A Gift of Wings

My chief instructor caught me before I was out of the airplane.

“You’re back! We searched a solid week, looking for you from here to Cheyenne! We thought you were dead!”

“Not dead. Not dead at all. Just coming alive,” I said. And beginning a tradition, I added, “Sir.”

South to Toronto

The reason that a lot of adventures begin in this world is that the adventurers sit by the fire in comfortable living rooms and they haven’t the faintest mist of an idea of what they are letting themselves in for. They stretch out in that easy chair and there is no such thing as cold or wet or wind or storm and they say well it’s about time somebody discovered the North Pole and they lapse into a dream of glories and an hour later, dreaming still, they set wheels turning, maps unfolding, cogging other warm adventurers’ lives to changing, to saying “Why not?” and “Jove! It should be done! Count me in!”—themselves tranced in a fantasy where hardship and trouble are only words that faint hearts look up in dictionaries.

Poke the fire, then, sit here in this warm chair, and let me spin you an adventure.

BARNSTORM WINTER CANADA!

What a sight, all those little towns snowed north of America, huddling through a white-quartz winter waiting for somebody to drop down from the sky and bring them colors and thrills in ten-minute hops to see their town from the air, three dollars the ride! And what a sound—that soft virgin February sighing to the touch of our skis! None of the problems of summer barnstorming here, no endless searching for pastures and hayfields smooth enough and long enough and close enough to town … why, all the world will be a place to land! Lakes are frozen flat, bigger than a hundred Kennedy Airports; every field that’s rough in summer, or planted in tender crops, is a smooth perfect runway for our Cubs. Let’s prove there’s still room in the world for man individual, man challenging Canada winter to do its worst to keep him f

rom bringing the gift of flight into the lives of those who have never been off the ground! How about it? The Canadians, after all, are frontiersmen, up there, with red-checked mackinaws and blue wool caps; axe in one hand, canoe in other, laughing all the time at danger—no hesitating there to buy our tickets! We’ll fly up there for February, be home by March with the wilderness a part of our soul, the frontier alive again within us, the way it used to be!

That was all I had to spin to myself to be convinced. That, and letters from Glenn Norman and Robin Lawless, Canadians, woodsmen turned airplane pilots, no doubt, inviting me to stop by Toronto, someday.

Toronto! What a sound! A real Canadian outpost in the snowfields, Utopia for barnstormers! I stirred from the fire and got out the maps.

Toronto looks a little larger than one expects a wilderness outpost to look, but beyond it there are thousands of much smaller wilderness outposts, for miles around. Fenelon Falls, Barrie, Orillia, Owen Sound, Pentanguinishe. There are a dozen towns on the shores of Lake Simcoe alone, thirty miles from Toronto, and they are mere doorways to the teeming villages north and east and west. Imagine waking in the dawn, looking out from your warm sleeping bag under the wing, and finding the sign there in the ice:

PENTANGUINISHE!

My reply to the Canadians went out by return mail … would they be interested in joining the Winter Wonderland Flying Circus as wilderness guides? The wheels of adventure had begun to turn.

I sent letters the same day to American pilots with light planes and skis, mentioning that space was available in Canada for February.

Russell Munson signed on, with his Super Cub, the moment he got the news. All at once we had a starting date; on January 29th our two planes would touch their skis in Toronto, on January 30th we’d be off north, into high adventure.

We prepared all through January. I found a pair of used Cub skis in a hangar on Long Island, Munson found a pair of new ones in a factory in Alaska. We went through the flight over and again in his New York office—what must we be sure to take along?

Warm clothes, of course, and before a week was by we were clomping around the airfield in parkas and multilayer wools and insulated snowboots. Wing and engine covers, and we were enveloped in yards of sheet plastic and burlap, sewing them together just so. Hand-warmers for us, engine-warmers for the Cubs, inflatable tents, space blankets, survival kits, maps, spare parts, tools, cans of oil, sleigh bells for the skis. It is remarkable how much equipment one needs for a simple Canadian wilderness barnstorming tour.

My airplane was painted in enamel milk, which would never do; what customer would notice a white Cub parked on a snowbank? For the next three days I laid masking tape in candy stripes across the top of the wings and tail while Ed Kalish sprayed bright red over it all and remembered his days mechanicking at God’s Cape, north of Hudson Bay.

“Got there one day,” he said from a scarlet cloud of Dulux, “and it was seventy degrees below zero!”

My parka, the warmest garment I owned, was rated to fifty below.

“Had to start the engines with blowtorches up the exhaust stacks, turning the props backwards and getting the cylinders warm through the valves.”

I went out that day and bought a propane blowtorch. And figured if I had to, I could stuff my parka with leaves.

Of the two other pilots I had invited, one wrote to say that he felt that Canada in February might be a little chilly … hadn’t I meant we’d barnstorm Nassau?

When I finally replied that this flying circus was heading north, he wished me luck. I remember thinking that there was a strange reason to cancel adventure, because it would be cold. He had advised me to recall that the Cub had no cabin heater at all, but somehow that bounced off me like moose off ice.

The other pilot, Ken Smith, would meet us in Toronto on January 29th.

That gave us three Cubs, three pilots, and a pair of wilderness guides. We needed one more airplane, a Canadian, to join us so that we could be a true international circus, but I had no doubt that there would be dozens of CF aircraft ready to go along when we arrived in their country.

By mid-January the lakes were turning to ice all over Canada. New England ski resorts had opened for business and a few large snowflakes fell on Long Island.

On the night of the 20th I practiced sleeping among those flakes. It was only twenty degrees Fahrenheit outside, quite a bit warmer than we’d be having in Canada, but any test was better than none. Twenty degrees, I discovered, is actually quite cold. This was discovered some time around three in the morning. It wasn’t that the tent had failed, or the space blanket wasn’t working, but that the cold, after waiting that long, comes around and attacks the sleeper through the ground. I could think warm, all right, and fight it, but it took such a concentrated effort conjuring Saharas and bonfires that there was no time left for sleeping. At four I gave up and dragged tent and all back into the house. It was then that I began to think that while this was a lark for us, chasing this adventure, it was no game for winter. We were pointed dead-on into what the Air Force used to call a “survival situation” … men froze to death in warmer climates than February Canada! I packed an extra blanket at once.

Norman and Lawless flew to check out Lake Simcoe. The lake was frozen solid, the day they did, and the temperature was thirty below.