“Heh-heh-heh-heh.” That was the only answer I got, and it very clearly said you poor con man, do you really think I’m stupid enough to go up in that old crate?
The quality of that laugh stopped me cold, and I turned abruptly away.
What a crushing difference between this place and the other little places where we had been so welcome. If our search is for the real people and the true people of America, then we should get out of here now.
“Can you take me for a ride?” A man walking boldly from another car changed my attitude at once.
“Love to,” I said. “Stu! Passenger! Let’s go!”
Stu trotted over and helped the man into the front cockpit while I strapped into the rear one. I was very much at home in this little office, with the board of familiar dials and levers around me, and I was happy there. Stu began cranking the inertia-starter handcrank, the device recognized time and again by farm folk as a “cream separator.” Straining at the handle, turning it slowly at first, throwing heavy effort into the steel mass of the geared flywheel inside the cowl, Stu drained pure energy from his heart into the starter. At last, starter flywheel screaming, Stu fell away and called, “CLEAR!” I pulled the starter-engage handle and the propeller jerked around. But it turned for only ten seconds. The propeller slowed, and stopped. The engine didn’t fire one single time.
What’s wrong, I thought. This thing starts every time; it has never missed starting! Stu looked at me in a glazed sort of shock, that all his torture on the crank had gone for nothing.
I was just shaking my head, to tell him I couldn’t understand why the engine didn’t fire, when I found the trouble. I hadn’t turned the switch on. I was so familiar with the cockpit that I had expected the switches and levers to work by themselves.
“Stu … ah … hate to say this … but… I forgot to turn the switch on sorry that sure was a silly thing to do let’s crank her one more time OK?”
He closed his eyes, imploring heaven to destroy me, and when that didn’t work, he made to throw the crank at my head. But he caught himself in time and with the air of a church martyr, inserted the handcrank once again and began to wind it.
“Gee, I’m sorry, Stu,” I said, sitti
ng back in my comfortable cockpit. “I owe you fifty cents for forgetting.”
He didn’t answer, as he had not the strength to talk. The second time I pulled the engage handle the engine roared awake at once, and the jumper looked at me as one looks at a poor dumb beast in a cage. I taxied quickly away and was airborne a moment later with my passenger. The biplane fell into a pattern for Palmyra at once, with a circling detour to look at one of the lakes and to climb a little higher, for there was no emergency landing field anywhere east of town.
The pattern took ten minutes exactly. Touching down, the biplane swerved for a second as I was thinking about what a pretty grass runway this was. Wake up! she was telling me. Every landing, every takeoff is different, every one! And don’t you forget it!
I did quick penance by stomping on a rudder pedal to stop the swerve.
As we taxied in, Paul was taxiing out in the Luscombe with a passenger of his own. My spirits brightened a little. Maybe there was hope for Palmyra, after all.
But that was the end of it for the afternoon. We had watchers, but no more passengers.
Stu collected my rider’s money, and walked to the cockpit. “I can’t do anything with ’em,” he said over the engine-roar. “If they stop and get out of their cars, we get passengers. But if they stay in the cars, they’re watchers, and they just aren’t interested in flying.”
It was hard to believe that we could have all those cars and no more riders, but there it was. The watchers all knew each other, and soon a lively conversation was going on. And the Directors arrived to size us up on their own.
Paul landed, taxied in, and lacking more passengers, shut his engine down into silence. A fragment of talk drifted to us. “… he was right over my house!”
“He was right over everybody’s house. Palmyra isn’t that big.”
“… who told you we were having a meeting tonight?”
“M’wife. Somebody called her and got her all shook up…”
Joe Wright came over and introduced us to some of the directors, and we told our story again. I was getting tired of this becoming such a big thing. Why couldn’t they tell us right out that we were welcome or not? Just a simple thing like a couple of barnstormers.
“You have any schedule for your shows?” one man asked.
“No schedule. We fly when we please.”
“Your airplanes are insured, of course; how much would that be?”
“The insurance on these airplanes is what we know about flying,” I said, and I wanted to add, “fella!” sarcastically. “There is not one cent of any other kind of insurance; no property damage, no liability.” Insurance, I wanted to say, is not a signed scrap of paper. Insurance is knowing within us about the sky and the wind, and the touch of the machines that we fly. If we didn’t believe in ourselves, or know our airplanes, then there was no signature, no amount of money in the world that could make us secure, or make our passengers safe. But I simply said, again, “… not one penny of insurance.”
“Well,” he paused, startled. “We wouldn’t want to say that you’re not welcome … this is a public field …”
I smiled, and hoped that Paul had learned his lesson. “Where’s the map?” I asked him fiercely.