by The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (retail) (epub)
Roses
1914. The Great War begins in Europe. There, it quickly becomes evident that the utter devastation meted out by modern weaponry will be so pervasive as to lay desolate the great rose gardens of Europe. 1915. That spring, hybridists of all the Major Powers meet secretly in Switzerland to discuss the creation of a grand refuge for the flower far from the lethal battlefields and the now newly aerially bombed cities. Meanwhile, half a world away in Philadelphia, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, is engaged by rose enthusiast, George C. Thomas, later Captain Thomas of the United States Army Air Service, to initiate a campaign of public awareness and fund raising for the creation of such a botanical refuge in one of the far western states. Art Smith takes to the air after adapting his skywriting mechanism to produce a deep red effluent, imploring the curious onlookers to cultivate the most beloved bloom.
Smith and Thomas also modified Smith’s aeroplane to carry a cargo of rose petals, an apparatus mostly constructed of a netted hamper that when agitated proceeded to expel the petals. During a prolonged sweeping turn along the Schuylkill, Smith released his delicate cargo, creating, what was reported at the time, a crimson signature of flowers, a blood-red cloud curtain evocative of the noble carnage being spilled on the denuded plains of France and Belgium. The flowering trees along the river were in bloom, and the remnants of the raining rose petals clung to the native blossoms for days later until they too fell to the ground mixed with the now blown and spent native display.
Upon his return to the United States after his first successful tour of Japan in 1916, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, took to the air once more. His severe injury—a broken femur, sustained in the spectacular crack-up at Sapporo—was on the mend. He headed east, on several missions, one of which was to resuscitate the neglected drive to establish a sanctuary for rose propagation far from the botanical gardens of war-torn Europe.*
Again, he flew to Philadelphia to assist George Thomas in his campaign. This time he composed a message that extended the length of the Delaware River waterway, the airy letters drifting as they dissipated in the prevailing breeze decaying over the far reaches of the New Jersey shore. Once more, Smith followed, in the wake of the desiccating inscription, with an infusion of iridescent petals that drew a shimmering curtain in front of the setting sun. The petals were so buoyant and the drafts of air that day so stirring that the shower Smith unleashed seemed to levitate instead of falling. Stalling, it continued to rain down through the gloaming, giving Smith enough time to land his aeroplane on the Jersey waterfront and enjoy the sparkling drizzle of fragrant confetti. Unbeknownst to Art Smith that day, his craft served as an unwitting vector for an insidious invader. Concealed within the precipitation of roses was a stealthy stowaway transported from Japan, its eponymous beetle, Popillia japonica, that copper-colored clumsy flier discovered and scientifically confirmed a few months after Art Smith’s departure by a Rutgers entomologist in a Riverton, New Jersey, florist’s greenhouse.
*
In the spring of 1918, the rose cultivars began arriving in Portland, Oregon, soon to be known as the “City of Roses.” The site of The International Rose Test Garden would grow to over four acres of terraced plots and sculptured beds. There would be nearly 10,000 plants and 600 varieties represented including the Rosa kordesii Rupert Brooke, named for the poet who died on his way to Gallipoli and is buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Art Smith, a long-standing proponent of the rose refuge, was transporting a bare root Rupert Brooke start with him as he installed the evocative message, above, in the dirty weather over Portland.
The Moon
With the commencement of the Volstead Act in 1920, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, found himself between ruminative situations. Recently demobilized from the U.S. Army Air Service and yet to be hired by the Post Office to inaugurate the fledgling Air Mail Service in the Midwest, Smith offered his skills to the beleaguered Treasury Department’s Bureau of Prohibition in the eradication of alcoholic spirits being smuggled across the Great Lakes from Canada. Operating from the stable platform of a surplus Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2 fighter-bomber, he circled above the Maumee River as it meandered through the verdant valley from Fort Wayne to the port of Toledo on Lake Erie. Having modified his craft to deploy the phosphorescent night skywriting script, he illumined the coastal marshes, confluences, and estuaries affording egress to the lighters launched from the ships offshore or the commandeered car floats of the Canadian National Railroad.
