A Gift of Wings

“Course you can stay here,” he said. “Except you won’t light any fires, will you? The straw around …”

“No fires, Mr. Newton.” we promised. “Thanks very much for letting us stay.”

Later, it was Chris who spoke. “You can sure get away with murder, in an airplane.”

“Murder, Chris?”

“Suppose we had come along with a car, or on bikes, or walking. What are the chances he’d be so nice about letting us stay here like this? But with airplanes, because it’s getting dark, we’re welcome to land!”

It didn’t sound fair, but that’s just the way it is. That is a privilege one has, as a pilot, and it was not lost on the kids.

Next day we were landed back to Sussex Airport, New Jersey, and the Invitational Cross-Country Adventure was officially finished. Ten days, two thousand miles, thirty hours of flying.

“I’m sad,” Joe said. “It’s all over. It was great and now it’s all over.”

It wasn’t till late night that I opened the journal once more, and noticed that Chris Kask had made one last entry in it.

“I learned a tremendous amount,” he had written. “This has opened my mind to a whole bunch of things that exist outside of Hicksville, L.I. I’ve got a new perspective on things. I’m able to stand back from everything a little more and see it from a different viewpoint. Something I’ve felt on this is that it’s an important thing not only to me but to everyone along and to everyone we met, and I realized this while it was happening, which is a very heady feeling. It caused many tangible and many intangible changes in my mind and emotions. Thanks.”

There was my answer, there’s what we can say to the kids who say “Peace” instead of “Hello.” We can say “Freedom,” and by the grace of a secondhand rag-wing lightplane, we can show them what we mean.

Think black

Think black. Think it above and below and all around you. Not a pitch black, but just a darkness without horizon or moon to give it reference or light.

Think red. Put some softly in front of you, on the instrument panel. Let it barely show twenty-two instrument faces with ghostly needles pointing to dim markings. Let the red flood gently around to your left and right. If you look, you can just see your left hand on the thick throttle, and your right holding the button-studded grip of the control stick.

But don’t look inside, look out and to the right. Ten feet from the plexiglass that keeps pressure around you is a spot of red light, flashing.

It’s attached to the left wingtip of the lead airplane in the formation. You know that the plane is an F-86F; that its wings are swept to a thirty-five-degree angle; that in its fuselage is a J47-GE-27 axial-flow jet engine, six fifty-caliber machine guns, a cockpit like yours, and a man. But you take it all on faith; you see only a dim red light, flashing.

Think sound. A dynamo’s whine behind you, eerie, low and unceasing. Somewhere on the dim panel in front, an instrument is telling you that the engine is putting out ninety-five percent of its rpm; that fuel is being fed to it at a pressure of two hundred pounds per square inch; that there is thirty pounds of oil pressure at the bearings; that the temperature in the tailpipe, behind the combustion chambers and the spinning turbine wheel, is five hundred seventy degrees Centigrade. You hear the whine.

Think sound. Think the hiss of light static in the foam-rubber earphones of your crash helmet. Static that three other men in a sixty-foot radius are hearing. A sixty-foot radius at thirty-six thousand feet, four men alone-together swishing through the thin black air.

Push with your left thumb and four men can hear you talk, can hear how you feel, seven miles above a ground you cannot see. Dark ground, buried under miles of dark air. But you don’t talk, and neither do they. Four men alone with their thoughts, flying on the flashing light of the leader’s airplane.

Everything else about your life is normal, and everyday common. You go to the supermarket; the gas station; you say, “Let’s eat out tonight!” But every once in a while you are far away from that world. In the high blackness of a star-studded sky.

“Checkmate, oxygen check.”

You slide your plane out a little from the flashing light and look into the dim red of your cockpit. Hiding in a corner is a luminous needle, pointing two-fifty. Now your thumb hits the microphone button, there’s reason to talk.

Your own words sound strange in your ears after the long quiet. “Checkmate Two, oxygen normal, two-fifty.”

Other voices in the black:

“Checkmate Three, oxygen normal, two-thirty.”

“Checkmate Four, oxygen normal, two-thirty.”

Silence pours back in, and you close again on the flashing red light.

What makes me different from the man behind me in the grocery line? you wonder. Maybe he thinks I’m different because I have the glory-filled job of a jet fighter pilot. He thinks of me in terms of gun-camera film in the newsreels, and a silver blur of speed at an air show. The film and the speed are just part of my job, as preparing the annual budget report is part of his. My job doesn’t make me any different. Yet I know that I am different, because I have a chance that he doesn’t. I can go places he will never see, unless he looks up into the stars.

Still, it isn’t my being here that sets me apart from those who spend their lives on the ground, it’s the effect this high, lonely place has on me. I get impressions that can’t be equaled anywhere else, impressions that he’ll never feel. Just to think of the reality of the space outside this cockpit is a strange feeling. Eleven inches to my right, eleven to my left, is a place where man can’t live, where he doesn’t belong. We flick through it like frightened deer across an open meadow, knowing that to stop is to flirt with death.

You make tiny automatic motions with the stick, correcting to keep in position on the flashing light.