Nothing by Chance

THE DAYS FOLDED ONE INTO ANOTHER, and into events of August and September. County fairs, with special brushed cows and combed sheep waiting for judgment, dining only on the cleanest of polished straw.

Coins raining down on glassware with the sound of wind chimes in the night, above the song of the barker: “Nickel in the crystal glass, folks, and it’s yours to take home. Toss a nickel and win a glass …”

Quiet streets, old towns; where the Vogue Theater had been turned into a machine shop, and finally closed.

People with memories of old airplanes flying, and of droughts and floods, the good and bad of decades.

Foot-tall jars of Mrs. Flick’s Oatmeal Cookies, three for five cents.

Pioneer-dressed women in small-town celebration, and square dances in the streets.

Music amplified and echoing through the starlight, rippling across the still wings of a biplane and through the silken hammock of a barnstormer listening, watching the galaxy.

A great burly grizzled mountain of a man, Claude Shepherd, tending his monster-iron Case Steam Tractor, built 1909. Twenty tons of metal, barrels of water, bunkers of coal, giant huge bull gears driving wheels seven feet tall. “I got to love steam power from the time I was a little tad, on my grandfather’s knee. Smoothest power in the world, steam. When I was five, I could set the valves … never got over it, never got over lovin’ steam.”

Passengers, passengers, men and women and children rising up to see the sky, to look down on the water towers of towns everywhere Midwest. Every takeoff different, every landing different, every person in the cockpit ahead a different person, guided into gentle adventure. Nothing happened by chance, nothing by luck.

Sunrise into sunset into sunrise. Wild clear air, rain and wind and storm and fog and lightning and wild clear air again.

Sun fresh and cool and yellow like I’d never seen. Grass so green it sparkled under the wheels. Sky blue and pure like skies always used to be, and clouds whiter than Christmas in the air.

And most of all, freedom.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THEN CAME A DAY when we took off, the biplane and I, into Iowa.

Chugging north, looking down. One town had a good hayfield, and we circled and landed. But the margin wasn’t there. If the engine stopped on takeoff there was only rough ground ahead. There are those who say that the chances of engine failure on takeoff are so remote that they aren’t worth worrying about, but those people do not fly old airplanes.

We took off again and turned farther north, into the cold air of autumn. The towns here were islands of trees, isolated by seas of cornfields ready for harvest. The corn grew right close in to town, and there weren’t many possible places to work. But I wasn’t worried. The question of survival had long since been answered. Some good place always showed up by sundown.

I had just discarded another small town when the engine choked, one time, and a puff of white smoke whipped back in the windstream. I sat up straight in the seat, tense as iron.

The smoke was not good. The Wright never acted strangely unless it was trying to tell me that something was wrong. What was it trying to say? Smoke … smoke, I thought. What could make a puff of white smoke? The engine was running smoothly again. Or was it? Listening very carefully, I thought that it was running the slightest bit roughly. And I could smell the exhaust more than I usually could. But all the instruments were pointing in their proper places: oil pressure, oil temperature, tachometer … just as they should have been.

I pushed the throttle forward and we climbed. Just in case something was wrong, I wanted more altitude for gliding if everything went to pieces and we had to land in the gentle hills below.

We leveled at 2500 feet in icy air. Summer was over.

Was there a fire under the cowl? I looked over the side of the cockpit, out into the wind, but there was no sign of fire forward.

There was something wrong with the engine. There! It was running rough, now. If the engine would stop, that would be one thing, cause for definite action. But this roughness, and the smell of the exhaust, and that puff of smoke. It all meant something, but it was hard to tell what …

At that instant, a great burst of white smoke flew back from the engine, a solid river dragging back in a dense trail behind. I looked over the right side of the cockpit and saw nothing but smoke, as if we had been shot down, in real combat.

Oil sprayed windscreen and goggles. We are in trouble, airplane.

I thought again that we were on fire, which would not be good in a wood-and-fabric airplane, half a mile in the air. I shut down the engine and turned off the fuel, but still the smoke poured overboard, a long helpless streak across the sky. Great Scott. We are on fire.

I kicked the biplane hard up on her wing, slammed full rudder, and we slipped wildly sideways toward the ground. There was an open field there, with a hill, and if we played it just right…

The smoke came thinner and finally stopped, and the only sound was the quiet whistle of the wind through the wires and the faint clanking of the propeller as it fanned around.

There was a tractor working the other side of the sloping field, mowing hay. I couldn’t tell whether he saw us or not, and at the moment, I didn’t care.

Level out, cross the fence, slip off a little speed, catch the hill on the rising side …

We touched, and I forced the control stick hard back, digging the tailskid deep into the ground. We rolled across the peak of the hill, rumbling, clattering, slowed, and stopped.