Lucky
Documentation of this skywriting may be found in a letter from Art Smith, dated October 28, 1923, to Garnet Straits of Flat Rock, Michigan. He asks if she or any friends or family saw the message floating over Detroit that summer. Art had met Garnet by chance a year before when his de Havilland mail plane had to set down, making a forced landing in the Straits family pasture. Art stayed with the Straits during the time it took to make repairs on the aircraft, striking up an acquaintance with the eighteen-year-old Garnet that soon bloomed, in the days that followed, into mutual admiration and affection. The relationship matured and blossomed. It is said that the couple was even engaged to be wed but for the fatal crash of 1926. Buoyed by the frequent exchange of letters that Art Smith would sometimes “deliver,” launching a bundle of missives over the house in Flat Rock once he deviated from his route between Cleveland and Chicago, Garnet was to say years later of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, that it seemed as if “he dropped out of heaven.”
The Falling Leaf
He called it “The Falling Leaf,” Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, did. He had, many times, descended from altitude by such means, employed a spiral trajectory, either narrowing the loops as he approached the earth or widening the loops as he fell. In all those initial attempts in early aerobatics, however, he was unable to record the graceful decline; map the difficult maneuver in order for an audience to appreciate these daring initial experiments in the physics of controlled powered flight. In other words, the onlookers were unable to tell “the dancer from the dance” to quote W. B. Yeats, a poet Art Smith was known to admire. Perhaps this lack of the ability to inscribe the complicated exertion against and in tandem with gravity, circling through the transparent air, incited Smith to create “skywriting” in the first place! “The Falling Leaf” is seen here in the December night sky of 1915 at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition. To record the stunt that night, he used intense light tracings that would score the overexposed photographic negatives of the under-illuminated event. He accomplished it by using burning phosphorescent fusees borrowed from the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, an extremely dangerous combustible to have on board his wood and canvas aircraft. The leaf he was thinking of, I think now, must have been the palm-sized maple leaf prevalent in his hometown in Indiana. And what with its fiery colors of autumn—the reds and oranges and yellows—a camouflage of flame while falling, the leaf, no doubt, suggested to him the pyrotechnical display he would create. I can see him now, transfixed, watching the whirling leaves landing one after one. Or, perhaps more accurately, he sought to mimic the motion of the cantilevered construction of the maple tree’s winged seeds, double samaras, with their elegant helical transcriptions as they spun to the earth through the late summer’s humid air. In any case, this stunt became Art Smith’s signature, literally, written each night in the sky over the exposition.
It is the “graveyard spiral” but also known as the “vicious spiral,” the “deadly spiral,” or, simply, the “death spiral.” This fatal spiral dive, initiated, accidentally, when a pilot flying in fog, night, or other visually obscured phenomenon is blind to the horizon. The sensory deprived pilot listens to the signals, illusionary signals it turns out, emanating from the inner ear. He feels that he is in level flight but losing altitude and reacts (he cannot help himself) to pull up. But in doing so, he only tightens the turn, accelerating into the banking turn his plane is already locked into. It creates a kind of vertigo for the plane. But that vert
igo is kept from the pilot in the blind cockpit where the instinctual maneuver of “pulling up” feels like life-saving equilibrium. Trusting one’s “seat of the pants” over the feedback of flight instruments, a pilot over-corrects. He gets the “leans,” sensing he is level when he is not, he continues to compensate to the false whisper in his ear. It is paradoxical that the confused and confusing organ complicit in the service of the “death spiral” should be the inner ear with its corkscrewing cochlea and its braid of semicircular canals that sculpt in bone and tissue the very deadly flight path the ear fails to read or comprehend. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, trained with early, view-limiting devices, trained and then trained others to fly with instruments, to override the messages his own sensing apparatus mistakenly produced. Shown here, a controlled death spiral, very much like “The Falling Leaf” of San Francisco, over Dayton, Ohio, sometime after he began flying for the Mail Service. His “skywriting” transcribing, in a controlled manner, the nightmarish spiral for student observers on the ground. His own fatal crash, a few months later, would be ruled a pilot error. But it was a different kind of mistake, one of visual acuity not auditory derangement as he mistook the lights of a farmyard as aids to navigation at a landing field. Still, after all this time, a failure to recognize or respond to instrument readings is the most common cause of what we now call “a controlled flight into terrain.”
