Nothing by Chance

Cars and trucks stopped along the roadside, to help and to watch.

A truck driver brought a heavy jack, and we lifted the pickup free of the trailer, undamaged, and drove it up to the edge of the highway. By now it was full dark, and we worked in the beams of headlights; it all felt like a Dante nightmare.

With ten men, and with a heavy rope tied from truck to fuselage, we finally dragged what was left of the biplane back onto its wheels, and forced it again onto the trailer. I wondered how we were going to tow a trailer without a hitch, or even move the trailer out of the low grass valley.

A great boxy truck stopped by the plane, and the driver got down. “Can I help you?” he said.

“Kinda doubt it; can’t do too much more, I guess. Thanks.”

“What happened?”

“Hitch broke off.”

The man walked to look at the broken metal. “Hey, look,” he said. “I have a hitch on my truck, and I don’t have to be in Chicago for another couple days. Maybe I can tow you somewhere. I’m kind of interested in airplanes … airline pilot out of Chicago. Don Kyte’s the name. Coming home from California. I’d be glad to help you, if I could.”

About that time I came awake to what was happening. Again … what are the chances of this guy coming along this road in this month in this week in this day in this hour in this minute when I have no possible way to tow that trailer, and him coming along not only in a truck, not only in an empty truck, but in an empty truck with a trailer hitch on it, and he not only happens to like airplanes but he is an airline pilot and he has days to spare? What are the chances of a lucky coincidence like that?

Don Kyte backed his truck down into the valley, pulled the trailer straight, then hitched up to it and pulled it onto the road.

The police arrived, then, and an ambulance, red lights flashing in the dark. “Anybody hurt?” the officer said.

“Nope. Everybody’s fine.”

He ran back to his patrol-car radio to report this, and then came slowly out to see the trailered airplane. “We heard there was an airplane crash on the Interstate,” he said.

“Sort of, yeah.” I explained what had happened.

“Any cars damaged?” He began to write on a clipboard.

“No.”

He held his pencil, and thought. “No cars damaged, nobody hurt. This isn’t even an accident!”

“No, sir, it isn’t. We’re all ready to move on, now.”

We unhitched the trailer by the Ottumwa hangar at midnight, and Don came to stay the night with us. We found that we had mutual friends from one coast to another, and it was past two when we finally folded the couch down into a bed for him and let him alone to sleep.

The next day I went to the airport and unloaded airplane-parts, stacking them in the back of the hangar.

Merlyn Winn walked to meet me, his footsteps echoing in the giant place.

“Dick, I don’t know what to say. That hitch was welded into bad iron there, and it just picked this time to go. Gosh, I’m sorry about what happened.”

“It’s not all so bad, Merlyn. Centersection and struts, biggest part. Engine had to be overhauled, anyway. Some work on the wings. Be a good winter job.”

“Nice thing about old airplanes,” he said. “You just can’t kill ’em dead. Shame it had to happen, though.”

A shame it had to happen. Merlyn left, and in a moment I walked out from the hangar into the sunlight. It never would have happened at all if we had stayed home, if the biplane and I had only flown on Sunday afternoons, around the airport. I’d have no smashed airplane, then, no parts awaiting rebuild in the hangar. There would have been no crash at Prairie du Chien, picking up a handkerchief with a wingtip. No crash at Palmyra, as Paul met his challenge. No crash on Interstate 80, when a trailer hitch strangely failed.

There would have been no Stu plummeting down through the air, or puzzling us with his silent thoughts, or having the most continuous fun of his life. No mouse attacking my cheese. No passengers turning in the air for the first time, no “That’s great!” no “WONDERFUL!” no immortality in Midwest family albums. No crumpled money-piles, no proof a gypsy pilot can survive, if he wishes, today.

/> No Claude Shepherd, by his giant hissing monster engine, talking the wonders of steam. No county fairs, no mosquito-hum at midnight, no honey-clover for breakfast, no formation flying in the sunset or sorrow of a lone airplane disappearing in the west. No freedom tasted, none of these strange affairs I called guidance to whisper that man is not a creature of chance, pointed into oblivion.

A shame? Which would I rather have, the wreck in the hangar or a polished piece of a biplane that flew only on calm Sunday afternoons?

I walked across the concrete ramp in the sun, and for a moment I was in the biplane again and we were flying together beside the Luscombe and the Travelair, up in the wind, out over those green fields and towns of another time. I still didn’t know the why of the wreck, but some day I would.

What mattered, I thought, was that the color and the time still waited for me, as they always had, just across the horizon of a special free enchanted land called America.