The biplane stands serene and unmoving. She seems very sure that there will be room for a lesson tomorrow.
3
ADVENTURES BEGIN with the sun. By the time the mist is gone, and the mud dry on the wings, the biplane and I begin our first full day together. The only sounds in the field are the unusual ones of cylinders 1–3–5–2–4 slowly, over and again while the bright blade flickers around.
I pace the field in front of the plane, moving blown tree branches and occasional stones aside, marking the holes that could give difficulty. This first part of the takeoff is critical, before the weight has gone from the wheels into the wings.
The 1–3–5–2–4 comes fainter and fainter as I pace, a soft sewing machine stitching quietly away to itself. If someone wanted, he could dash to the biplane, push the throttle forward, and be gone. I know that the field is deserted, but still I am glad to return and work closer to the biplane.
Sleeping bag stowed in its tight fluffy cylinder and strapped in the front cockpit, giant fan-wind whirring past once again to establish a pattern of familiar, we are ready to say goodbye to a field that has been friend and tutor.
The thought flag comes down, checkered, and a single word: Go. Center of a roaring hemisphere of 1-3-5-2-4 round and round 1750 times a minute, moving slowly at first on heavy wheels, jouncing. Then faster. Then skipping from peak to tiny peak. Splashing mud in the first second, then spattering it, then spraying it hard, then skimming it, then leaving it smooth and untouched, casting down a shuddering black shadow.
Goodbye, field.
A railroad track points east, and so does the nose of the Parks. For the decision to fly from coast to coast, for the poor human frailty of wanting to tie things in neat packages with colorful bows just so, we fly east on our journey west. Because of an intangible unseen whim, a most seen and quite tangible old biplane whirs and thrashes through the sky, above a railroad track, reaching for the Atlantic Ocean.
Ahead, the sun rises from a golden sea. I need railroad tracks no longer, and shift my navigation from dull rails to a blinding star.
Sometimes there are so many symbols about me in the air that it is surprising I can see to fly. I become a symbol, myself. Which is a glorious sort of feeling, for there are so many meanings for me that I can inspect the meaning-bin and carefully select the one that looks best and feels best for this day and this hour. And all good meanings, and real.
What shall I be, this moment? For that part of me that keeps a cautious and uneasy distance from meanings, I am the holder of Commercial Airman’s Certificate 1393604, with the privileges of flight instructor, rated for instrument flying and to control single- and multi-engine land airplanes through the air and along the ground as necessary to accomplish the mission of flight. For that part of me, I am 5.27 miles from the Wilmington Omnirange, on the 263-degree radial, at 2,176 feet pressure altitude at 1118 hours Greenwich Mean Time on the 27th day of April in the 1,964th year of the Gregorian Calendar, New Style.
The fuselage of the airplane I fly is painted Stearman Vermilion, Randolph stock number 1918, the wings and tail are Champion Yellow, Randolph stock number unknown but very definitely and precisely listed somewhere in the dusty records of a forgotten drawer in a lost attic away over the horizon. A very precise airplane, every bolt and joint and stitch of it. Not only Detroit-Ryan Speedster, Model Parks P-2A, but serial number 101, registration number N499H, built December, 1929, and licensed January, 1930, under Aircraft Type Certificate 276.
Divorced from meanings, with labels only attached, the airplane and I become very complex and forbidding machines. Every bolt and wire of the engine and the airplane has a stock number, a serial number, a lot number. Take a magnifying glass, scrape away the varnish, and there are our numbers, stamped. And meaningless. When one surrounds oneself with meanings there are conflicts and shades of meanings and meanings whose holes are not drilled to line up and can’t be bolted together. One can be safe, with serial numbers, in a land of utter quiet. No disputes. Nothing moves.
But I am moving now, and so would carefully select a tailored meaning to outfit my airplane and one to slip about my own shoulders.
Since it is a bright day, biplane, and promising fair, let us mean joy. How does that fit? Look: joy seeks the sun, and the early of the mornings. Joy moves with delight, hasting to where the ocean is golden and the air crisp and cold. Joy tastes the liquid air spraying back onto leather helmet and lowered goggles. It delights in the freedom that is only found and won away up in the sky, from which there is no falling if one only keeps moving. And in the moving, we gain, and joy is precious even in Stearman Vermilion number 1918.
Here, here, son. The practical self speaking, uneasy with symbols, the rein-holding, solemn self. Here, here. All we want to do is get this thing out over the Atlantic a foot or two, so you can say you’ve done it, and then we have to get along on west. Engine, you know. It could fail.
How is it possible, I wonder, for me to be so sure, so self-centered certain that I am in control? I do not know, but the fact remains that I am, when I fly. Those clouds, for instance. Others may pass through them, but I am the one who lends them to the world. The patterns now in the sunlight on the sea, the streaks of fire in the sunrise, the cool breeze and the warm, all of these. Mine. For surely there can be in the world no one who knows and loves these as I. There, the source of the confidence and the power. I am sole heir to these, who can lift an airplane into the sky and feel, as the cloud wheels beneath him, that he has come truly home once again.
Look up, of a morning when the sun rises through the clouds, or of an evening as it sets. A thousand slanting shafts of gold, aren’t there? A brilliance, a sort of molten fire hidden? These are just the sights of my land seen from the ground, so bright and so warm and with beauty filled that the cloud cannot contain it all and splashes its overflow onto the earth as just a hint of the brilliance and the gold that exists above.
That little sound of four cylinders or five or seven, above the cloud, comes from a winged machine that is immersed in bright wonder. To be up there and fly alongside this creature is to see a vision, for the wings of an airplane in the sunrise are of beaten gold, going bright silver if you catch the proper angle, and on the canopy and along the windscreen dance the sparkle of diamonds. And within, a pilot, watching. What can you say, seeing this? You say nothing, and you share with another man in another cockpit a time of silence.
For when he sees this, when the magnificence floods over an airplane and the man who guides it, there is no speaking. Enchanted in the high land, to mention of beauty and joy in the mundane surroundings of earth and city and wall and polite society is to feel gawkish and out of place. Even to his best beloved, a pilot cannot speak of the wonder of the sky.
After the sun is high and the spell fades, one’s fuel is gone. The white needle is at the E, the little indicator cork ceases its bobbing, a red low-level-warning light glares above a fuel counter. And in a minute or five or ten, the tires thud again onto the grass or scream a bluesmoke cry against the concrete of a once-forgotten runway. Mission done, flight over. Chalk up another hour. Pencil and logbook for a moment busy. But though the earth once again spreads beneath our feet, and the unnatural quiet of an engineless world surrounds us, there is new fuel to be hosed into tanks, and another page in the log to be filled.