by Richard Bach
Before me on the plain, the first smudge of a city rising. Dallas. Or more properly, Dallas/Fort Worth. Gradually it lifts and looms clearer, a giant sprawled in the sunlight. I shift course to the south, to avoid flying over the city. It should look like any other city from the air, but it does not. I cannot look at Dallas objectively. There has been a furious battle raging over airports in Dallas/Fort Worth. Each claims to have the airport most suited to the needs of both cities, and at last the government had to step in and mediate the case. Much name calling going on down there, and bad feeling among those who used to fly and are now the operators of Large Steel Desks with “Airport Official” written in nameplates.
Beyond that, the city is a big depressing place, and there is even a sad tone in the sound of the engine, a going-lower sound from the cylinders. This is the city where the President was shot. I am glad that I do not have to land.
The mood of the countryside brightens a bit when the city has fallen out of sight behind, and I find U.S. Highway 80, which will be my primary navigation aid for the next thousand miles. Somewhere soon I should think about landing. Western Hills, it says on the map, and I fly one circle about a little town and its airport. It is 8:30 in the morning, but there is not a sign of life on the field. The hangars are closed, the parking lot is empty. I will surely have to wait for fuel. I have made good time in the wind and down the road will be another airport at which someone is stirring. Besides, every mile behind is one less mile ahead. Considering this rather basic maxim of the traveler in the open cockpit, I settle down once again with the W of the magnetic compass bobbling under the reference line. By now the wind is a full crosswind and there is nothing to be gained by remaining at altitude. Forward on the stick, then, and down we come into the layer of the sky where the wind is slowed by its contact with the ground. We level fifty feet in the air above the deserted highway and rise and fall with the contour of the low hills.
Here and there an automobile on the road, and I get to know each one well, for I do not pass them so quickly now. A station wagon built sometime way ahead in the years to come, with children who haven’t yet been born crowding the rear windows. I wave to them, across time and across five hundred feet of Texas air, and receive in return a little forest of waving hands. It is comforting to see other people moving through this space, and I cannot help but wonder what the others think as they look back into 1929. Does it remind them? Do they remember the days when they crossed this very road (it was a dirt road then) and along about there in the sky was an airplane just like that one that is there now? And it pulled slowly ahead and it vanished gradually to the left of the road, just as that one is vanishing?
I fly the up-sun side of the road from habit, and I wonder if that was a habit in the first days of flight. Probably not. Fly up-sun and they can’t read your number. A defensive sort of habit, that. But I think it has saved me trouble now and then. There are not many people who know that it is perfectly permissible for an airplane to fly at less-than-treetop height in uninhabited land. If someone were not feeling happy about old airplanes, they could catch my big registration number and cause me to have to prove my innocence. The regulations say only that I must fly five hundred feet from any person on the ground; whether the five hundred feet is over or to one side of him makes no difference. Now, avoiding the wind and with plenty of smooth places to land, I choose to fly five hundred feet to one side of. The up-sun side.
When the road is clear, I fly over till my wheels straddle the centerline and I sit up tall in the seat and crane over the windscreen and over the long nose and just enjoy flying low. The telephone poles whisk by, and by resting one elbow on the rim of the cockpit I feel again almost as if I am driving an automobile. With the one fine difference of being able to touch back on my steering control and go roaring straight up into the sky.
I have a friend who is a race-car driver and he says racing is the greatest fun in the world. For him; he keeps forgetting to say, for him. For anyone else—well, for me—it is a frightening sort of fun. As in so many pursuits that are pinned to the ground, there is no margin, no time for thinking of other things. He must stay precisely upon that narrow ribbon of asphalt, and if anything looms ahead or even if the ribbon is not properly banked, the driver is in trouble. He has to think hard about driving every second that he holds that accelerator down. The sky, on the other hand, and very happily, is for dreamers, because there is so much margin, so much freedom. In an old airplane the takeoff and the landing are a bit critical, but the flying itself is the simplest, most controllable way to travel since . . . since nothing at all. Something in the way ahead? Climb over it. Turn around it. Fly underneath it. Circle for a while and think about it. None of these can the race driver do. He can only try to stop. With his margin, the airplane pilot can sit back in his cockpit and relax. He can spend long minutes looking behind his airplane, or above it or below it. Looking ahead is a sort of formality that has carried over from habits learned on the ground. He can do anything he wants to do with the ground; tilt it, twist it, put it over his head or directly behind his tail. And he can let it just wander its sleepy way below and look down at it through slitted eyes and make it go all misty and unreal.
The signs and the warnings and the agencies of flight remind solemnly that one should never let his attention shift from the urgent task of flying his airplane, that to let the mind drift for a second is disaster. But, after one has been flying for a very short while, it becomes clear that the agencies take themselves far too seriously. As a student pilot learns early in his first lesson, an airplane will fly itself better than he can fly it. An airplane does not demand the constant concentrated thought to stay in the air that the race car demands to stay on its narrow road. Following only the basic caution of not flying into a tree or the side of a mountain, a pilot finds the sky a perfect place to go and not-think.
