Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE TOWN OF WALWORTH, Wisconsin, is a fine and friendly place. It showed that friendliness by spreading before us a smooth soft hayfield, all mowed and raked. The field was three blocks from the center of town, it was long and wide, and the approaches were good save for one set of low telephone wires. We landed, on our last reserves of money and morale.

The owner of the field was kind, mildly amused at the old airplane and the strange people who came down from it. “Sure you can fly out of the field, and thanks for the offer of a ride. Take you up on it.” Hope stirred. Somebody had said we were welcome!

The signs were out in a flash, and we flew two free rides for the owner and his family. By sundown, we had flown three paying rides, as well. That evening, the treasurer informed me that on this day we had paid $30 for gasoline, but that we had taken in $12 from passengers. Clearly, our fortunes were changing.

Gazing back at me in the morning from the gas station mirror was a horrible image, a scraggly rough-bearded Mr. Hyde so terrible that I drew back in alarm. Was that me? Was that what the farmers had seen whenever we landed? I would have run this monster off with a pitchfork! But the bearded image disappeared at last to my electric shaver, and I felt almost human when I walked again into the sunshine.

We had to make money at Walworth, or quit. We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.

It worked at once.

“Hi, there.”

I lifted my head at the voice and looked out from beneath the wing. “Hi.”

“You fly this airplane?”

“Sure do.” I got to my feet. “You lookin’ to fly?” For a fleeting moment, the man looked familiar, and he looked at me with the air of one who was trying to remember. “It’s a nice flight,” I said. “Walworth’s a pretty little town, from the air. Three dollars American, is all.”

The man read my name from the cockpit rim. “Hey! You’re not… Dick! Remember me?”

I looked at him again, carefully. I had seen him before, I knew him from… “Your name is…” I said. What was his name? He rebuilt an airplane. He and… Carl Lind rebuilt an airplane a couple of years ago… “Your name is… Everett… Feltham. The Bird biplane! You and Carl Lind!”

“Yessir! Dick! How the heck you been?”

Everett Feltham was a flight engineer for some giant airline. He had been brought up on Piper Cubs and Aeronca Champs, was an airplane mechanic, pilot, restorer. If it flew through the air, Everett Feltham knew about it; how to fly it and how to keep it flying.

“Ev! What are you doin’ here?”

“I live here! This is my home town! Man, you never can tell what kind of riff-raff gonna fall down on you from the sky! How’s Bette? The children?”

It was a good reunion. Ev lived only two miles north of the field we had landed in, and our friend Carl Lind kept a country house on Lake Geneva, ten miles east. Carl had flown airplanes in the late twenties, barnstorming around this very countryside. He quit flying when he married and raised his family, and he was now the president of Lind Plastic Products.

“A gypsy pilot,” Ev said. “Might have known it was you, doing a crazy thing like this, landing in a hayfield. You know there’s an airport just down the road.”

“Is there? Well, it’s too far out. You got to be close to town. We’re a bit in the hole after flyin’ around all week for nothin’. We got to get some passengers up in the air this afternoon or we’ll be starvin’ again.”

“I’ll call Carl. If he’s home, he’s gonna want to come out and see you, probably want you over to the house. You need anything? Anything I can bring you?”

“No, Rags, maybe—we’re runnin’ out of rags. If you got some around.”

Ev waved and drove away, and I smiled. “Funny thing about flying, Stu. You can never tell when you’re gonna run into some old buddy somewhere. Isn’t that somethin’? Go land in a hayfield, and there’s ol’ Ev.” Nothing by chance, nothing by luck, the voice, almost forgotten, reminded.

After suppertime, the passengers started coming. One woman said the last time she had flown was when she was six years old, with a barnstormer in a two-winger airplane, just like this one. “My boss told me you were here and I better not miss it.”

A young fellow with a fantastic mop of a haircut stopped and looked at the airplane for a long time before he decided to fly. As Stu fastened him into the front seat he said, “Will I see tomorrow?”

