Biplane

by Richard Bach

  I am in a hurry, full in a hurry. I do not care now whether I learn or not, the only thing that matters is that this engine keeps running and that we make it quickly to California. Learning is a misty little will-o’-the-wisp that is gone as soon as one blinks one’s eyes and allows thought of something else. When I hurry, the airplane goes dead and quiet beneath me, and I grow tired, and I fly a machine in the air and I learn nothing.

  Coming in from the horizon is the first curve in the track and around that curve, Deming, New Mexico. We’ll make it to Deming in fine shape, won’t we, engine? Of course we will. And after Deming is Lordsburg and my goodness we’re not far from home at all, are we? You just keep right on chugging along up there, my friend. Chugging right on along.

  Comes Deming, sliding by, and once again a road to follow. And Lordsburg. The engine utters no complaint. After Lordsburg I fly off my map into Arizona. But if I follow the road, it will surely lead to Tucson. I sit in the cockpit and watched the powdered ground reel by. The mountains are surprises now, without a map, as if this were all unexplored territory. The next chart I have is for Tucson.

  The road winds for a moment, twisting through the rocky hills. An adobe house to the right, a cluster of mountain buildings to the left, guarding a lake as smooth as engine oil. There is not the faintest ripple of wind.

  One certainly becomes impatient when one doesn’t know just where one is. Come along, Tucson. Around this curve? This? All right, Tucson . . . let’s go, let’s go.

  We snake down a lonely valley, echoes rebounding from its hills. In Tucson we shall have to look around; big airports and big airplanes there. It will be nice to see another airplane. Why, I haven’t seen another airplane since Alabama! Even over Dallas, not a single airplane. Talk about the crowded sky. But perhaps the first thousand feet doesn’t count as sky.

  And there it is ahead, suddenly, as in the motion pictures of the sailing boats when the lookout shouts land ho and the camera turns to find land only a hundred yards away. There, a silver gleam in the air, an airplane flying. It is a transport making his landing approach to Tucson International. A transport. He looks as foreign in the sky as though he were an oil painting of an airplane, sliding on invisible tracks toward the runway.

  To the right is the giant that is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, with a runway nearly three miles long. I could land on the width of that runway with room to spare, but the mountain-heavy airplanes that fly from the base sometimes need every foot of the length to get off the ground. What a way to fly.

  Right there, by the corner where the parking ramp turns, I stood on a weekend alone, with a fighter plane that would not start. Something wrong with the ignition. I could get all kinds of fuel into the burner cans and the tailpipe, but it wouldn’t light. . . . I couldn’t make it burn. I gravely considered throwing a newspaper afire up that tailpipe, then running around to the cockpit and opening the throttle to spray it with fuel. But a mechanic happened along and fixed the ignition system before I found a newspaper and a match. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened.

  One other airplane, a little one, in the sky below me, and I rock my wings to him. He doesn’t notice. Or he may have noticed, but is one who doesn’t believe in wing-rocked greetings between airplanes. That is a custom going out of style, I think, wing-rocking to say hello and doesn’t-worry-I-see-you. Well, I’ll give it a chance to live on, anyway. Sort of a comradely thing to do, I think, and I might be able to set the custom going again; have everyone rocking their wings to everyone else. Jet transports, bombers, lightplanes, business planes. Hm. That might be carrying it a little far. Perhaps it’s best that only a few keep the custom going.

  One mountain north of Tucson and it is time to land once more, at an ex-Army field. Marana Air Park, they call it now. Like planting flowers in a hand grenade. Hard surface here, and straight into the wind. I should be getting used to the biplane by now, but there is that strange wall of hurry between us. We land without incident, and stop. Yet there is a moment in which I know that I could not control the airplane if it veered to left or right, as though we were sliding on buttered glass. Something is gone. My rushing, my placing California before learning has breached the trust between us, and the biplane has not stopped to teach or even to imply a lesson since before the thunderstorm. She has been cold and void of life, she has been a machine only. Watching the familiar fuel pour into the familiar tank, I wish that I could slow down, could take my time. But the closer I come to home, the harder I drive the biplane and myself. I am helpless, I am swept up in a windstorm of hurry and nothing matters except getting home tomorrow.

  13

  THE MAGNETO AGAIN. Only ten minutes after takeoff, the left mag is misfiring. Clearly it is not Automatic Rough at work, for below is Casa Grande and an airport into the wind. It is just that the engine is misfiring and backfiring whenever the left magneto is called upon to spark the cylinders by itself. The right mag works well, with only an occasional single missing of a single beat. Decision time once again, and more difficult. Land now at a field that has some limited repair facilities and find the trouble, or continue on, using the right mag alone?

  No answer from the airplane, as if she is sitting back and watching me dispassionately, not caring whether the decision I make here means safety or destruction. If only I were not in a hurry to be home. It would be prudent to stop. Prudence and I haven’t been getting along too well these last days, but after all, one should sometimes follow its leadings.

