Biplane

2

AS LONG as I’m so few miles from the Atlantic, I’ll fly east to the ocean. Make it a more fitting triumph to have flown literally from one coast to the other; from sea, as it were, to shining sea.

We are aloft, and heading east as the sun grows into a cool setting fireball behind. The shine is gone from the railroad tracks, and shadows have washed together into a dark protecting coat for the ground. I am in daylight still, but that is night seeping up out of the ground and my new old airplane has no lights. Barely airborne, it is time to land.

Five minutes away, down and to our right, a field. A pasture. It is a quarter mile long, with only a single row of trees to make the landing approach an interesting problem. We circle the field three times, the biplane and I, watching closely for ruts and holes and tree stumps and hidden ditches. And in the circling and the watching, the quarter mile of land changes from anonymous old pasture to my pasture; my field, my home for the night, my airport. A few minutes ago this land was nothing, now it is my home. I know that I shall have to land well to the left, paralleling the dirt road, avoiding a jackstraw pile of pine logs near the forest.

For the briefest of moments, a frightened voice. What the devil am I doing here, sitting in a wild old biplane with the sun gone down, circling a pasture with intent to land and a good chance of overlooking one felled tree in the dark grass and adding another twenty-three hundred pounds of kindling to the pile of jackstraws? One last cautious pass. The field looks short, and it looks wet, too. But I am committed to land, short or not, wet or not, kindling or not.

Eighty miles per hour and whistling down over the row of trees. One brief sideslip to lose the last of my altitude, black grass blurring by, the pile of giant logs that were jackstraws a moment ago, and in the last second the world forward is blanked in the long wide nose of my new airplane. For better or. for. worse. The wheels. SLAM down. Instant geysers of high-pressure mud swallow the airplane in flying spray and I fight, I just hang on and fight to keep her straight it takes forever to stop we should be stopped by now and we’re just barely beginning to slow and the mud is still roaring up from the wheels and I can feel it wet on my face and the world goes dim as it sprays my goggles and we should be stopped by n. BAM! what was that the tail, something has snapped in the tail and HANG ON! We finish our mud-landing with a hard wrench to the right, with a great sheet of liquid brown thrown in a tenth second to be a solid storm of mud over airplane and grass for a hundred feet around. We slide to a stop with our tall wheels four inches down in the sodden ground. Switches off and the engine stops and we are forlorn and unmoving, wrapped in a blanket of deepest silence.

Across the field, a bird chirps, one time.

What a landing. Something is broken, for the Parks is twisted, her nose high in the air. So this is what it was like in the old days of flying. A pilot was on his own. If I would live the old days, I must be on my own.

It is clear, in a moment, that nothing will happen and nothing will move unless I make it happen and unless I make it move. We will sit together, the biplane and I, to freeze into mud and all eternity unless I break this silence and move around and find out what damage I have done.

So, while night oozes up out of the mud, I stir and climb over the side of my cockpit to step squishing down and look fearfully upon the tailwheel. It does not look good. Only the tip of the wheel shows round beneath the fuselage, and I am certain that the axle has been smashed and twisted beyond any hope of repair.

But, lying in the mud, pointing a flashlight, I discover that it is not so, that only a small shock cord has broken, allowing the wheel to fold backward. The cord replaced by a length of nylon rope from my front-cockpit supply depot, the wheel rotates down once again into position, ready for other fields to conquer. The work takes ten minutes.

So this is how it was. A pilot handled his own problems as they came, and he went without help wherever he felt like going.

In modern aviation there is a runway for every man, and scores of people earn their living by helping the pilot in need. And mind your conduct, pilot, when the control tower is watching.

What would they have thought, those pilots who barnstormed alone in the Parks and her sisters across the meadows and the early years of flight? Perhaps they would have seen how wonderful it all is today, at the big airports. But perhaps, too, they would have shaken their heads a bit sadly and flown back into the days when they are free and on their own.

Here, in my muddy pasture, I have followed them. This is a barnstormer’s field. No control tower or runway here, no fuel-and-oil service, no follow-me truck to tell me where to park. There is not a trace of the present, there is not a hint of time in the air. If I wish, I can find reference in the papers and cards I carry to years labeled 1936 and 1945 and 1954 and May, 1964. And I can burn them all. I can burn them and squash their ashes down into this black mud and press more mud over them, and there I would be, all alone, way out in the middle of now.

