Nothing by Chance

by Richard Bach

  “Everything was so pretty, and fun,” she said. “I’d say he’s good”

  Just before five p.m. I saw that my fuel was getting too low to last through the heavy flying till sunset, and at the same time we found that the man who had the key to the gas pump was out of town.

  “I’ll hop over to Keokuk, Richard,” I said, “and you keep the folks happy, flyin’.”

  “Take your time,” he said.

  In twenty minutes I was looking down in dismay at the Keokuk airport. It was all concrete runway, with new construction everywhere. To land on the hard surface would be to grind the tailskid to nothing, and I didn’t have enough fuel to find another airport. But there was one short section of grass left on the west side of the field, and we landed there.

  We had to cross a new runway to reach the pumps, all along the edge of the runway was a muddy deep ditch, with a five-inch lip of concrete to jump. We taxied back and forth along the edge of the runway, picked the least muddy section for crossing, and charged at it straight on.

  It didn’t work. The mud slowed the biplane to a walk, and by the time we reached the concrete lip, full power on the engine wasn’t enough to drag it across.

  I shut down the Wright, holding unkind thoughts about aeronautical progress and the wholesale destruction of the grass runway, vowed never again to land at Keokuk or any modern airport, and went for a towing machine.

  A tractor, mowing grass, was the answer.

  “Hi!” I said to the driver. “Got a little problem here, trying to cross your new runway. Think that machine of yours could tow me out?”

  “Oh, sure. She can tow airplanes ten times that size.”

  He left his grass-mowing at once and we rode together back to the airplane. When we got there, there was a line service man from the flight school across the field, looking in the cockpit.

  “Looks like you got stuck,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But we’ll have ’er out in a minute here and I’ll come over get some gas from you.” I took a coil of stout rope from the tractor and tied it from the iron hitch to the landing gear of the biplane. “That oughta do ’er. We’ll kinda help the wingtips here and you see if that tractor can do the job.”

  “Aw, she’ll do the job. Don’t you worry.”

  The tractor made it look easy. In a few seconds the biplane was standing free on the concrete, ready to start engine and taxi for gas.

  “Thanks. You really saved me, sir.”

  “Think nothin’ of it. She can pull airplanes ten times that big.”

  The line service man was looking nervously at the big steel propeller, hoping that I wouldn’t ask him to swing that by hand to start the engine. It is a frightening thing to one who has never hand-propped a Wright, but we had no choice; the starting crank was in Kahoka.

  “Why don’t you hop in the cockpit, here,” I said, “and I’ll swing the prop.” I walked back as he climbed aboard and showed him the throttle and ignition switch and brakes. “Just pull the throttle back a bit after she starts/’ I said. “She should start right off.”

  I pulled the propeller through a few times, and said, “OK, give me contact and brakes, and we’ll start her goin’.”

  I pulled the big blade down and the engine fired at once. Good old reliable Wright.

  I was walking casually toward the cockpit when I saw that the man in the pilot’s seat was frozen in horror, and that the engine was much louder than it should have been. The throttle was nearly full open, and in all the wind and sudden noise, my helper had forgotten what to do. He sat there, staring straight ahead, as the biplane, all by herself, began to move.

  “THE THROTTLE!” I screamed. “CUT THE THROTTLE!” Quick visions flashed of the Parks leaping into the air with a man at the controls who had no faintest idea how to fly. I ran toward the cockpit, but already the airplane was rolling swiftly across the concrete, engine roaring wildly. It was a dream, like running from a railroad train. I threw myself desperately at the cockpit, grabbed the leather rim with one hand, but could not move any farther. The immense propellerblast kept me from moving; it was all I could do to race alongside the biplane.

  The vision of my airplane a total wreck gave me one burst of strength to claw my way against the hurricane, up onto the wing. We were moving 20 miles an hour, accelerating quickly. I clung to the edge of the cockpit with every ounce of strength I could squeeze from my body. The man was cold wax in the seat, his eyes glazed, his mouth open.

  The biplane was moving far too fast, and turning, now. We were going to groundloop. In one desperate motion I reached over the cockpit rim, grabbed the throttle and slammed it back. It was too late, and all I could do was hold on as we went around. The tires cried out, dragging sideways, one wing lifted, the other went hard down, scraping concrete. I clung there and waited for a wheel to collapse, or the gear to break away.

  After five seconds tense as shredding steel, the wings leveled and we coasted to a stop, all in one piece.

  “That,” I said, panting, “was a ground loop.”

  The man climbed like a robot from the cockpit, and not one word did he say. He set his feet on the ground and began walking woodenly toward the office. It was the last I saw of him.

  The engine was still running. I set myself down into the seat and talked to the biplane for a while. This had been her way of telling me not to leave her to unknowing people, and I promised that I would never let that happen again.

  It was nearing sundown by the time we landed at Kahoka, and Dick was ready to leave.

  “I gotta get goin’,” he said. “I told my wife I’d be home at seven, and it’s seven right now. I shall do some violent aerobatics over the field and be on my way. Let me know when you’re back around here.”

  “Thanks, Richard. We’ll do ’er.”

  I propped the Cub for him and he was off. He flew a pretty set of aerobatics overhead, as he promised, plus a few strange things of his own—flying sideways through the air, flat turns, steep climbs and pushovers.

  The crowd was on us before Dick had disappeared in the west, and we flew the last hour steadily, till dark. By the time we covered the airplane and walked to the Orbit Inn, we felt as if we had been working for a living. We had flown twenty-six passengers by the end of the day, and Dick had flown another five. He had made his gas-and-oil money, and Stu and I split $98.

  “Almost made it, Stu. Almost broke a hundred-dollar day.” We felt affluent, and ordered double milkshakes.