Now, driving a foot above Highway 80 in my airplane, I must be a little more cautious than in those hours when there are five hundred or a thousand feet between my wheels and the earth. Now I can be the race driver, but without the penalty that plagues him. If I miss the turn, I can go right on over the guard rail, on over the rocks and boulders and the trees, and not feel the slightest tremor in my machine.
Over the rise of a hill ahead, unexpectedly, a car driving toward me. Back hard on the stick, and a turn into the sun, to gain that five hundred feet. I can’t help but smile within myself. What would that feel like for me, to be driving over a little rise of ground along an ordinary road way out in nowhere and suddenly be confronted with an airplane headed directly at my windshield? That’s not a very kind thing for an airplane pilot to do to people, despite the legality of it, and I should peek over the hills before I allow the biplane to frighten some poor driver who would rather be alone with his even-chuffing train of thought.
So we go our way, peeking over the hills first, then pressing ourselves tightly to the road, rolling our wheels once or twice on either side of the white line without really meaning to.
A bit of a start as I glance at my watch, for I have been flying for over four hours and am far ahead of my estimate for this hour. Ahead, the town of Ranger, Texas, listed on the map as home to an airport, I climb to see better, and find the water tower, the crossing of another highway, a building being built. And an airport. It is a big airport for such a small town, three dirt runways crossed on the ground and a pair of hangars. Circle once, check the windsock and, with a silent word of thanks to the man who decided to have more than one runway available for landing, turn into the wind and settle to the dirt.
It is not even lunchtime and I have covered five hundred miles from Louisiana. That seems like so much, and I am proud, but away in the future/past I have flown airplanes that covered that distance in less than an hour, and one that could cover it in twenty minutes. There should be something meaningful in the contrast, in the shifting spectrums of times and airplanes, but now I am tired from four hours of sitting on a stone-hard para
chute, and at the moment the meanings come second to the luxury of standing up and taking a step along an unmoving ground. The flight is going like a welcome routine, everything according to plan and as I would have it. And at the moment, at Ranger, Texas, as I wipe the oil from the windscreens and from the cowl, I do not think of the plan or of the future.
10
“SORRY, MISTER. I can’t swing that prop for you. Can’t turn the crank, either. Insurance. My insurance wouldn’t cover me if I got hurt.”
Strange strange strange, and I’m furious as I storm from the cockpit where I have been ready for engine start. Come all this way having too many willing helpers to tend the biplane and now, in a hurry to be gone, I have to get out here in the ninety-degree sun in a fur-lined jacket and I have to crank the airplane by myself, while the attendant stands back and watches. Anger converts easily into energy, and by the time the inertia flywheel is screaming I am too tired to bother with the fears of the attendant. Pull the starter engage handle, let the engine roar into life and shake a blanket of dry dust behind, taxi to face the wind, run the engine and let go the brakes. A glance at my watch as the wheels lift from the ground and I begin to tick away another four hours, second by second. I settle down upon my friend the highway and it is as if I had not landed at all, as if I have been sitting constantly behind this propeller from sunrise, and from the night before that and from the day that led into the night. It will be good to get to California and home.
The crosswind has turned now to become a strong breeze, pushing me hard to the right, so that I must fly angled to the highway, fighting the wind with the bright blade of my propeller.
Fighting the wind with the blade. That is sort of poetic. But, when one is pressed shoulder to shoulder with the roiling forces that travel the sky, one needs every weapon he can get. A propeller is one of the pilot’s weapons, for as long as it turns he is not really thrown on his own. As long as it turns it is not just a man against the crosswind or the headwinds or the ice over sea, but a man and his airplane, working and fighting together. One doesn’t feel quite so lonely. Still, the propeller is not a friend without weakness, and to know the weakness and to supply the need of the weapon in those times is a wise practice. A propeller can be bravely turning full revolutions, as fast as it can turn, and if the airplane flies into a mass of air that is falling faster than the airplane can climb, it is all to no avail and the weapon and the pilot slide toward the earth. But the simple forethought of seeing the weakness and supplying it, of knowing that one can escape downdraft, and turn a mile away to a place where the air is rising, fills the coffers with altitude. So, before the weapon is even unsheathed for battle, before it is needed or the battle has been joined, the man in the airplane can supply the needs of his weapon. Enter this valley on the right side or the left? On one side will be a constant fight, a furious running duel with the wind and the mountain. On the other side, perhaps less than a mile distant, a smooth flight, that needs even less power than normal to maintain altitude. So, as he learns, the pilot begins to think not of left side or right, but upwind side or downwind. At first the student pilot would seek to disregard the wind, to cast it from his thought, for he has too many problems already to concern him, and give him one good reason why he should bother with something he can’t even see. The answer, the student learns, is simply to be able to see the wind. The wind is a giant ocean of air surging along the rocky floor of the earth. Where ocean waves would tumble green and rushing down the side of the mountain, look for the wind to do the same. Where ocean would smash against the base of a cliff and shoot straight up, see there, on a day when the wind is strong, a power that will take an airplane by the wings and throw it headlong into the sky. Fly always the upwind side of the mountains and hills and you can fly easily, in the conscious power of one who knows that he needn’t even loose his weapon to win a battle or to avoid it.
