A Gift of Wings

We can throw a DC-8 into the sky instead of a Nieuport Veestrutter, and we can throw it from a two-mile sheet of reinforced concrete instead of a muddy pasture, but the sky that the DC-8 whispers through is the same sky that held Glenn Curtiss and Mick Mannock and Wiley Post. We can blow islands out of the sea and change pioneers’ wagon trails to six-lane superhighways, but the sky is the same sky it always has been, with the same hazards and the same rewards for those who journey it.

Real flight, my friend taught me, is the spirit of an airplane lifting the spirit of its pilot into the high clean blue of the sky, where they join to share the smooth taste of joy and freedom. Like trucks and trains, airplanes have become matter-of-fact and accepted workhorses, their soul and their character aren’t so easily seen as they once were. But they’re still there.

Even though you cannot find an industry that doesn’t benefit from flight and though there are thousands of reasons to fly airplanes, in the beginning men flew only for the sake of flying. Wilbur and Orville Wright didn’t bring the powered airplane into the world to move cargo or to fight battles in the sky. They invented it for the same selfish reason that Lilienthal held tightly to his cloth-and-bamboo wings and leaped from his pyramid: they wanted to be free of the ground. That is pure flight, followed for the joy of traveling through the air as an end in itself. And every once in a while we ask, “What are you, airplane?”

Barnstorming today

When he had tightened the safety belt down over the two passengers in the front, and shut the little half-door on their leather-rimmed cockpit, Stu MacPherson held for a moment in the propeller blast by my windshield.

“You’ve got two first-timers, and one’s a little scared.”

I nodded and lowered my goggles, and pushed the throttle forward into a great roaring burst of sound and wind.

What brave people! They battle the fear of all the air-crash headlines they’ve read, they put their trust in an airplane nearly forty years old and a pilot they’ve never seen before, just so that for ten minutes they can do in fact the thing they’ve only done in dreams … fly.

The rough ground jolts hard under the wheels as we begin to roll forward … bit of right rudder here, and the ground is a green-felt blur beneath us … back on the control stick—touch it back and the thunder of the biplane moving along the ground ceases …

The bright sunburst biplane skims the grass tops, tearing and slicing the warm summer air with spinning propeller and cat’s-cradle flying wires, and angles on up into the sky. My brave passengers look at each other in the roar of the wind and laugh.

We lift up over the grass; higher, over a field of kelly-green corn; higher still, over a wooded river lost away in mid-year Illinois. The tiny home town rests gently by the river, cooled by multiple hundreds of leafy shade trees and a faint breeze from the water. The town is an inpost of mankind. Men have been born, worked, and died here since the early nineteenth century. And there it is, nine hundred feet beneath us as we circle in the breeze, with its hotel, cafe, and gas station, its baseball game and children selling three-cent lemonade on dark-shadowed front lawns.

Worth being brave for, this view? Only the passengers can answer that. I just fly the airplane. I’m just trying to prove that a gypsy pilot, barnstorming, can exist today.

“SEE YOUR TOWN FROM THE AIR!” are our opening words to a hundred small towns. “COME UP WITH US WHERE ONLY BIRDS AND ANGELS FLY! RIDE A TESTED AND TRUE OPEN-COCKPIT BIPLANE, FEEL THAT COOL WIND THAT BLOWS WAY UP OVER TOWN! THREE DOLLARS THE FLIGHT! GUARANTEED TO BE LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE DONE BEFORE!”

From town to town we had flown, sometimes with a companion airplane, sometimes just the parachute jumper and me in our biplane. Across Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois again. County fairs, homecomings, and quiet days of quiet weeks in summer America. The cool lake towns of the north, the baked farm towns of the south; we buzzed our way, a bright dragonfly-machine carrying the promise of new views, and a chance to see away over the horizon.

More than our passengers, though, it is we who looked over the horizon, and on the other side we found that time was dead in its tracks.

Just which moment time chose to stop in the little towns of the Midwest is not easy to say. But it was clearly during a pleasant hour, in a happy time, when the minutes suddenly ceased moving one into another, when the real things ceased to change. Time stopped, I think, one day in 1929.

Those huge heavy trees of the park are there as they have always been. The bandstand, high-curbed Main Street, and the wood-frescoed, glass-front Emporium with a gold-leaf sign and a four-bladed fan stirring the air. White lap-strake churches; open-front porches in twilight; hedge clippers chopping the boundary between one house and another. The same bicycles lying right-side-down by the same gray-painted wooden doorsteps. And we found, flying, that we were part of the sameness, part of the pattern, a thread without which the fabric of town life would not have been complete. In 1929 the barnstormers chugged and clattered about the Midwest in their flake-painted, oil-throwing biplanes, landing in hayfields and on little strips of grass, diverting anyone ready for diversion, impressing anyone ready to be impressed.

The sound of our 1929 Wright airplane engine fitted precisely into the music of these timeless home towns. Even the same boys came out to meet us, with their same black-patch dogs running at their heels.

“Wow! That’s a real airplane! Tommy, look! A real airplane!”

“What’s it made out of, mister?”

“Can we sit in the pilot’s seat?”

“Careful, Billy! You’ll tear the canvas!”

Looks of utter awe, without a word spoken.

“Where did you come from?”

The hardest of all questions. Where did we come from? We came from where the barnstormers always come from—from somewhere out over the horizon beyond the meadow. And when we go, we’ll disappear over the horizon where we always disappear.

But here we are, flying, and my two brave passengers have forgotten what a headline looks like.

Throttle back, and the engine’s roar is supplanted by a polished silver fan spinning on the biplane’s nose, and the whistling hush of air over wings and through streamlined wires. We circle now over the field where we will land, to view a crowd of boys, a dog, an olive-drab pile of sleeping bags and cockpit covers that is a gypsy pilot’s home. Whistling, hushing, turning down across the cornfield … gliding quietly and bam we’re down and rolling over the rough ground at fifty miles an hour, at forty, at twenty, at ten and then the black engine comes alive again to trundle us, rocking awkwardly on tall old wheels, back to where it all began. I push my goggles up on the leather helmet.

Stu is on the wing before we stop, opening the door, guiding the passengers back to solid ground. “How did you like the ride?”

A loaded question. We know how they liked the ride, how every first-timer has liked his ride since back before the clock stopped turning in the little towns of the Central States.

“Great! Nice ride, mister, thank y’.” And turning away, “Lester, your house’s no bigger than a corncob! Aw, it’s great. Town’s a lot bigger than you’d think. You can see clear on off down the road. It’s really fine. Dan, you ought to give it a try.”