A Gift of Wings

We didn’t bring any money.

Maybe tomorrow.

By the time he returns to the biplane I’m stretched out in the shade under the wing.

“This must not be a very air-minded town,” he says.

“Win a few lose a few. You want to pull out tonight or tomorrow?”

“You’re flying the airplane.”

It feels funny. The city is a different place, but that’s not what is strange about it. All the towns have been different.

It is a different time. Here in the city it is 1967. The year has sharp edges and angles that cut into us, that make us alien and out of our element. Traffic hums on the highway at the airport’s edge. Modern airplanes come and go, all built of metal, with wide radio-filled instrument panels and powered by new and smooth-running engines.

A gypsy-pilot barnstormer can’t exist in 1967, but at the same time he can. There’s a big difference, some places.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Where to?”

“South. Anywhere. Let’s just get out of here.”

Half an hour later we’re up in the wind, up in the engine roar and the propeller blast. Stu is encompassed with gear, the tip of our FLY $3 FLY sign and the blue-and-white of his parachute sleeve, still field-packed, show above his cockpit rim. The sun shines in over the right side of the stabilizer, so we are heading off southeast somewhere. It doesn’t make any difference where we are headed; the only thing that matters is that we’re doing it now.

And all at once, there it is. Another small town of trees and church spires, a wide field to the west, a little lake. A town that we have never seen before, but one that we know in every last detail. We circle three times over the corner of Maple and Main, to see a few folks looking up and a few boys running to their bicycles. A turn west, and a moment later, propeller fanning silently around as I pull the throttle back, our old wheels whisper in the old green grass and the old ground rumbles hard beneath us.

Stu is out with the sign at once, striding to the road and the first of the curious townspeople, “SEE YOUR TOWN FROM THE AIR!”

I can hear him as I unload our sleeping bags and engine cover from the cockpits, and his voice comes clear on the clear summer air.

“COME UP WITH US WHERE ONLY BIRDS AND ANGELS FLY! GUARANTEED TO BE LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE DONE BEFORE!”

We are back where we belong. Never having been here, we are home again.

A piece of ground

There is a feeling about an airport that no other piece of ground can have. No matter what the name of the country on whose land it lies, an airport is a place you can see and touch that leads to a reality that can only be thought and felt.

Come out to the airport an hour before you fly, and just look at it, before you get involved in oil levels and elevator hinges and master switch ON. There’s a row of lightplanes in their places, planes that have been there to taxi around as you roll toward the runway and take off. Look at them again. There stands a pert-nosed Cessna 140, her silver canvas windshield cover tied carefully in place. She’s not just an airplane, or two thousand dollars’ worth of rivets and bolts, but a man’s key to relaxation and satisfaction, his way of getting up and away from the problems of people who live out their lives on the ground. Next Saturday, or perhaps every Tuesday afternoon, the windshield cover comes off and the ropes are untied. He calls “Clear!” and forgets the latest threats of nuclear war. Those, and worries about traffic tickets and W-2 forms and tie-down fees are blown back wi

th the propwash to flatten the grass behind the tailwheel. Then he’s gone and the ropes that held his airplane lie free on the ground.

Down the line near the hangar is a light twin with a company emblem on the fuselage. “You get tired of flying after the first four or five thousand hours,” the gray-haired company pilot likes to say. Every once in a while, though, he’ll smile a little as his bright propellers blur into life and if he hadn’t denied it, you’d say he wasn’t tired at all.

Look at the runway some morning when no one is flying. It lies still and quiet and is so simple: a field of asphalt. What is it then that gives a runway its mysterious, almost eerie quality of the unknown?

It is the steppingstone to flight. A runway is a constant that is found only where flight touches ground. In all the vastness of a country, in all its highways and fields and mountains and plains, flight is found only where a runway is found. The busiest city is isolated without one. The smallest farm is touched with life if there is a dirt strip out along the road. It may stand alone and deserted for weeks, but if an area on the ground can have patience, that short band of dirt has it. That time always comes when a man and his airplane seek it out, over anywhere else on earth, and come down, wheels clouding the dust, to land.

Have you ever stood in the center of a deserted runway? If you have, you know that the most striking thing about it is that it is so quiet. Airports have come to be synonyms for noise and activity, but even the runways of an international airport are frozen in silence. An engine run-up that rattles the glass in buildings on the flight line is only the bare whisper of a distant buzzing fly when it is heard from the runway. The snap of voices and radio signals exists only in airplane cabins; the runway itself takes no notice of words buried in VHF. The runway is quiet as a cathedral is quiet, and only if you listen for them can you hear sounds that come from beyond its boundary. Even the little pebbles and rocks along the edge of a runway are very special ones and—part of the world of flight—are as alien to the earth as the runway itself is alien to it.

As you stand on the broad paved field, you have at your feet the record of hundreds of landings, made in all kinds of airplanes by all kinds of pilots. The long, smooth, tapered streaks of heavy black rubber came from wheels under a man who was looking far down the runway, yet knew that beneath him the tires still had another inch and a half to descend before they touched the ground. That man has flown airplanes to ten thousand landings, and he knows many things about many places where runways lie.

Short, sudden lines of thin black abound on the asphalt surface, for on the edges of the field is a school that teaches people how to fly airplanes. These lines were made by people whose minds were crowded with the mechanics of landings, concentration on just the right amount of wing-down to offset the drift, on the stick coming back and back to hold the wheels off the ground, ready on the rudders, don’t forget the carb heat on the go-around.

There is a hard set of urgent black streaks halfway down the runway, and seconds after those appeared, the air a few inches above the pavement heated in the smoke of brake discs held hard against spinning steel. There are grooves in the overrun dirt that change to hard black where they meet the runway. Just beyond the halfway mark is one curving streak that ends abruptly where the asphalt stops; the grass growing in line beyond it looks as if it has been growing there just as long as the other grass by the side of the runway, but of course it hasn’t. It was once bare churned dirt beneath a cloud of grass and dust and rubber that led to the ragged tire of a war-surplus fighter.

The runway holds all this in its patient memory, along with memories of brilliant landing lights slashing the night’s low clouds to throw grass shadows on the first inch of hard surface, and the sharp picture of a Waco biplane inverted at the top of a loop, its propeller an unmoving blade above the eyes of a silent watching crowd. In the memory of that runway is the cartwheeling cloud of splinters where an antique trainer landed on a broken gear.