Where there are no mountains, the pilot who sees the sky sees tall columns of warm blue air rising from heated spots on the ground. Pause for a moment in one of the columns, circling, and the airplane climbs in spite of itself, carried aloft on an elevator denied to those who believe only what they can surely see. The man who flies an airplane, then, to be the best possible pilot, must be a believer in the unseen.
One can get along in the air for a long time without having to believe, for usually the only consequence of unbelieving is a little more strain on the engine, a little more wear on the propeller. But if one flies long enough and far enough there will come the day when the difference between believing and not believing is the difference between winning or losing the whole game of problem solving.
Ahead, the sky goes brown in dust thrown by the wind. Dust that is Texas airborne, and one of the reasons behind the poignant names of Texas towns along my course: Gladewater, Clearwater, Sweetwater, Mineral Wells, Big Spring. A land centered about water, and where the water is scarce in the ground it is made plentiful in thought and in the names of cities.
I look up and see that the dust tops out way over my head . . . six thousand, maybe eight thousand feet. It would be useless to try to climb over it; the winds aloft would be even more on my nose and I would find the cars passing me. As it is, I can stay with the faster autos, just barely hold my own. That is a disconcerting feeling. There is a blue station wagon on the highway, humming along. It falls behind me a little when it has to climb a hill, it catches up and moves on ahead when the hill is in its favor. We have been together for minutes, so long that the passengers no longer bother to look out the window at the biplane flying not far away. The woman is reading a newspaper. I wonder if she knows that I’m looking over her shoulder. Of course not. You wouldn’t expect the pilot of an airplane to be aware of a car on the road, let alone of the people in the car.
The great wide flat land is all about, as far as I can see. There is room to put ten thousand biplanes into safe harbor. If the dust ahead gets so thick that I cannot see, it will be simple to turn and face the wind and land on any short stretch of clear soil. The stronger the wind, the shorter the space that the biplane will use for a safe landing. If the wind reaches fifty-five miles per hour, I’ll be able to land without even rolling the wheels. I could hover for an hour above my landing spot if I wished, and alight as gently as hummingbird upon jasmine branch. Still, the wind across the ground looks vicious, whipping long lashes of sand across the highway, making the dry trees bow and flutter to the force of its will.
We press ahead and I find myself wondering what comes next, from out of the murk, wondering whether the dust and the wind are all that are lying behind the portent of this ominous right drift. Somehow, there is that part of my thought that will be disappointed if there is not something more carnivorous than this waiting to battle.
The little towns of the brown plain slowly appear and slowly vanish behind as the wind shifts to blow more directly against the front of the biplane. Of course, I remind myself, the wind is not blowing on the airplane at all; the only wind that I feel is the wind that the airplane makes in its passage through the air and the blast of the propeller at work. We are like a goldfish in a deep river of air, swimming through the air and at the same time being carried along in its bosom. The classic illustration for the young in flight is, “If you are aloft in a balloon in a hurricane, you could light a candle in the open air and the flame wouldn’t even flicker. You’re moving just as fast as the wind, my friend, just like a goldfish in a river.”
I doubt that the candle/hurricane theory has ever been tested, but it all seems very logical and the goldfish must know that it is true. Still, it is difficult to accept this totally from the windy, gritty cockpit of an airplane over a long and lonely highway. Perhaps if I had a candle . . .
If I had a candle, I would still need the balloon. Settle down, pilot, and think about your flying. If the visibility gets very much worse, you know, you are going to have to land.
One solitary automobile on the highway passes me handily and I must draw my comfo
rt from the fact that it is a new and luxurious machine. He could probably go one hundred miles per hour if he wanted to. In the tiny towns, the people have left the outdoors to the wind, and for the long minutes that the collection of houses drift beneath me they bring rippling reflections of the little villages along the roads of France. Deserted. Utterly deserted. Shutters closed, even in the center of the day. I never did discover where French villagers live, and left Europe as mystified as the other squadron pilots as to what the villages and the houses were for.
Vaguely through the sand comes a longer line of gasoline stations clinging to the highway. There is a city coming, and I look to the map on my knee. City city city, let’s see. City should be . . . Big Spring. A strange name, at this moment. North of the city there will be an airport and I should think about landing. No, I won’t land. There are two hours left in the tank, and I might fly out of the worst of the dust if I continue. Climb to cross the city, although I’m certain that no one hears the sound of five cylinders over the howl of the wind. Still, in a few things, conforming to regulation becomes a habit. Seven minutes to cross the city. I am certainly not moving very quickly. But if I stick to my task the wind should shift to become a right crosswind, drifting me to the left and portending good things to come.