It might have been that Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, first read W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” in the magazine The Dial where it was first published in 1920. The Christian Science Reading Room in Fort Wayne did carry the magazine in its inventory out of the mistaken belief that it was still the Transcendentalist journal it was at its founding in 1840. Or did the book in which the poem was later collected, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, fall into his hands a year later in a Cleveland bookseller’s shop or the Allen County Public Library between sorties for the Mail Service or applications of skywritten advertisements? He would have been taken by the imagery of flight and flying encapsulated by the falcon and falconer as well as the evocation of the “widening gyre” the bird turns through in the poem’s opening line. The sublime apocalyptic symbolism would have struck a chord as the poem addresses the aftermath of The Great War’s traumatic disruptions. The bombing of cities from the air. Aerial dogfighting with rapid firing machine guns diabolically designed to fire in the clear intervals between spinning propeller blades. Fiery midair disintegrations of fragile and unstably tuned aircraft. Smith and many veterans read the bleak verses generated by the carnage. Sassoon, Owen, Brooke, Graves. The early optimistic elation that airplanes and flying promised seemed broken and exhausted as aviation and Art Smith settled into routines of hauling bags of letters through the air punctuated by the prosaic tattooing of the sky with advertisements for cigarettes and shaving cream. The center not holding. This lyrical curlicue was captured over rural Zulu, Indiana, in the summer of 1922 amidst the circling turkey buzzards and quarreling crows. A folly of exhaustion? A distracted doodle? An attempt to recapture some of the spent joy of his boyhood flight? A transcription of a sigh? A hieroglyph of a death wish?
On Wednesday, March 18th, 1925, the deadliest tornado in the history of the United States cut through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. The Tri-State Tornado killed close to 700 and injured more than 2,000, damaging 20 cities, four of which were effaced from the earth. It was a fast moving storm, averaging 60 miles per hour as it moved diagonally from southwest to northeast. It traveled over 300 miles, in the five hours it was on the ground, carving a path that ranged from 1 to 3 miles in width. Had there been satellites, the ruled straight-edged course of the storm’s destruction would have been visible from space. And even a few months after the event, that scored course remained visible to Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, who, from a mere mile aloft, easily tracked the storm’s irresistible vector as it plowed through the mostly rural landscape. The shadow of his Jenny fell on the actual trued black furrow in the fields below still papered with debris, tangled metal wreckage, alluvial fans of masonry, clapboard sticks, and swaths of shingles. At the end of his reconnoitering near Princeton, Indiana, where half the town was destroyed and the Heinz factory flattened, Smith pulled up, performed a slow circling climb into thinner and ever thinner air, probably not even aware that he had initiated the telltale smoke of his skywriting, and disappeared there, above a high ceiling of reddish cirrocumulus clouds also known as a mackerel sky.
