh was a carnival that left them unimpressed. They had not been caught by airplanes as much as by the idea of flight itself

, by the idea of riding some airborne motorcycle up off the ground, leaving roads and traffic lights behind, and setting out to discover America. More and more this began to occupy their thinking.

Rio, Wisconsin, was our first stop homeward. There we carried thirty passengers on joy rides over town. The kids helped the passengers into the planes, explained flying to those just come to watch, and found that it was quite possible for a fellow to break even this way, if he had a plane of his own. That afternoon we earned fifty-four dollars in contributions and donations, which bought us gas and oil and suppers for a few days to come. At Rio, the town treated us to a picnic complete with salads and hot dogs and beans and lemonade, balancing out those nights lost to wet bedrolls and hungry mosquitos.

Here Glenn and Michelle Norman left us to fly farther southeast, to meet friends and see farther into the USA.

“There’s nothing more poetic or joyful-sad,” Chris wrote in the journal, “than seeing a friend fly away in an airplane.”

South we flew, four of us now in two airplanes, south and east and north again.

For crowded skies, that Monday afternoon, we saw a total of two other airplanes in all Chicago’s metropolitan airspace.

For 1984, we saw the horses and buggies of the Indiana Amish on the country roads below, and three-horse teams hitched to plows in fields.

Our last evening out we landed in the hayfield of Mr. Roy Newton, not far from Perry Center, New York. We talked with him for a while, asking his permission to stay the night on his land.