Darkness gathers full about us, and I spread my waterproof cockpit cover on the ground beneath the left wing, and the sleeping bag upon the cover, where it will be dry. The only sounds in the whole field, quarter mile long and rimmed in uncut forest, are the sound of a sleeping bag straightened over a canvas cockpit cover and a sound of cold chicken sandwiches unwrapped.

Stretched out beneath the wing of my airplane, I sleep, but wake later in the cold of the night. Above me the sky is moving its fresh cold dark silent way to its own secret horizons. I have watched the sky for hours uncounted and followed it, and crossed horizons with it, and still have not begun to tire. The everchanging, fascinating sky. The airplane, of course, is the key. It makes the sky accessible. As astronomy without a telescope can be uninteresting, so the sky without an airplane. One can watch only so much before he is sated, but when he can participate, when he can move himself through the halls of cloud in the day and travel from star to star in the night, then he can watch with knowing, and does not have to imagine what it would be like to walk those halls and those stars. With an airplane, he can learn to know the sky as an old friend, and to smile when he sees it. No prodding the memory nor need to keep reminders. A glance through a window, a walk along a crowded or along a secluded street, at noon or at midnight. The sky of now is always here, moving; and we, watching, share a part of its secret.

I rest, tonight, partly beneath a white-flour moon and partly beneath a wing of wooden ribs that carries struts and wires to support another wing of wooden ribs above it. This is not happening years ago, I rest here now. The barnstormers? They live with the same moon and the same stars. Their time has not gone, it is still about us.

I wonder about my new biplane. She has spent many calendars safe in a silent hangar, and has been cared for patiently, and rarely flown. The rain did not touch her, nor the sun, nor the wind. And here she is in the mud of a cold night field, sheathed in dirt and water mixed, with dew beading on her wings. Around her no black hangar air, but the sky and stars. Knowing where she is, Evander Britt would wince and turn away. The last remaining Detroit-Parks P-2A flying, the very last, priceless; and tonight, you say, in the MUD?

I have to smile. For I truly think, with no need for guile, that she is happier here. For fields and mud she was built, with fields and mud and nights under the stars in mind she was set from designer’s pen to paper. Designed to make her living flying passengers on joyrides from pastures and crossroads, from green-summer county fairs and in rainbow air circuses traveling, traveling. She was designed to be flown.

The pages of the aircraft logbook, buried now under tool kit and tiedown ropes, are a document of flight, a memory in ruled paper.

“D ATE: May 14, ’32, DURATION OF FLIGHT: 10 min. NUMBER OF PASSENGERS: 2.” Page after page of five-minute and ten-minute flights, just time for one takeoff, one circle of the field, one landing. Occasionally, in the REMARKS column: “Total passengers carried to date—810.” A few pages further; “Total passengers—975.” Between these, the column makes minor reference that all landings were not smooth. “Propeller removed and straightened.” “Wingtip repaired.” “Tailwheel replaced.” In September, 1939: “Passengers—1,233,” and the next entry: “Aircraft prepared for storage.”

If he had not been able to sell the airplane soon, Evander Britt had said, he was going to give her to the National Air Museum, the last aircraft of her type, and a symbol of her time.

Which would you choose, airplane, polished linoleum floors and a life secure behind purple-velvet rope, or the insecurities of mud and moonlight, of bent propellers and wingtips for repair?

A good question for the pilot, too. There can be the security of polished floors and velvet ropes for him, too. No need to be thundering about the countryside, to be tackling highly improbable odds, when he can be forever safe behind a desk. There is only one sacrifice to be made for that security. To be safe he has only to sacrifice living. In safety there are no fears to conquer, no obstacles to overcome, no wild screaming dangers stalking behind the fence of our mistakes. If we wish, velvet ropes, and a single word on the wall: “Silence.”

A mist has risen from the damp earth of the field, and under the moon it is a field of spun glass glowing. What is this like? To what does it compare? I consider for a long time, to discover that it compares to nothing I have ever known. An airplane teaches many things, but always before I have learned in the air, while flying. When the airplane was on the ground, the lesson was over. But tonight, in a nameless field in North Carolina, the airplane huge above me, casting a quiet black shadow across my sleeping bag, I am still learning. Will I never stop learning from airplanes? How can there be room in tomorrow for still another lesson?

The biplane stands serene and unmoving. She seems very sure that there will be room for a lesson tomorrow.