Gas City
Serious mining of the natural gas reservoir, a reserve that would become known as the Trenton Field in east central Indiana, began in the late 1880s. Overnight, thousands of wells were drilled. The deposits of fossil fuel in the huge interconnected field spread over 5,000 square miles, nearly the size of the state of Connecticut, and contained a trillion cubic feet of gas and a billion barrels of oil. To prove that the gas was flowing from the new well bores, the operators tapped the mainline, piping off a portion of the flow to set the surplus spectacularly ablaze. The flames towered over the plains and prairies, forests of fire. The flares could be seen as far north as Fort Wayne. And the light over the horizon above Indianapolis roiled and flickered, a man-made display of the aurora borealis. These constantly combusting gas flares came to be known as “flambeaux.” The discovery led to an industrial boom for commerce, illumination, manufacturing, especially of glass products. Ball Brothers, Henry, Hoosier, Root, and Sneath—all these companies were attracted by the cheap and seemingly inexhaustible fuel. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, began his flying career just as the great gas field of Indiana was reaching its peak. Aloft, even in daylight, he could see over the horizon, south to the far reaches of Delaware, Jay, Blackford, and Grant Counties and the copses of yellow orange flames flaring in the distance, the light seemingly floating, like oil on the shimmering melting azure of liquefied air. At night, the flambeau-burning created a deep blue mirage, a blanket that wavered like waves on a black sand shore. In 1912, the Chamber of Commerce of Gas City hired Smith to celebrate The Boom by writing BOOM over the booming city ringed with flaming groves and arbors of flambeaux whose jets of combusting gases leapt up toward Smith’s vapory writerly combustion, fingers pointing, twitching flickering hands grasping the slowly expanding, ever thinning rings of the mute BOOM.
Only a few years later, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, returned to the famous Trenton Gas Field on a more sober mission of sky calligraphy. The pressure across the field was falling. The decline in pressure meant that the gas to heat the houses and power the furnaces of Indiana would soon be too low to continue flowing. At the turn of the century the pressure at the wellheads was near 200 psi. By the time of Smith’s initial visit, the flow had fallen to 150 psi and continued to fall. It was suspected, even then, that the open displays of flame were a major contribution to the rapid depletion of what was thought to be a vast and bottomless resource. Now, a century later, we understand that as much as 90% of the field’s natural gas was wasted in flambeau displays. And much of the proved oil reserve, without the pressurized gas to aid in its extraction, remains below the Hoosier bog unlifted and unliftable. In 1916, Smith was invited back to Indiana (from his triumphant turn at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco where he had lit up the night with skywriting, produced by means of phosphoric flares) to commemorate the extinguishing of the final flambeau. The fire forests of standing pipe, burning continuously for a quarter of a century, now saw their arboreal canopy of flame dwindling, going out, extinguished. The Chamber of Commerce at Gas City did not want to wait for what now seemed inevitable, but instead sought to ceremonially cap what was believed to be the last flambeau. This they did as Art Smith arched over the funereal crowd below. He considered writing, “DOUSE” or “DONE” or “ENOUGH’ or “SNUFF” or “OVER.” He wanted to find a word that would suggest the blowing out of candles on a birthday cake, onomatopoeia of exhaustion, exhalation, breath, a whooshing whispered wish. But he settled on a return to the optim
istic BOOM of a few years before, transmuted to this startled interjection of the unexpected, the uncontrolled. The sun was setting as he took to the air. The Indiana State Seal depicts a sun near a mountainous horizon, a man with an ax felling a tree that a bison leaps over in flight. There was never much thought about the kind of sun that’s pictured, setting or rising. But now? And the mountains in the distance, they never made sense, he thought, as he closed the last radii of his second zero and the faint sun sank through it toward the flat, hairline fracture that would be there in the diminished distance: Illinois.
Rest
The first publicly sponsored Fourth of July fireworks display in Fort Wayne took place at the Irene Byron Tuberculosis Sanatorium north of the city in the summer of 1925. The Sanatorium, opened in 1919, housed varying ages of infected patients in the then state-of-the-art facility. There were several buildings on the campus with one unit entirely dedicated to children. The fireworks were launched in such a manner that they could be viewed from the numerous screened-in verandas and sun porches where the patients daily enjoyed part of the generally accepted regimen of treatment—rest and more rest, steeping in rest, sleeping in fresh air both days and nights all year round. The patients also received a healthy diet and could partake in light exercise at the hospital’s wading pool, playground, badminton courts, and table tennis tables. All were gathered on the porches, patios, and balconies that midsummer late gloaming, anticipating the pyrotechnics later that evening but now entertained by Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, whose smoky prescription of R E S T was transformed as they watched into F R E S H,