  All the while, Casa Grande drifts slowly behind. I don’t have much money, and it would cost money even if the little hangar there would have the parts the engine needs. If I go ahead, I’m gambling that the good magneto will stay good across the next three hundred miles of desert. If I lose, I’ll land on the highway and seek the help of my fellow man. That’s not too bad a fate, or a very high penalty to pay. What does an airplane engine have two magnetos for, anyway? So that it can run all day on one magneto, it can run all its life on one magneto. Decision made. We go on.

  With the decision, a wind rising out of the west. A time for patience has once again arrived, and at altitude, in the midst of the wind, I am slowed so that a lone automobile, towing a house trailer, keeps in perfect pace with me. The cost of my decision to fly with an ailing ignition system is that I fly at altitude and do not allow myself the trick of flying close to the ground in avoidance of the wind. My only negotiable asset now is altitude and I cannot afford to squander it for a few miles per hour. At least I am moving westward.

  I’m not concerned, and engine failure is an academic sort of problem from Casa Grande to Yuma, for this is land that I know well and that I have seen day after day and month after month. Just on the other side of those same Santan Mountains off my right wing lies Williams Air Force Base. Just after I had finally earned the right to wear the wings of an Air Force pilot, I came to this land, and to the magnificent swift airplane that was numbered F-86F and that was coded Sabrejet. From those runways we flew, nervous at first in a single-seat airplane in which the first time we flew, we flew alone. And it was such a simple airplane to fly that we would finish our short before-takeoff checklist there on the concrete and stop and wait and shake our heads and mutter, certain that we had forgotten something. You mean all you do is push this little handle forward and let go of the brakes and then fly? That’s what they meant, and following that opening routine we came up from those runways to cross this same desert.

  To my left are a few hundred square miles marked Restricted Area on my map, and that are indeed restricted, as far as biplanes are concerned. But then Restricted meant Our Very Own, where we flew to find the strafing targets set in cleared squares of desert and the bull’s-eye rings of the bomb circles. But best of all for us was the desolate land called the Applied Tactics Range. Applied Tactics gives the student the feel of what close air support really is. There on the desert are convoys of old rusting automobiles and trucks, are tanks waiting in the sage and yucca, are roundhous
es and artillery emplacements. Once in a while we would be allowed to practice combat tactics on these, learning such basic tenets as Never Strafe a Convoy Lengthwise; Never Attack Twice from the Same Direction; Concentrate Your Fire.

  Maybe they’re out there today. If I could make it very quiet, maybe I could hear the sound of the engines and the thud of the practice rockets hitting the sand and the popcorn sound of the fifty-caliber machine guns firing. This is happy country, from a time of good days, filled with that rare sort of friend that one only finds when adventure is shared, and when one trusts one’s life to another.

  Where are they in this twist of now? Those other pilots are no longer about me every day, briefing for the first flight before the sun has risen. Some who flew this land with me are still flying, some are not. Some are the same, some have changed. One a purchasing agent now for a giant corporation, one a warehouse manager, one an airline pilot, one in the Air Force, a career man. The friend within them is driven hard in a corner, by trivial things. Talk not to him of rent or taxes or how the home team is doing. The friend within is found in action, in the important things of flying smoothly in the weather, in calling the fuel check, the oxygen check, and in trying to put more bulletholes in the target than any other friend can do.

  It is strange to discover this. Here is the same man, that same body whose voice came once on the radio saying, Look at that, and I’d turn and look over my right wing and there would be an isolated mountaintop in spring, with its base all brown and dry, and from its razor top the wind pulling a white tatter of snow, absolutely without sound, and alone. The quiet wind on a quiet mountaintop, and the trail of snow like spray from a mid-ocean stormwave. And in “look at that” a friend is revealed. There is no triviality in those words. They are to say, Notice our mortal enemy, the mountain. He can at times be so very cruel, yet at times like these he can be very handsome, too, can he not? You’ve got to have respect for a mountain.

  Without mountains over which to be concerned, the friend shrinks away. When the purchase order and the desk become the important things in a life, the friend is difficult to reach. One can break through, of course, with sheer power and anguish and see again for a second or two the friend within. Hey! Bo! Remember the day when I was dialing a radio in my cockpit and you were flying my wing and you touched your microphone and said, Plan on flying into that hill, ace? Don’t you remember that?

  A stirring within, and an answer from the friend.

  I remember; don’t worry. I remember. Those days were bright, but we can never live them again, can we? Why must we hurt ourselves in the remembering?

  There is a shock of cold when I realize that the desk mind has taken over so much of the thought of a friend and that his brilliant life has become a calm plain. No more the roaring laughing highs of pulling contrails in the sun or rolling down into an attack. No more the furious caged lows of being caught for days on the ground by fog that doesn’t show the other side of the flight line. Nothing devastating ever happens to a purchasing agent, and nothing filled with delight.

  * * *

  The Restricted Area falls away behind and with it a few lumps of crusted lead, copper clad, buried in the sand, that once shimmered from my gun barrels. Ahead, another mountain, and a town called Yuma. Almost home country, now, biplane. Almost there. But it is surprising how big even home country can be. And for a reason unknown a fragment of statistic drifts through my mind. The great majority of all aircraft crashes occur within twenty-five miles of an airplane’s home base. One of those undoubtedly meaningless things, but of the sort that is so cunningly worded that one remembers it.

  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.”