Biplane

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.

To a pilot, the most important thing in the world is flight. To share it is the gift without price. Therein is a key to the sometimes wild acts of young pilots. They fly under bridges, they buzz housetops, they loop and roll their airplane much closer to the ground than is safe. They are a major concern of military flight-training bases, for such action reflects a lack of discipline, and occasionally means the loss of student and airplane. But his thought is to give, to share joy with those he loves, to share a truth. For pilots sometimes see behind the curtain, behind the veil of gossamer velvet, and find the truth behind man, the force behind a universe.

In the bright thread are woven four billion lives. Now and again, a man will see a certain brightness beyond the curtain and go spinning away into the depths of reality. We who remain watch him go, marvel for a moment, and return to our stations at our own crossthreads in the woof and the warp of a sparkling illusion.

For even in an airplane we see too often imperfectly. With advancing invention, with cockpits closed and navigation instruments and radio and new electronics, the problem of flying has become something to be solved more and more within an arm’s distance of the pilot. Drifting off course? A needle shows it, points the error, and all the pilot must do to see it is to look within a three-inch face of glass. Concerned about weather ahead? Dial a frequency on the radio, call a meteorologist and ask expert advice. Airplane slowing in the air, approaching a stall? A red light flashes on the instrument panel, a warning horn blares. We look outside to the sky only when we have time to enjoy the view, and if we don’t want to be bothered with the view, we needn’t look outside from takeoff till touchdown. It is this kind of flight over which the manufacturers of flight simulators can boast, “Impossible to tell our trainer from flight itself!” And so it is. Those who define flight as a series of hours spent in attention to the moving gages of an instrument panel cannot tell the difference. The only thing that is missing is the wind. The heat of the sun. The canyons of cloud and sheer white walls rising solid at each wingtip. The sound and the sting of rain, the freezing cold of altitude, the sea of moonlight in its bed of fog, the stars untwinkling and ice-hard in a midnight sky.

So. The biplane. Is it the better way? If the Parks flies too slowly, there are no warning horns or flashing red lights. Just a shudder in the control stick and it turns into a machine unwilling to be controlled, suddenly aware that it is heavier than the air. One must be careful and alert for the shudder. One must look outside, for outside is flight itself, the moving through the air and knowing it. Especially, knowing it.

Navigation is goggles down, look over the side, down through the churning winds. The railroad: so. The river crossing: so. But the lake, there should be a lake here. Perhaps there are headwinds.

A check on the weather is a constant thing. The clouds mass and grow together, lowering into the hills. Slanting columns of rain, where earlier there was no rain. What to do, pilot, what to do? Beyond the hills, the cloud may thin, or break. But then, beyond the hills, the cloud can lower to brush the grasstops ragged and soak them in rain. Hills are green coffins for the airplanes and pilots who judge wrongly. Beware the hills when the cool grey mist is pulled over your eyes.

Decide, pilot. Land now? Choose the pasture for soft touchdown and certainty of longer living? Or push on, into the grey? This is flight: decisions. And knowing that sooner or later an airplane must always come to rest.

* * *

We turn south, the Parks and I, to follow the Atlantic coastline. The beach is wide and hard and deserted, and the only sounds across it are the sounds of the wind and the waves crashing and the cry of a seagull and the brief windy passing roar of an airplane flying. The air is salt air, and salt spray leaps toward the tall wheels of the biplane. Here for a hundred miles we can fly in comfort with the wheels skimming the wave tops, for the old fliers’ caution—always be able to land safely should the engine stop—is satisfied by the wide smooth expanse of sand to our right. There is no greater security for a pilot than the security of flat land nearby. Flat land equals peace of mind and serenity in any situation. Fail the engine, bring the downdraft, bring the storms with thunder rolling; with a level field nearby, the pilot has no worry. A circle once to lose altitude, a gentle lifting of the nose, and airplane and pilot are blessed with their only time without the pressure and the need for constant motion. To fly above flat fields is to fly without pressure, and is the most relaxed flying that a pilot can know. And now from horizon to horizon as far as I can see ahead is the broad flat landing beach of South Carolina.

But, oddly enough, the biplane does not feel right, as if she is not glad to be here. There is foreboding in her, a sense of caution that dampens even the assurance of the infinite beach strip ahead. What could be wrong? Why, I simply am not used to her yet, or she to me. It will take time, it will take a few hours to fly this beach and enjoy it to its full.

A brief inlet, with a single small sailboat drifting idly along. We roar over its mast, with one quick wave to the skipper at the helm, and catch his wave in return.

