Nothing by Chance

A moment after she left, I noticed that we had company. “Stu, there is an ant on our table.”

“Ask him where we’re going to go today.” He unfolded the road map.

“Here you go, little fella,” I said, and helped the ant onto the map. “This is known as the Ant Method of Navigation, Mister MacPherson. You just follow after him with a pen, now. Wherever he goes, we go.”

The ant was frightened, and traveled east across Missouri at a great rate. He stopped, wandered nervously south, turned west, stopped, turned northeast. The line under Stu’s pen passed some promising towns, as he followed, but then the ant struck out due east, toward the sugar bowl. He stepped across a fold in the map, and in that one step covered 300 miles, all the way across southern Illinois. Then he leaped off the map and ran for the sugar.

We consumed our magnificent cherry pancakes and looked at the line. Up to the fold, the ant had a pretty good plan. Push east and south, swing around in a big circle to end at Hannibal, Missouri. We’d get a taste of southern Illinois, and the county fair season was upon us as summer burned on. There might be some good places to work, at the fairs.

Decision made, water jug filled, we said goodbye to our waitress, tipping her for being pretty, and walked to the plane.

In half an hour we were off again, pushing into a headwind. The ant had not told us about headwinds. The longer we flew, the more annoyed I got at that dumb ant. There was nothing down there. A few little towns with no place to land, an isolated Army outpost, a million acres of farmland. If there was sugar to the east, we certainly weren’t finding it.

There was a fair in progress at Griggsville, Illinois, but no place to land, except in a wheatfield adjacent. The gold of that wheat was no illusion. At the going wheat prices, it would cost us $75 to roll down a landing-swath of the tall grain.

We flew on, and days passed, and our affluence dwindled.

There was a fair at Rushville, with horses and sulkies trotting stiffly around the quarter-mile, and crowds of potential passengers. But there was no place to land. We circled dismally overhead, and finally pushed on, cursing the ant.

At last we staggered into Hannibal, and talked with Vic Kirby, an old barnstormer who ran the airport there. We stayed a while with him, bought some gas at discount because all antique planes get discounts at Hannibal, and then at his suggestion, flew north to Palmyra, Missouri.

There was no comparison to Palmyra, Wisconsin, which was centuries away now, in the distant past. This strip was short and narrow, lined by farm equipment and tall corn. We stopped long enough to fly one passenger, and then were off again, aimlessly south, weaving back and forth across the Mississippi, then east again into Illinois.

Landing in a grass field at Hull, I figured we had set a record for biplane crossings of the Mississippi in one day.

We sold three quick rides in the town of five hundred souls, and found that the hayfield we had landed upon had only the day before been approved by the State of Illinois as a landing area. The flying club was going strong, volunteer-building a cement-block office.

“You’re the first airplane to land here since this field became an airport!” We heard it over and over again, and we were told it was an honor. But it was ironic. We wanted to have nothing to do with airports, we were just looking for little grassy places to land on, and here our hayfield had been declared an airport beneath our very wheels.

Flying all that day long, using two full tanks of gas, we had earned a total of twelve dollars cash.

“I don’t know, Stu. ’Cept for Pecatonica, Illinois just don’t seem to be our piece of cake, huh? Next thing you know, ol’ what’s-his-name is gonna be down here askin’ about our Illinois registration tag.”

Stu mumbled something, rigged his useless mosquito net and flopped down on his sleeping bag. “You were born in this state, weren’t you?” he said, and was asleep at once. I never did figure out what that remark was supposed to mean.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I WOKE UP at six-thirty in the morning, to the click of a Polaroid camera-shutter. A man was taking pictures of us sleeping under the wing.

“Mornin’,” I said. “Feel like flyin’ this mornin’?” It was more reflex than a hunger for three dollars.

“Maybe in a little while. Takin’ some pictures now. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No.” I dropped my head down on my hammock-pillow and went back to sleep.

We woke up again at nine, and there was a crowd standing a discreet distance away, looking at the airplane.

One fellow looked at me strangely, and studied the name painted by the cockpit rim.

“Say,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t be the Dick Bach that writes for the flying magazines, would you?”

I sighed. Goodbye, Hull, Illinois. “Yeah. I do a little story, once in a while.”

“How do you like that. Why don’t you stand over by the cockpit, there, and I’ll get your picture.”

I stood, glad that he liked my stories, but no longer die anonymous barnstormer.

“Let’s pack up, Stu.”