Biplane

Easy to chase that foreboding. I’m not within twenty-five miles of my home base. I’m a lot closer to it than I was a few sunrises ago, but it is still over the horizon ahead.

With the Colorado River below and California air whistling about me, I have the courage to try the other magneto. And now, after two hours running on the right magneto, the left one works perfectly. The last time I tried it, at Casa Grande, backfires and puffs of black smoke from the exhaust. Now, smooth as the youngest of kittens. What a most unusual engine.

Biplane, we are almost home. Hear that? A little more desert to do, one more stop for gasoline, and you’ll be in a warm hangar once again. The Salton Sea glimmers ahead and the squares of green-blotter land to the south of it. Anything can happen now and we can say we have made it to California.

Still, it is a California just in name and feels like home only as Saturday feels like Saturday because I’ve seen a calendar. This desert, and the baked blotter land doesn’t shout, California! the way the long beaches do, or smooth golden hills or the sudden mass of the Sierra Nevada. One isn’t truly in California until one is west of those mountains.

The biplane’s wings flick suddenly dull, as if a switch were thrown. Surprised, we have been enveloped in dusk. The switch is the Sierra itself, thrown to block the sun, casting a giant dark knife-shadow across the desert. The familiar first-lights of cautious automobiles sparkle on the road toward Palm Springs, hurrying in for the night. Our night will be Palm Springs, too, nested down in the grey blur at the base of San Jacinto Mountain. There is now the turning greenflash whiteflash of the airport beacon. And there, spilling over the top of a peak marked on my chart as 10,804 feet above sea level, clouds, as black as the mountain itself.

Palm Springs, airplane! Home of motion-picture stars and heads of state and giants of enterprise. Better, Palm Springs is less than a day from your own home, a hangar again, and Sunday-afternoon flights. Like that, airplane?

There is no response from the Parks. As we turn to land, not the faintest hint of reply.

14

THE AIRPORT AT PALM SPRINGS is a rather exclusive place and parked upon it are the most elite and the most expensive airplanes in the world. There is this morning, however, something radically wrong. At the very end of a long row of polished twin-engine aircraft, in fact parked almost in the sagebrush, is a strange oily old biplane. It is tied to the ground by a rope at each wingtip and one at the tail. Underneath the wing, as the grey sun rises, is a dim sleeping bag stretched on the cool concrete.

It is raining. Once a year in Palm Springs it rains, and in the worst years twice. What instrument of coincidence has timed my arrival with the arrival of the Day of Rain? There are no other sleeping bags spread on the concrete of the airport and I must consider this alone.

The rain is light at first, from broken clouds. At first, too, the wetness makes merely the background for a white silhouette in dry of the biplane, and I lie along the dry left wing of the silhouette. The rain goes on, drumming first on the top wing, then slowly falling in big drops from the top wing to boom against the fabric of the lower wing. A pretty sound, and I lie unconcerned and listen. Mount San Jacinto scowls down at me, clouds spraying over its towering peak. I’ll cross you today, San Jacinto, and then it is all downhill to home. Two hours’ flying from here at most, and I shall discover what it feels like to sleep once again in a bed.

The rain continues, and the wetness takes on a sheen of tiny depth. Lying now with my head on the concrete and with my lowest eye open, I can see a wall of water advancing, fully a sixteenth of an inch high. This is a great deal of rain, and the drumming and booming on my wing should stop any second now.

It doesn’t. The wall of water advances slowly into my dry sanctuary. The thirsty concrete drinks, but to no avail. New drops still rush to reinforce the water. By tiny leaps and minuscule bounds, the wall advances. If I were less than a millimeter tall, it would be an awesome spectacle of rampaging nature. Pinpoint twigs and branches are being swept up into that wall, waves thereon are foaming and cresting and the roar of their advance can be heard for inches around. A fearsome, terrifying sight, that water rushing, sweeping over everything in its path. The only reason that I do not run screaming before it is a matter of perspective, an ability to make myself so big that the water is nothing, and of no danger. And I wonder as I watch. Can it be the sa

me with all fearsome things? Can we lift ourselves so far above them that their terror is lost? I wonder, and for the briefest part of a second I can swear that I sense a faint, tired smile. Perhaps my friend is awake once again, briefly returned to lesson teaching.

Phase II of the Lesson of the Advancing Water is that, no matter the perspective, one cannot ignore the problem. Even though it is suddenly only a barely moving film of moisture and not a flash flood of the desert, it can still be annoying and uncomfortable unless I soon solve the problem. My silhouette of dryness grows narrower as the rain continues, and unless I find some way to stop the water’s advance or decide that wet sleeping bags aren’t so bad after all, I’ll be forced to flee.

Unshaven, oil-covered, disheveled with the worst of the barnstormers, I gather my sleeping bag and race for shelter in the luxurious office and waiting room of the general-aviation terminal. Would a good barnstormer have gotten wet? I wonder as I run through the rain. No. A good barnstormer would have climbed into the cockpit, under the waterproof cover, and have been asleep again in an instant. Ah, well. It takes time to learn.

Against one wall of the deserted room is a telephone, a direct line to the weather bureau. It is a strange feeling to hold a telephone in my hand again. A voice comes from the thing, with an offer of general aid.

“I’m at Palm Springs. Want to get across into Long Beach /Los Angeles. How does it look through the pass?” I should have said The Pass. Almost every pilot who flies to Southern California has flown through the gigantic slot cut between the mountains San Jacinto and San Gorgonio. On a windy day, one can count on being tossed about in the pass, but so many new pilots have exaggerated its rigors that even old pilots are beginning to believe that it is a dangerous place.

“The pass is closed.”

Why is it that weathermen are so smug when the weather is bad? At last they can put the pilots in their places? The arrogant devils need to be set back a notch, now and then? “Banning has a two-hundred-foot overcast with one-mile visibility in rain; probably won’t get much better all day long.”

The devil it won’t. The chances of that weather staying so bad all day are about the same as the chances of Palm Springs being flooded in the next half hour.

“How about the pass at Borego or Julian, or San Diego?”

“We don’t have any weather for the passes themselves. San Diego is calling three thousand overcast and light rain.”

I’ll just have to try them and see.

“How’s the Los Angeles weather?”

“Los Angeles . . . let’s see . . . Los Angeles is calling fifteen hundred broken to overcast, light rain. Forecast to remain the same all day. A pilot report has the pass closed, by the way, and severe turbulence,”

“Thanks.”

He catches me before I hang up, with a request for my airplane number. Always the entries to make in his logs, and no doubt for a very good reason.

Once I get on the other side of the mountains, there will be no problem. The weather is not quite clear, but it is good enough for finding one’s way about. Banning is in the middle of the pass, and the weather it is reporting is not good. But the report may be hours old. I can’t expect much so early in the morning, but I might as well give Banning a try before I run down along the mountain chain, poking my nose into every pass for a hundred miles. One of them is sure to be open.

Twenty minutes later the biplane and I round the corner of San Jacinto and head into the pass. It certainly does not look good. As if someone has made a temporary bedroom out of Southern California, and has hung a dirty grey blanket between it and the desert, for privacy. If I can make it to Banning, I can stop and wait for the weather to lift.