The shape of the land now, and of the beach, is familiar. I know that to the right there should be a swamp soon, and soon to the right there is a swamp. How can I know? A map can give no such familiarity, for ink and colored lines, unless studied and imagined, are only ink and colored lines. And this is familiar, the curve of the beach, the swamp.

Of course! I have been here before! I have flown this very stretch of beach; and the vagueness and the familiarity come from a different viewpoint. I have flown the beach before at an altitude many times higher than the biplane will ever reach, from eight miles in the air, and looked down upon these same sands and have noted with satisfaction that my groundspeed was six hundred miles per hour. A different day then, and a different airplane. Fine days, those. Of strapping into thirteen-ton fighters and riding the twisting thundering heat of a turbine engine. Climb straight up, come blasting straight down through the speed of sound.

A good life, and it was sad to leave the fighters with their great speed and their brilliant glory. But I nodded my head to circumstance and the reins were snapped and the days of machmeters and gunsights faded behind me.

Yet the high land is the same no matter the vehicle. With a whirling thrashing propeller again in front of the cockpit instead of a spinning turbine behind, I discover that the only real difference is that a tank of fuel lasts three times as long, and in place of speed I am the master of time, and a new kind of freedom.

Suddenly, on the beach below a sunrise biplane in the world of now, a house. Two houses. Five, and a wooden pier stretching out into the sea. A water tower, and the name, CRESCENT BEACH. We have arrived. Time for fuel and a sandwich.

Still, though, the foreboding, the reluctance in the wood and the fabric and a trembling in the control stick.

The airport is a single runway, a hard-surface runway not-far from the water tower. The wind is blowing from the sea, across the runway. Official terminology: crosswind. I have heard the stories of the old pilots. Never land in a crosswind, they said, and told stories of the days when to do this was a painful and costly error.

And for a moment I forget what time it is. The airport is safe in 1964 and I am flying in 1929.

Come on, airplane, settle down. The Parks feels brittle and stiff, and I move the rudder from side to side to make her loosen up. She is trying to remind me of the stories. Crosswinds to her are like flames to a racehorse, and I am leading her, urging her into the heat and the fire, concerned only about fuel and sandwiches.

Eighty miles per hour and lined on the runway. Power back, the Parks settles lifelessly toward the ground. I am puzzled that she should feel so dead. Settle down, there, little friend. In a minute you will be drinking a tank of cool red eighty-octane.

The wheels touch the concrete smoothly at 70 mph, and, tail held high, we slow, runway blurred still at the edges. Finally the tail loses its flying speed and the tailwheel comes down to squeak on the hard surface. And we meet the inevitable. Moving at thirty miles per hour, the biplane, against her will and mine, begins to turn into the wind. Sudden full rudder against the turn has no effect, and she swings faster into the wind. Press hard opposite brake. but that instant when the brake could have helped is past and from the slow turn a monster grabs the biplane and slams her into an instant whiplash turnabout. With a great shriek from the tires we snap around, sliding sideways down the runway. A shriek, a horizon blurring all around, a sharp pistol-shot from the right main landing gear, all in a half-second. While I sit powerless in the cockpit, numbly holding full opposite rudder, a wheel breaks, folds beneath the airplane. A wingtip grinds suddenly down into the concrete, spraying sparks and splinters and old fabric to mix with blue burning rubber smoke. Scraping and screaming about me, the biplane is lashed once, hard, by her old enemy, the crosswind.

And then it is quiet, save for the engine panting and quickly dying as I cut the switches.

You fool.

You stupid idiot you harebrained excuse for a pilot you hamfisted imbecile. You idiot you fool you dumb stupid—you’ve broken her! Look at what you’ve done, you idiot, you fool! I climb slowly from the cockpit. It has been very quick, very sudden, and I have destroyed an airplane because I didn’t heed the old warnings. Nineteen twenty-nine does not mix with today. They are separate separate worlds. You fool. The right wheel is smashed beneath the airplane and torn in two pieces. You idiot. The right wingtip is shredded, the rear wingspar cracked. You dumb stupid imbecile. I forced 1929 into the present and that force was enough to shear the carbon-steel bolts of the right main gear fittings, to twist them into little bent-clay cylinders of something once useful. You worthless clod.

A few tears of gasoline fall from the engine. It is very quiet on the runway. The crosswind sighs now, unconcerned, no longer interested.

Airport attendants, those that heard the crash, drive from the hangar with a truck and a winch and they lift the nose of the biplane, and help me guide her under a roof. A tall jack is moved in to replace the missing wheel and broken landing gear strut.

They leave me and I sit alone with the biplane. What is the lesson, airplane? What am I supposed to learn here? There is no answer. Outside, the sky goes dark, and later it begins to rain.