Biplane

Quiet, caution. I’ll land in the fields down there and in this wind I won’t roll very far. Now be quiet.

It is quiet from the dissenter’s gallery for the moment, the quiet of someone phrasing in his mind the most vengeful way of saying I told you so.

The mace is not hitting us squarely any more and the engine no longer stops in the force of it. We are one mile from the opening between cloud and ground over the hill. If it stays open for another minute and a half, we’ll be through. There will be perhaps a thirty-foot clearance. A mace blow glancing, smashing the biplane into a wild right bank.

Recovering, wheels swishing the top of the hill, we squeak through the crack, and instantly fly out of the dark rain. Instantly, in the blink of an eye. Whoever has been directing the action for this flight has been doing a magnificent job, so good that no one save a pilot will believe the land spread out before us as we cross the hill.

The clouds ahead are broken, and through them the golden shafts of sunlight pierce down like bright javelins thrown into the earth. A bit of an old hymn is tossed into my thought: “. . . from mist and shadow into Truth’s clear day.”

The day has color again. Sunlight. I have not known what sunlight means until this moment. It brings life and brilliant things to the air and to the ground under the air. It is bright. It is warm. It turns the dirt into emerald and lakes into the deep clear blue of a washed sky. It makes clouds so white that you have to squint even behind your dark goggles.

If the people working in the green fields below could have listened very carefully, they would have heard, high in the eucalyptus-wind, mixed with engine noise from that little red-and-yellow biplane, a tiny voice singing. I no longer have to hurry.

The first buildings of Los Angeles and its thousand suburbs slide beneath us, and from habit we climb. No chance of being lonely if we must land now. Stop the engine this moment and we shall land on the city golf course. This, and it’s the parking lot at Disneyland, big enough to land transports on. This, and we have the engineered concrete bed of the Los Angeles river.

But in no moment does the engine stop, as if the biplane is eager to see her new home and hangar, and has no patience for failures. “You can’t go wrong with a Wright,” the barnstormers used to say, and so it has proved. After playing its few harmless practical jokes, the Whirlwind engine has laughed at us and shows now the truth of the saying. We haven’t gone wrong.

We turn one last time, to enter a busy traffic pattern. One last runway tilting beneath us, rising out of the city. Compton Airport. Home. We have come twenty-seven hundred miles across a country, and now, oil trailing back from our silver cowl, wet dust spraying from beneath our tall wheels, past fitting smoothly into present, our journey is done. We have been splintered across runways; frozen in midair; blasted in flying sand; soaked in rain; beaten in mountain winds; scourged in brittle sage; we have flickered back and forth through the years, a brightwinged bird in time, and we have arrived home. Has the arriving been worth the travail of the journey? A good question. I rather doubt that a biplane cross-country craze will soon be sweeping the nation.

We wheel slowly into a hangar and rumble its giant heavy door closed against the busy modern sounds of a busy modern time.

In the miles and sand and rain and years, we have learned only a little about ourselves, picked up just a tiny fraction of knowing about one man and one old biplane, and about what they mean to each other. At the last, in the sudden quiet of a dark hangar, man and biplane alone together, we find our answer to the question of the journey. Four words.

It was worth it.