This was pretty strange sentence structure, coming from a fellow who proclaimed himself illiterate. (For shame, I thought, judging the man by his haircut!) In flight, he braced hard against the turns, fearful, and after we landed he said, “Wow!” He stayed for a long time after his ride, looking at the airplane almost in awe. I put him down as a real person, in spite of the haircut. Something about being above the ground had reached through to him.

A pair of pretty young ladies in kerchiefs put our account-book in the black for the day, and they laughed happy in the sky, turning over their home town.

I checked the fuel, and with ten gallons left I was at the end of my margin, and it was time to fill the tank even though passengers had to wait.

I took off at once for the airport that Ev had mentioned, and in five minutes was rolling to a stop by the gas pump. I was just topping the tank when a burly, bright-eyed business-man in a snap-brim straw hat brisked out to the airplane.

“Hey, Dick!”

“CARL LIND!” He was just as I remembered him, one of the happiest people in the world. He had survived a heart attack, and now enjoyed the very air he breathed.

He looked the airplane over with an appraising eye. “Is it good, Carl?” I said. “Is it the way you remember?”

“We didn’t have all that flashy gold paint, in my day, I can tell you. But the skid’s pretty nice, and the patches in the wings. That’s how I remember it.”

“Hop in, Carl, get in the front here, if you trust me. You got no controls in front. I’m goin’ back over to the field.”

“Are you going to let me go along? Are you sure I can go?”

“Get in or you make us late. We got passengers waiting!”

“Never let ’em wait,” he said, and stepped up into the front seat. We were airborne in less than a minute and it was good to see the man again in the sky he loved. He took off his hat, his gray hair blew in the wind, and he smiled hugely, remembering.

The biplane gave him a gentle landing in the hay, and I left the engine running while Carl stepped down.

“You go ahead and fly your passengers,” he said. “Then we’ll cover the airplane up and you come on over to the house.”

We flew riders steadily till the sun was below the horizon, and all the time Carl Lind watched the biplane fly, waiting with his wife, and with Ev. It was the best weekday yet; twenty passengers by sundown.

“I don’t know if this is in the Barnstormer’s Code,” I said to Carl as we drove around the edge of Lake Geneva and wound among the estates there. “We’re supposed to get all dirty and always stay under the wing when we’re not flying.”

“Oh, no. They used to do this. Someone who liked airplanes would take you home for dinner.”

But not, I thought as we turned into his drive, in quite this manner. It was a scene clipped from a Fine House magazine, all in full color and with deep carpets and full-length glass facing the water.

“This is our little place…” Carl began, apologetically.

Stu and I laughed at the same time. “Just a little shack you keep out in the woods, Carl?”

“Well… you like to have a place you can come and relax, you know?”

We got a brief tour of the elegant house, and it was a strange feeling. We felt close to something civilized. Carl enjoyed his house immensely, and it was a glad place, because of this.

“You fellows can change in here. We’ll go down for a swim. You will. I’ll catch two fish in the first five casts. Betcha, I will.”

It was nearly full dark when we walked barefoot down the velvet sloping lawn to his dock. At one side of the white-painted wood was a boathouse, and an inboard speedboat hung there on winches.

“The battery’s probably dead. But if we get it started, we’ll go for a ride.”

He lowered the boat into the water on its electric winch and pressed the starter. There was only a hollow clank and silence.

“I’ve got to remember to keep that battery up,” he said, and hoisted the boat back into the air.

Carl had brought a little fishing pole with him and he began working for his Two Fish in the First Five Casts just at the moment that Stu and I hit the water in running dives off the dock. The lake was clear dark black, like pure oil that had been aged twenty years in ice. We swam furiously out to the light-float a hundred feet offshore and from there we watched the last sun fade from the sky. As it disappeared, so did every single sound in the Midwest, and a whisper from pur float carried easily to shore.

“Carl, you’ve got a pretty rugged life,” I said, from way out in the water.

“Two more years and then I’m going to retire. Quicker than that, if I get all this business done on my flying medical. Why, if I could fly alone, I’d retire this year! But if I can’t fly, and just had to stay around here, it would get pretty bad.” He caught a fish on his second cast, and let it fall back into the dark water.

