Biplane

12

THERE IS A RESTAURANT IN FABENS, part of the motel on U.S. Highway 80. Like every other café and restaurant across the country, in the hour before sunrise, it is a very uncomfortable place for criminals. In Rayville it was the sheriff at breakfast, at Fabens it is the highway patrol. Two beaconed squad cars are parked in the gravel outside and four black-uniformed, six-gunned officers take their coffee at the counter, talking about a murderer caught the night before in El Paso.

I feel guilty as they talk, and glad that they aren’t still looking for murderers. I am a suspicious-looking character, sitting alone at the far end of the counter, furtively consuming a doughnut. My flight suit is smeared with rocker-box grease, ingrained with Midland-Odessa sand. My boots are white in runway dust, and I am suddenly aware that the survival knife sewn on my right boot could be a very sinister thing, a concealed weapon. I cross my left boot over the right one, feeling more and more the wary fugitive.

“You want a ride out to the airport, mister?”

I hope the sudden startled clatter of my hot chocolate cup doesn’t mark me a murderer.

“You’re the fellow with the biplane out there, aren’t you?”

“How would you know that?”

“Saw you come in last night. I do a little flying out there myself—Cessna 150.”

I forget about my concealed weapon, accept a ride, and the talk changes from murderers to the good old days of flying.

At dawn the magnetos are dry. During the engine runup before takeoff, they don’t miss a beat. That was my problem. There can be no other explanation. The magnetos were wet, and as long as I keep them dry I shall have no more difficulties with engines.

So, before the sun is quite up, a single biplane leaves the ground at Fabens, Texas, and turns to follow a highway leading west. It takes a while to settle down again. It was from this cockpit that I saw the unpleasant difficulties of yesterday, and it will be a minute or two before confidence returns that the difficulties are truly gone. Switch the mag selector from Right to Left and I cannot hear the slightest change in the sound of the engine. I could not ask for a better ignition system. But it is always good practice to keep a landing place in sight.

El Paso, with its very own mountain, in the first light of the sun. I have watched the sun on this mountain before, but I think now of the times quickly, without searching for meaning. I just know that I have been here before, but now I am in a hurry to leave El Paso, a checkpoint only, a dwindling crosshatch behind me.

The road is gone, too, and for the next eighty miles the navigation is the traditional kind: railroad track, and is this ever a desert! Visibility must be a hundred miles and it’s like looking through a microscope at a sheet of grey newsprint: clumps of desert sage on mounds of sand, each clump precisely eight feet from its neighbors on all sides. Any one clump could be the center of the desert and the rest stretch perfect and absolutely constant to the end of the earth. Even the map gives up here and sighs. The black line of the railroad track races inch on inch through the tiny faceless dots that mean there’s nothing out here at all.

Stop now, engine, and we’ll discover how long we have to wait for a train to cross these tracks. I dare not fly low. First, to give a wider choice of landing places. Second, because I am afraid that I will see rust upon the tracks.

Right magneto. Fine. Left magneto. wasn’t that the tiniest missing of a beat, there? It couldn’t have been, now quick, switch back to Both. Oh, it’s whistling-up-courage time. There was the smallest choke then, I’m sure. Automatic Rough, boy, just like the missed beats you hear in any engine as soon as it is over water and out of gliding distance from land. Yesyes that’s it, good ol’ Automatic Rough, the practical joker, and it won’t be necessary to check the mags again.

Listening very closely, I can hear the uneven beat of the engine. The only unanswered question is whether the uneven beat is normal or not, for I have never listened so closely to this engine before. I think that I could listen as closely to a sewing machine and hear the stitches missed. As the mechanics say, you can’t fix anything till you see something wrong; I’ll just have to wait till the missing gets worse.

Uncomfortable miles of desert pass below. Certainly makes a difference when one suddenly has no trust in an engine. I can’t help but think that the less I trust the engine, the less worthy of trust it will be, and my little sewing machine will collapse completely.

There you go, engine; I trust the heck out of you. Run on and on, you little devil; bet I couldn’t stop you if I tried, you run so well. Remember your brother engines who set the endurance records and pulled the Spirit of St. Louis from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget. They wouldn’t be at all happy to hear that you considered stopping over the desert, would they? Now, you’ve got plenty of fuel and there’s plenty of oil for you, warm and clean, it is a fine dry morning. Wonderful for flying, don’t you think? Yes, it certainly is a fine dry morning.

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.