Nothing by Chance

The old-timers, I thought, suddenly. How many of them ever survived, leading a gypsy-pilot’s life?

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS ALL SIMPLE AND free and a very good life. The barnstorming pilots, back in the twenties, just cranked their Jennies into the air and they flew to any little town and they landed. And then they took passengers up for joy-rides and they earned great bales of money. What free men, the barnstormers! What a pure life that must have been.

These same sky gypsies, full of years, had closed their eyes and told me of a sun fresh and cool and yellow like I had never seen, with grass so green it sparkled under the wheels; a sky blue and pure like skies never come, anymore, and clouds whiter than Christmas in the air. A land there was, in the old days, where a man could go in freedom, flying where he wanted to fly, and when; answering to no authority but his own.

I had asked questions and I had listened carefully to the old pilots, and way in the back of my mind I wondered if a man might be able to do the same thing today, out in the great calm Midwest America.

“On our own, kid,” I heard. “Aw, it used to be great. Weekdays we’d sleep late, and work on the airplanes till supper-time, then we’d carry folks up to sunset and beyond. Special times, pshaw, a thousand-dollar day was nothin’. Weekends we’d start flyin’ at sunup and we wouldn’t stop till midnight. Lines of people waitin’ to fly, lines of ’em. Great life, kid. Used to get up in the morning… we’d sew a couple blankets together, sleep under the wing … get up and say, ‘Freddie, where we goin’ today?’ And Freddie … he’s dead now; a fine pilot, but he never came back from the war … and Freddie’d say, ‘Where’s the wind?’

“‘Comin’ out of the west,’ I’d say. ‘Then we go east,’ Freddie’d say, and we’d crank up the old Hisso Standard and throw in all our junk and off we’d go, headin’ with the wind and savin’ gas.

“‘Course the times got rough, after a while. There was the Crash in ’29, and the folks didn’t have much money to fly. We were down to fifty cents a ride where we had been five dollars and ten dollars. Couldn’t eve

n buy gas. Sometimes, two fellas workin’, we’d drain gas out of one plane to keep the other flyin’. Then the Air-Mail came along and after that the airlines started up, needin’ pilots. But for a while there, while it lasted, it was a good life. Oh, ’21 to ’29 … it was pretty good. First thing out, when you’d land, you’d get two boys out, and a dog. First thing, before anybody …” Eyes were closed again, remembering.

And I had wondered. Maybe those good old days aren’t gone. Maybe they’re still waiting now, out over the horizon. If I could find a few other pilots, a few other old planes. Maybe we could find those days, that clear clear air, that freedom. If I could prove that a man does have a choice, that he can choose his own world and his own time to live in, I could show that highspeed steel and blind computers and city riots are only one side of a picture of living … a side we don’t have to choose unless we want to. I could prove that America isn’t all really so changed and different, at heart. That beneath the surface of the headline, Americans are still a calm and brave and beautiful people.

When my vague little dream was known, a few folk of differing opinion rushed to stamp it to death. Time and again I heard that this was not just a chancy impractical quest, but impossible, without hope of success. The good old days are gone … why, everybody knows that! Oh, maybe it used to be a slow and friendly place, this country, but nowadays people will sue a stranger—and like as not a friend—at the drop of a hat. It’s just the way people are, now. You go landing in a farmer’s hay field and he’ll throw you in jail for trespassing, take your airplane for damages to his land and testify that you threatened the lives of his family when you flew over the barn.

People today, they said, demand the best in comfort and safety. You can’t pay them to go up in a forty-year-old biplane all open-cockpit with wind and oil lashing back all over them … and you expect them to pay you for the pain of all that? There wouldn’t be an insurance company—Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t cover a thing like that, for a cent less than a thousand dollars a week. Barnstorming, indeed! Keep your feet on the ground, friend, these are the 1960’s!

“What do you think about a jump?” Stu asked, and snapped me back to afternoon Rio.

“Getting a bit late,” I said, and the gypsy pilot and doom voices faded. “But, heck, a good calm day for it. Let’s give it a try.”

Stu was ready in a minute, tall and serious, shrugging into his main chute harness, snapping the reserve parachute across his chest, tossing his helmet into the front seat, making ready for his part of the quest. A bulky clumsy deep-sea diver, all buckles and nylon web over a bright yellow one-piece jumpsuit, he pulled himself into the forward cockpit and closed the little door.

“Allrighty,” he said, “let’s go.”

I had a hard time believing that this lad, filled with inner fires, had chosen to study dentistry. Dentistry! Somehow we had to convince him that there was more to life than the makeshift security of a dentist’s office.

In a moment, as we blasted off the ground and into the air, I was all of a sudden singing Rio Rita, making it Rye-o Rita. I knew only a part of the first line of the song, and it went over and over as we climbed to altitude.

Stu looked overboard with a strange faint smile, thinking about something way off in the distance.

Rita … Rye-o Ritah … noth … thing … sweetah … Rita … Oh-Rita. I had to imagine all the saxophones and cymbal-clashes over the thunder of the engine.

If I were Stu, I wouldn’t be smiling. I’d be thinking about that ground down there, waiting for me.

At 2500 feet, we swung around into the wind, and flew directly above the airport. Rye-o Ritah … la … dee … deedah … deedah … oh Ritah … My-baby-an’-me-o, Ritah …

Stu came back from whatever far land it was he saw, and peered down over the side of his cockpit. Then, looking, he sat straight up and carefully dropped a bright roll of crepe paper overboard. It just missed the tail, unfurled into a long yellow-red-yellow streak of color and snaked straight down. I circled, climbing, and Stu was intent, watching the color. When it hit the ground, he nodded and smiled briefly back at me. We turned back on course for the airport, level at 4500 feet. I shuddered at the thought of actually jumping out of an airplane. It was a very long way down.

Stu opened his cockpit door while I slowed the biplane to ease the windblast for him. It was an odd feeling, to watch my front-seat passenger climb out onto the wing and make ready to get off while we were a mile in the air. He was going to go through with it, and I was afraid for him. There is a gigantic difference between standing on the ground talking glibly about parachute-jumping, and the fact itself, when one is standing on the wing, fighting the wind, looking down through empty empty air at the tiny little trees and houses and filaments of roads laid flat on the ground.

But Stu was all business now. He stood on the rubber mat of the wing root, facing the tail of the airplane, watching for his target to slide into view. He held onto a wing-strut with one hand, the edge of my cockpit with the other. If anything, he was enjoying the moment.

Then he saw what he wanted to see; the center of the grass runway, and the windsock, barely visible in smallness. He leaned toward me. “GOIN’ DOWN!” he said. And then, as simply as that, he vanished.

On the wing root, where he had been standing, was nothing. One instant there, talking, next instant gone. I wondered for a second whether he had ever been in the airplane at all.

I looked down over the side and saw him, a tiny figure, arms outstretched, falling straight down toward the ground. But it was more than falling. It was much faster than falling. He blurred down, fired from a cannon, right at the ground.

I waited for a long time as he changed from a tiny cross into a round speck. No parachute opened. It was not a good feeling, to wait for that chute. After an agonizing long while I knew that it was not going to open at all.

The very first jump of our two-plane circus and his parachute failed. I felt a little bit cold. His body might be that leaf-shaped dot there by the grove of trees that bordered the the airport, or the one by the hangars. Darn. We had lost our jumper.