Nothing by Chance

They had just begun to scatter and dive for cover when we pulled steeply up and banked hard right, to keep the bean-field in gliding range.

We circled the town once for advertising, and then back over the strip we dropped down through loops and rolls and cloverleafs and a one-turn spin. The airshow lasted ten minutes, including the climb, and I waited to hear some general disappointment that three dollars could be shot up so fast.

“That was nice, mister!”

“Yeah! Gee, that part right at first, where you went zzzZZZZOOOOOOMM! right at us! That was scary!”

In a minute the first automobiles arrived, and we were glad to see them. Stu went into action, telling the joys of flying on a hot day like this, selling the idea of Kahoka from the cool, cool sky.

As Stu strapped him in, the first passenger said, “I want a thrill.” A man walked to the cockpit just as we began to taxi out, and said in a low voice, “This fella is sort of the town cut-up. Take ’im up and turn ’im upside down a few times/OK?”

In every town we worked, all summer long, the one dominating personality was the watertower. In fact, the watertower became as much the symbol Town to us as it had become for the people who lived in its shadow. But now, up in the sun and the wind and the leather and the wires of the biplane, our passengers were for the first time looking down on that tower and its great black town-name painted.

I watched my riders carefully, at Kahoka, and every one of them looked long and thoughtfully at the top of the water-tower, and then out to the road that led off over the horizon. It was part of the flight, when I saw this, to fly a separate little conquering circle over the shining four-pillared thing and its eight-foot letters KAHOKA. To

rise above that tower was an event unforgotten.

By sundown we had flown nineteen passengers.

“What do I keep telling us, Stu,” I said as we walked through the dark toward town. “We get right close in and we can’t lose!”

We finished our hamburgers at the Orbit Inn and walked into the town square in the dark. The stores were closed, and silence drifted like slow fog in the branches of the elm trees.

There was a bandstand in the park, slope-roofed and faced about by rows of quiet wooden benches, all peaceful and silent in the warm summer night. The Seyb Emporium was across the way, and the sundries store, the hotel, with its wooden fans turning in the high lobby air. If I gave a dollar for every change in this square since 1919, I would still have been rich from the day’s earnings.

We walked down the quiet sidewalks, back toward our field, listening to the faint strains of radio music rippling out from the yellow light of the houses.

The peace of Kahoka, however, did not extend to its mosquitoes. It was Erie all over again, and worse. At last I devised a Method D of Mosquito-Avoiding, which requires one to lie down fully clothed on a sleeping bag, throw a silken hammock over his head, and leave only a tiny hole for air. This worked fairly well, though it didn’t spare me the hypersonic hum of a thousand tiny wings.

We were awake at the first cock-crow, about the time that the mosquitoes retired for the day.

I got up and poured a couple quarts of oil into the engine and looked it over well; we might have a busy day, close in. I had just closed the cowl when a car stopped by the field, sifting a cloud of fine flour-dust up from the dirt road.

“Are you flying yet, this morning?”

“Yes ma’am. All ready to start engines for you.”

“I missed you yesterday and I was afraid you might leave …” She was a schoolteacher, there was no question about it. She had that kind of confidence and control over the world that comes only from forty years of channeling American history into ten thousand high-school pupils.

The 90-mile wind over the morning town destroyed the set of her silver-blue hair, but she gave no heed. She looked down on Kahoka and out toward the horizon farms exactly as children did, without any consciousness of herself at all.

Ten minutes later she gave Stu three one-dollar bills, thanked us both, and left in a slow trail of summer dust.

There is America, I thought. There is real frontier America, reflected in daughters a hundred years removed from her pioneers.

“What do you think of that?” Stu said. “I think we’re in for a good day when they start coming out this early to fly.”

“What’s the estimate?” I began the walk toward town and breakfast. “How many passengers today?”

“I’ll say … twenty-five. We’ll fly twenty-five people today,” Stu said, falling into step.

“Aren’t we optimistic, this morning. Oh, it’ll be a good day, for sure, but not that good. We’ll fly eighteen people.”

We were joined at the restaurant by one of our passengers of the day before, one Paul, by name, who owned a drag strip on the road out of town.

“Have a cup of coffee with you, for just a minute here,” he said.

I was reflecting at the moment that there is nothing so horrible in the world as a stale glazed doughnut for breakfast.