  Stu was worried that we would miss the ten-twenty local news, so we walked into the hotel lobby and found the antique television set going unwatched.

  It was an interesting lobby. The fans washed mild vertical air down over us, in reminder of times that hadn’t quite gone by. There was a bell on the counter, the kind that dings when you tap the button on the top. Against the wall was a monster Firestone Air Chief radio console, four feet high and three feet wide, with stick-on paper squares over the pushbuttons: WGN, WTAD, WCAZ. If I pressed those buttons, I wondered, would I find Fred Allen, strolling in gentle static down Allen’s Alley; or Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy; or Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy? I was afraid to try.

  The ten-twenty news came and went without any mention of those delightful barnstormers out by the edge of Kahoka, and Stu was crushed. “My one chance to get on television! One chance! And I ended up on the newsroom floor!”

  That night Stu tried using cheesecloth for a mosquito net, taping a peak of it to the bottom of the wing. From what I could see in the dark it looked good, but it didn’t work. The mosquitoes learned at once that the trick was to land, to walk under the edge of the net, then take to the air once they were inside. It was another hard night.

  As we settled sleepily into the breakfast booth, I said, “Well, Stu, is it moving-on time?”

  “Oi thonk so,” he said, yawning. “’Scuse me. Darn mosquitoes.”

  We were blessed with a charming waitress, who had somehow missed her Warner Brothers
screen test. “What are we having for breakfast this morning?” she asked sweetly.

  “Cherry pancakes, please,” I said, “bunch of ’em, with honey.”

  She wrote the order, and stopped. “We don’t have cherry pancakes. Is that on the menu?”

  “No. Awful good, though.”

  She smiled. “We’ll give you cherry pancakes if you get the cherries,” she said.

  I was out the door in a flash, into the market two doors down, and laying out 29 cents for a can of cherries. The waitress was still at the table when I returned, and I set the can down triumphantly. “You just take these and dump ’em right in the batter.”

  “The whole can?”

  “Yes, ma’m. Zonk. Right in the batter. Great pancakes.”

  “Well… I’ll ask the cook …”

  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.”

  Illinois in midsummer was a scenic green hazy oven, and we droned through the broiled air like a worried bee. We wandered north on the Illinois River for days, finding no profit. And then one afternoon a city flowed in from the horizon. Monmouth, Illinois. Population 10,000. Airport north.

  Stu looked back at me as we circled the city and I shrugged. It was a sod field, anyway, we could say that much for it. The question was whether a city this size would be interested in barnstormers.

  We’d find out, I thought. We’d work it just as if it was a little town. We landed, taxied to the gas pump and stopped the engine.

  There was a row of nine airplanes parked, and a large brick hangar with an antique steam locomotive inside.

  The man who drove out to unlock the pump was an old-timer who had worked at Monmouth Airport for thirty years. “I seen it when there was six, eight instructors here,” he said. “Thirty people here at one time, a whole big line of airplanes. Had another runway, then, too, out into where that cornfield is now. This is the oldest continuous-used airport in Illinois, you know. Since 1921.”

  By the time he unloaded us at the restaurant, a half-mile from the airport, we had learned something about the way things were in Monmouth aviation. A glory that was past; once the stopping-place for the glittering names of flight, now the quiet resort of a few weekend pilots.

  In the frosted air of the restaurant, the name “Beth” began our list of Monmouth Knowns. She was interested in the airplane, but she brought us little hope with our hamburgers.

  “Summer’s the wrong time for you. All the kids from the college are gone home.” There was a long silence, and she smiled sadly for us and left us alone.

  “So,” said Stu, tired. “No kiddies. Where do we go from here?”

  I named some places, none of which were much more promising than Monmouth. “… and as a very last resort, we could try Muscatine.”

  “Sounds too much like Mosquito.” That spiked Muscatine.

  “Well, heck. Let’s just work Monmouth and see what happens. Give it a chance, you know. Might do a jump, maybe, see if we can g
et the people out.”

  The jump was first priority. By the time we had the airplane unpacked and ready to work, it was five o’clock, the best time for crowd-attracting.

  Stu jumped from 3500 feet, down into horizoriless haze, moving at meteor-speed toward the runway grass. His canopy snapped open in a great poof of white, the last of the King’s Ransom packed into the folded nylon, and now he drifted downward like a small tired cumulus cloud.

  While we dived to circle him, I saw a few cars gathering, but not nearly so many as I expected from a town that size. We flew some mild aerobatics over the cornfields and landed. Stu had logged another good jump, and I taxied to find him working the cars, saying over and again how cool was the air at 3500 feet.

  The people didn’t want to fly. “That thing state-inspected?” I heard one man ask, looking at the biplane.

  We’re a long way from small-town flying, I thought. It sounds as if city people live in the present day, as if they live at modern speeds and expect modern guarantees for their safety. We carried two passengers by sundown.

  The local pilots were very kind, and promised bigger crowds the next day. “We had a parachute meet here a month ago, and there were cars backed all the way up to the main highway,” they said. “Just takes a little while for the word to get around.”

  By the time we walked into the restaurant for supper, I was having doubts all over again about Monmouth.

  “Stu, what do you think about pressing on, tomorrow? This place feel right to you?”

  “Two rides. That’s normal first-day, you know.”

  “Yeah, but the place just doesn’t seem with it, you know? In the little towns, we’re a big thing, and people at least come out to look. Here we’re just another airplane. Nobody cares.” We ordered from Beth, who gave us a happy smile and said that she was glad to see us back.

  “Might as well give the place a try,” Stu said. “We hunted a long time, remember. Some other places looked bad, too, at first.”

  “OK. We’ll stay.” Another day, at least, would confirm my fears about big-city barnstorming. It just did not feel comfortable; we were out of our element, out of our time.