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 same 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.