Biplane

15

IN FIFTEEN MINUTES WE ARE AIRBORNE again, slamming through the whitecaps in the air, beating north across the wind. The safety belt is strained down tight, and the silver nose is pointed toward the shrouded peak of San Jacinto.

All right, mountain, this is it. I can do without my self-righteousness now. I’ll fight you all day long if I have to, to reach that runway at Banning. Today there will be no waiting for the weather to clear. I will fight you until the fuel tank is empty again, then fill the tank and come back and fight you for another five hours. But I tell you, mountain, I am going to make it through that pass today.

San Jacinto does not appear to be awed by my words. I feel like a knight, lance leveled, plumes flying, galloping at The Pass. It is a long gallop, and by the time I arrive at the tournament grounds we have used an hour of fuel. Plenty of fuel left to fly to Banning, and to spare. Come along, my little steed. First the lance, then the mace, then the broadsword.

The mountain’s mace hits us first, and it slams us down so hard that the fuel is jerked from the carburetor, the engine stops for a full second and my hand is ripped from the control stick. Then calm again.

San Jacinto is inscrutable, covered in its Olympian mist. Quite some mace it swings. Lance broken, it is time for my broadsword.

Another impossibly hard crash of air upon us, the engine stops for the count of two and I clutch the control stick with both hands. We are sheathed again in rainwater and raindrops whip back over my head like buckshot. We don’t scare, mountain. We’ll make Banning if we have to taxi there on the highway.

In reply, another smash of the mace, as if the mountain needs the time between blows to swing the spinning iron thing high over its head, to get the more power. In the force of it, I am fired against my safety belt, my boots are thrown from the rudder pedals, the world blurs as my head snaps back. And still Banning is not in sight. Airplane, can you take any more of this? I am asking much of you today, and I have not inspected your spars and fittings.

I can take it if you can, pilot.

The words smash into my mind as though the mace had driven them there. My airplane is back! It is a strange and wonder-filled time. A glorious time. I am no longer fighting alone, but fighting with my airplane. And in the middle of a fight, a lesson. As long as the pilot can believe in his fight, and battle on, his airplane will battle with him. When he believes his airplane has failed him, or will soon fail, he opens the door to disaster. If you don’t trust an airplane, you can never be a pilot.

Another mace, and I can hear it hit the biplane. Above the wind, above the engine and the rain, the hard WHAM of an incredible blow.

But ahead, now, ahead! Lying low in the rain, a shiny slick runway. In white letters across the end of it, BANNING. Come on, my little friend, we have almost won. Two strikes of the mace in quick succession, loud strikes that pitch us almost inverted, and I would not be surprised to hear spars snapping with the next blow. But I must trust the airplane. I lost my broadsword long ago, and we fight now with our bare hands. Only another minute.

And Banning is ours. We can turn now and land and rest.

But again, look ahead. The clouds have lifted, ever so slightly. I can see light between a foothill of the mountain and the cloud. Fly through that crack and the fight is over, I’m sure the fight will be over.

Banning fades slowly into the rain behind us.

This is a foolhardy thing to do. We could have stayed at the airport until this all lifted clear. You won your fight, you could have gloated over that piece of ill judgment without adding another to it. If that crack closes now ahead of you, where would you go, with Banning lost behind? Ninety percent of the crashes, they say, within twenty-five miles of home base.

Quiet, caution. I’ll land in the fields down there and in this wind I won’t roll very far. Now be quiet.

It is quiet from the dissenter’s gallery for the moment, the quiet of someone phrasing in his mind the most vengeful way of saying I told you so.

The mace is not hitting us squarely any more and the engine no longer stops in the force of it. We are one mile from the opening between cloud and ground over the hill. If it stays open for another minute and a half, we’ll be through. There will be perhaps a thirty-foot clearance. A mace blow glancing, smashing the biplane into a wild right bank.

Recovering, wheels swishing the top of the hill, we squeak through the crack, and instantly fly out of the dark rain. Instantly, in the blink of an eye. Whoever has been directing the action for this flight has been doing a magnificent job, so good that no one save a pilot will believe the land spread out before us as we cross the hill.

The clouds ahead are broken, and through them the golden shafts of sunlight pierce down like bright javelins thrown into the earth. A bit of an old hymn is tossed into my thought: “. from mist and shadow into Truth’s clear day.”

The day has color again. Sunlight. I have not known what sunlight means until this moment. It brings life and brilliant things to the air and to the ground under the air. It is bright. It is warm. It turns the dirt into emerald and lakes into the deep clear blue of a washed sky. It makes clouds so white that you have to squint even behind your dark goggles.

If the people working in the green fields below could have listened very carefully, they would have heard, high in the eucalyptus-wind, mixed with engine noise from that little red-and-yellow biplane, a tiny voice singing. I no longer have to hurry.

The first buildings of Los Angeles and its thousand suburbs slide beneath us, and from habit we climb. No chance of being lonely if we must land now. Stop the engine this moment and we shall land on the city golf course. This, and it’s the parking lot at Disneyland, big enough to land transports on. This, and we have the engineered concrete bed of the Los Angeles river.

But in no moment does the engine stop, as if the biplane is eager to see her new home and hangar, and has no patience for failures. “You can’t go wrong with a Wright,” the barnstormers used to say, and so it has proved. After playing its few harmless practical jokes, the Whirlwind engine has laughed at us and shows now the truth of the saying. We haven’t gone wrong.

We turn one last time, to enter a busy traffic pattern. One last runway tilting beneath us, rising out of the city. Compton Airport. Home. We have come twenty-seven hundred miles across a country, and now, oil trailing back from our silver cowl, wet dust spraying from beneath our tall wheels, past fitting smoothly into present, our journey is done. We have been splintered across runways; frozen in midair; blasted in flying sand; soaked in rain; beaten in mountain winds; scourged in brittle sage; we have flickered back and forth through the years, a brightwinged bird in time, and we have arrived home. Has the arriving been worth the travail of the journey? A good question. I rather doubt that a biplane cross-country craze will soon be sweeping the nation.

We wheel slowly into a hangar and rumble its giant heavy door closed against the busy modern sounds of a busy modern time.

In the miles and sand and rain and years, we have learned only a little about ourselves, picked up just a tiny fraction of knowing about one man and one old biplane, and about what they mean to each other. At the last, in the sudden quiet of a dark hangar, man and biplane alone together, we find our answer to the question of the journey. Four words.

It was worth it.