The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

I put the phone down in its cradle. "DONE!" I shouted to the empty room. "IT'S DONE!" Our fugitive was in our arms again, safely down from the ledge. I felt light as a mountain-summer sailplane launched for the stratosphere.

There's an alternate me this moment, I thought, veering sharp away, turned left out the fork in the road where I turned right. This moment in a different time, Richard-then hung up on Leslie-then after an hour or ten, or he didn't call her in the first place. He dropped her letter in the wastebas-ket, caught a cab to the airport, took off and climbed northeast, he levelled at nine-thousand-five and he ran to Montana. After that, when I looked for him, everything went dark.

thirty-three

"I CAN'T do it," she said. "I try, Richie; I'm

scared to death, but I try. I start the spin, we're diving straight down and spinning, and then I black out! The next thing I know we're level again and Sue is saying, 'Lesliel.Are you all right'?" She looked at me, dejected, hopeless. "How can she teach me-how can I learn spins if I black out?"

Hollywood disappeared four hundred miles over the horizon west, my Florida house sold, we lived in a trailer parked in ten thousand square miles of Arizona sagebrush and mountains, on the fringe of an airport for gliders. Estrella Sailport. Sunset like clouds soaked in jet-fuel and lit afire on a noiseless match. Sailplanes parked smooth seamless sponges for the light, dripping crimsons and melted-gold into pools on the sand.

"Dear little wook," I told her. "You know it, I know it, it is useless for us to fight what is true: there is nothing that

Leslie Parrish cannot do when she sets her mind to do it. And against that, a simple little thing like learning spins in a glider, it doesn't have a chance. You are in control of that flying-machine!"

"But I faint," she said sullenly. "It's hard to be in control when you're unconscious."

I went to the trailer's micro-closet, found our little broom, brought it to her where she sat on the edge of the bed. "Here's your control stick, the handle of this broom," I said. "Let's do it together, we'll do spins right here on the ground till you get bored."

"I'm not bored, I'm terrified!"

"You won't be. The broom is your control-stick, your feet are on the rudder pedals, pretend. Now here you are way up in the sky, flying along straight and level, and now you ease the stick back slowly, slowly, and the glider's nose comes up and it's going to shudder now, it's going to stall the way you want it to, and keep the stick back and the nose drops and NOW you stomp on full right rudder, that's right, hold the stick back and count the spins: one . . . two . . . three . . . count every time Montezuma Peak turns around the nose. Three, and stomp on the left rudder, at the same time move that stick forward, just forward of neutral, the spin's already stopped, and you lightly ease the nose back up to level flight. That's all there is to it. Was that so hard?"

"Not here in the trailer."

"Do it some more and it'll get easy in the airplane, too, I promise. I went through the same thing and I know what I am talking about. I was terrified of spins, too. Now again. Here we are in level flight, and you ease the stick back . . ."

Spins, the most frightening lesson in basic flying. So

frightening that the government dropped the requirement for spin instruction years ago ... students reached spin-training and they quit flying. But Laszlo Horvath, the national soaring champion who owns Estrella, Horvath insisted that every student learn spin-recoveries before solo. How many pilots had been killed because they fell into a spin and didn't know how to recover? Too many, he thought, and it wasn't going to happen at his sailport.

"You want the bottom to drop out right here," I told her, "that's what's supposed to happen. You want the nose to point straight down and the world to go whirling round and round! If it doesn't do that, you're doing it wrong! Again . . ."

It was Leslie's test to confront that fear, vault over it and learn to fly an airplane that didn't even have an engine to keep it up.

My test was a different fear. I promised that I'd learn from her how to love, to drop my frozen Perfect Woman and let Leslie as close to me as she would let me to her. Each trusted the other to be gentle, no barbs or daggers in that quiet place.

The trailer in the desert had been my idea. If this experiment in exclusivity could blow up, I wanted it to explode quickly and get it over with. What better test than to live two of us in a tiny room under a plastic roof, without a private corner for escape? How better challenge people intensely private? If we could find delight in that, month after month, we had found a miracle.

Instead of snarling, pressed together so, we thrived.

We ran with each other at sunrise, hiked in the desert with flower-handbooks and field-guides in our pockets, flew sailplanes, had two-day talks, four-day talks, studied Span-260

ish, breathed clean air, photographed sunsets, began a lifetime's training to understand one and only one other human being besides ourselves: where did we come from, what had we learned, how might we build a different world if it were up to us to build it?

We wore our premiere best for dinner, desert-flowers in a vase on our candle-lit table; we talked and listened to music till the candles melted out.

"Boredom between two people," she said one evening, "doesn't come from being together, physically. It comes from being apart, mentally and spiritually." Obvious to her, it was such a startling thought to me that I wrote it down. So far, I thought, we don't have to worry about boredom. But one can never promise for the future. . . .

The day came, I stood on the ground and watched her meet her dragon, stood in the rumbling blast of a towplane pulling her trainer aloft for spin-practice. In minutes the white cross of the glider released from the towline way overhead, alone and quiet. It slowed, stopped in the air and Whush! the nose dropped and wings swirled, a cotton-color maple-seed falling, failing-and smoothly recovered, eased out of its dive, to slow, to stop in the air and spin again.

Leslie Parrish, not so long ago a prisoner of her fear of light-planes, today in control of the lightest plane of any, bidding it do its worst: spins left, spins right, half-turns and recover, three turns and recover; all the way down to minimum altitude, then floated into the pattern and landed.

The glider touched down, rolled smoothly on its single wheel toward a stripe limed white on the dirt runway, stopped within feet of it. The left wing gradually tilted down to touch the ground and her test was done.

I ran toward her on the runway, heard a cry of triumph

across the distance from inside the cockpit, her instructor rejoicing. "You did it! You spun it by yourself, Leslie! Hurray!"