A Gift of Wings

“That wasn’t too smart,” I said. “You could have worked another two hundred feet out of that tow, and herded him around …”

“I wanted to be free,” he said, as if that was some kind of an answer.

To his credit, though, he did turn directly on course, pointing the nose into the wind toward the goal, forty miles distant. It was not an easy task, an upwind goal in a 1-26. To make it worse, there was a great blue hole of dead air between us and the first cumulus across the valley.

It was going to be a long tough glide to reach them, and by then we might well be too low, we might glide in beneath their rising air. He kept the nose on course, and increased airspeed to best penetration through the sinking air. Most of the other sailplanes, I noticed, stayed around the hill after release, working the ridge lift; and waiting for a thermal to give them safe altitude for a leap across the valley. A lovely sight, they were, wheeling and soaring in the quiet of the sun. Yet all the while they circled, I knew, they were watching us, to see if our try to penetrate at once would pay off. If it did, they’d follow.

I wasn’t sure what I would have done, if I were flying. It is all very romantic and daring to go blasting off on course directly after release, but if you don’t make it, if the sink presses you right down to the ground, you’re dead, you’re out of the game. Of course, you’re dead if you spend all day in the ridge lift on Harris Hill, too. The game is to reach the goal, and that takes just the right blend of bravery and caution. The others had opened with caution; my friend had chosen bravery. We flew directly away from the hill, sinking three hundred feet per minute.

“You’re right,” he said, reading my doubt, “Another minute in this sink and we won’t be able to glide back to the hill at all. But don’t you agree? Sooner or later, doesn’t a man have to turn his back on the safety of towplanes and ridge lift and set off on his own, no matter what?”

“I guess.”

But maybe if we had waited, some thermals would have cooked off in the valley. As it was, we could stay in the air for another five minutes, and then we’d be forced to pick a field and land. I started looking for fields, a little sullen. maybe, thinking more that we should have waited, like the others. I like soaring. I don’t like to throw away what might have been a two- or three-hour flight in some seven-minute speed dash for the ground, just because this guy feels daring. Four hundred feet per minute down.

“A man’s got to do his best,” he said.

“Your best is different from my best. Next time, let me fly the sailplane, OK?”

“No.” He meant it, too. He flew every flight we made together, except for a minute or two, now and then. He has made some terrible mistakes, in his time, but there have been some beautiful good flights, too, I have to admit. Mistakes or not, beauty or not, he never lets me fly.

Three hundred feet per minute down, nine hundred feet over the ground.

“This is it,” I said. “Get your harness tight as it will go.”

He didn’t answer, turning toward a paved parking lot in the sunlight. “Maybe not.”

The game was over. I knew it. We were dead. Set up for the parking lot, which was too short to land in, and he’ll scatter sailplane all over the place. No other place to land … wires, trees, roads. Two hundred feet per minute, sliding through seven hundred feet.

“You did it this time, buddy, you really did it!” It was all over but the crash. He wasn’t a good enough pilot to land a 1-26 in that space without bending it. A.J. Smith could bring it off, maybe, but this guy, with just a few hours in a 1-26, not a chance. I pulled my harness tighter. Blast, I thought. If I was flying, we would have been safe now in the ridge lift at the hill. But he’s flying, with all that romantic bravado, and now we’re one minute from disaster.

“Well. How about that,” he said. “Lift at last! Two-fifty, three hundred feet per minute up!”

He banked the Schweizer hard to the left, circling in a tight narrow thermal over the parking lot. It was quiet for a long while, as he worked the lift.

“Notice,” he said at last, “six hundred feet per minute climb, and we’re through twenty-five hundred feet!”

“Yeah. Sometimes you have the most fantastic luck.”

“Think it’s luck? Maybe so. Maybe not. Believe in lift, never give up the search for it, and I bet you turn out luckier than the man who gives up at a thousand feet. And a fellow hasn’t a prayer of reaching his goal unless he somehow learns to find lift for himself, don’t you think?”

We rode the lift to four thousand five hundred feet and he set off again on course.

“That little thermal saved your neck,” I said, “and you leave it, turn your back on it without so much as a fare-thee-well.” I was mostly joking, making a little fun of his dreamer’s ways.

“Right. No farewell. Does us no good to stay around after we’ve gone as high as we can go. Clinging to old lift is for the nonbelievers. Happens over and again. The only real security for a glider is knowing that the sky has other thermale, invisible, waiting. It’s just a matter of learning how to find what’s already there.”

“Hm,” I said. It sounded logical enough with four thousand five hundred feet in our bank, but the philosophy was no comfort back there when I thought we had bought us a parking lot.

We pressed along in zero sink for a while, then even that faded and we started down again. We reached the cumulus, all right, but there was no lift there at all. There should have been lift, but there wasn’t. I felt hot, suddenly. Below us was the edge of a vast pine forest, hard mountain country—we needed that lift.

“Two-hundred-foot sink,” I said. “What do you plan to do now?”

“Guess I’ll stay on course. I think that’s the right thing to do, sink or not.”

The right thing. It’s always hard to do the right thing, soaring cross-country. In rising air, for instance, you’re supposed to slow down, just when you feel like pushing along on course with the no

se down for speed. In falling air, when you feel like holding the nose up, that’s when you have it put down, to increase speed and get through the sink as fast as you can. To his credit, then, he set the nose down and penetrated, though we were well out over those hills all spiny with trees, dropping through twenty-five hundred feet with no place to land. He flew as if he had studied textbooks on soaring. Further, he flew as though he trusted that the textbooks were true.