A Gift of Wings

“There’s a time,” he had told me once, “when you have to believe the people who have already done what you want to do. You have to believe what they tell you, act on it until you’re out there proving it for yourself.”

I didn’t have to ask; that was just what he was doing this moment—believing the diagrams of lift over hills crosswind.

We lost altitude.

“Looks like that cloud might have some lift, off the right wing, couple of miles,” I said.

“It might.”

There was quiet, for a time.

“Then why don’t we cut over there while we still have the altitude to reach it?” I felt like a first-grade teacher with a slow pupil.

“Yes. Well. Look off to the left, too. There’s great lift, ten miles off in that cu. But it’s not on course. If we made it over there we could climb, all right, but we’d be ten miles off course, and use all our altitude getting back on. So why make the detour? All we’d do is waste time, go nowhere. That’s happened to a lot of good pilots. Won’t happen to me, if I can help it.”

“Get high and stay high,” I quoted at him. He didn’t even blink.

What a lousy day! We were down to fifteen hundred feet, in the middle of a bunch of sink, and no place to land but trees. The air was stagnant heavy stuff, like clear granite rock. This was worse than ever. In the parking lot, at least, there would have been people to help us pick up the wreck. Here there wasn’t even a lookout tower in the forest. We’d crash unseen.

“What do you know,” he said, rolling the glider hard to the right.

“What’s up? What are you doing?”

“Look. A sailplane.”

It was a pure white 1-26, circling in a thermal not half a mile away. I thought we had been alone, when we left the hill, but there had been somebody out here ahead of us all the time, and now he marked a thermal.

“Thanks, fella, whoever you are.” Maybe we both said that.

We slipped in beneath the other Schweizer, and at once the variometer showed two hundred feet per minute climb. It doesn’t look like much, on paper, but two hundred feet per minute over a horizon-wide pine forest is a lovely sight. We worked that lift all patient and careful, and by the time we left it, we had had another four thousand feet in the bank. The other sailplane had long since departed on course.

“That was kind of him, to mark that thermal for us,” I said.

“What do you mean?” He sounded annoyed. “He didn’t mark it for us. He found the thermal for himself and used it for his own climb. You think he made that climb for our sake? He couldn’t have helped us an inch unless we were ready to be helped. If we didn’t see him, back there, or if we saw him and didn’t believe we could use the lift he found, we’d probably be sitting on some pine branch by now.”

Just as we left the thermal, we looked down and saw another sailplane gliding down low into the base of it, finding the lift, turning to climb in it.

“See?” he said. “That fellow there is probably thanking us for marking the lift, but we didn’t even know he was there till now. Funny, isn’t it? We make our own climb, and it turns out that we’ve done somebody else a favor.”

The mountains gave way to flatland toward the end of the day. I was riding along, not thinking much, when he said, “Look there.”

There was a wide green field, by the road, and in the center of the field was a sailplane, landed.

“Too bad,” he said, with an odd sorrow in his voice.

It startled me to hear him say that.

“Too bad? What do you mean?”

“The poor guy came all this way, and now he’s out of the contest, sitting down there in that field.”

“You must be tired,” I said. “He’s not out. The distance he made counts for score, and those points add on to the points he’ll make tomorrow and the next day. Anyway, that’s not a bad feeling, once in a while, to be down at last and out of the competition for a time, just lying on the grass, resting, knowing you’ll fly again.”

As we watched, a blue station wagon drove carefully from the road into the field, towing a long narrow sailplane-trailer. It would be a good time. The ground crew would chide the pilot for not doing better, till he lived the flight again for them and proved that he had done his best, every minute. Some things he probably learned, so he might fly a little more skillfully next time. Tomorrow the same pilot would be born again to the competition, at the end of a different towline.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s not bad at all. It’s exactly right. Forgive me for being so blind.”

“That’s OK.” I couldn’t tell if he had been testing me or not. He does that, sometimes.