We cast off from the buoy and swam slowly to the dock. The wooden ladder-rungs were smooth and soft in moss, and when we stood again on the white planks, the air was warm as summer night.

“I lose my bet,” Carl said. “All your splashing scared my fish away. Five casts and only one fish.”

By the time we had returned to the house and changed into our least-greasy clothes, Everett had gone and come again, setting a huge steaming bag on the table. “I got twelve hamburgers,” he said. “That ought to be enough, don’t you think? And a gallon of root beer.”

We sat that evening around a table by the fireplace in Carl’s glass-walled den, eating hamburgers.

“I had to sell the Bird, you know,” Carl said.

“What? Why? That was your airplane!”

“Yes, sir. But I couldn’t stand it. Going out there and washing her down and waxing her, and not-being able to fly by myself; this medical thing, you know. It wasn’t right for the airplane, it wasn’t right for me. So I sold her. Thelma still has her Cessna, and we go places now and then.” He finished his hamburger. “Hey, I have something I want you to see.” He left the table and went into the living room.

“I do hope that medical paper comes through,” Thelma Lind said. “It means a lot to Carl.”

I nodded, thinking it unjust that a man’s life be so much affected by what to all the rest of the world was only a scrap of paper. If I were Carl, I’d burn all the paper in the fireplace and go out and fly my airplane.

“Here’s something you’ll love to see,” Carl said, returning.

He unrolled a long photograph on the table and we looked down at a row of ten biplanes parked in front of a hangar. White-ink letters at the lower right corner said June 9, 1929.

“These are the boys I used to fly with. Look at those guys. What do you think of that?”

He named each one of the pilots, and they looked out at us proud and unfaded, arms folded, standing by their airplanes. There at one side stood a young Carl Lind, in white collar and tie and knickers, not yet president of Lind Plastic Products, not yet concerned about a medical certificate. He wouldn’t be thinking about that for another thirty-five years.

“Look here, huh? Long-Wing Eaglerock, Waco Ten, Canuck, Pheasant… now there’s some real airplanes, don’t you think? We used to go out to the Firemen’s Picnic…”

It was a good evening, and I was glad that my years had overlapped Carl’s. He had been flying and smiling up out of that photograph seven years before I was born.

“Be glad for your friends,” Carl said. “We know people, don’t we, Thelma, with millions of dollars, but without one friend in the world. Boys, be glad for your friends.” He was deadly sincere, and to break the gravity of the moment he smiled at Stu. “You having fun out here in the cow-pastures, flying around?”

“I’m having more continuous fun than I’ve ever had in my life,” the kid said, and just about startled me off my chair. He hadn’t said such a revealing thing all summer long.

It was midnight when we zipped ourselves into our hot sleeping bags and settled down under the wing of the biplane.

“It’s a tough life, isn’t it, Stu?”

“Yep. Mansions, chocolate cake, swimming in Lake Geneva… this barnstorming is rough!”

A farmer was out by the huge Gothic cow-barn across the way at six a.m. He was a tiny dot by the base of the barn, dwarfed by the tremendous double-sloped roof with its four giant ventilators lined along the rooftrees seventy feet in the air. He was a quarter-mile away, but his voice came clear across the calm morning hay.

“BIDE BIDE BIDE BIDE BIDE! HURRY IT UP, BOSSY! C’MON C’MON C’MON!”

I woke and lay under the wing in the early light, trying to figure out what “Bide” meant. And “Bossy.” Do farmers still call their cows “Bossy”? But there was the call again, coming across the fragrance of the hay, making me feel guilty to be lying abed when there were cows to be gotten out.

A dog barked, and day began in America.

I reached for pen and paper, to remind me to ask about BIDE, and as I wrote, a tiny six-legged creature, smaller than my pen-point, came hiking across the blue-lined page. I added, “A very small pointy-nosed bug just walked across this page—purposefully, definitely going somewhere . He stopped here.”

Were we, also, hiking along some cosmic journal-page? Were the events about us all part of a message we could understand, if only we found the right perspective from which to read them? Somehow, with our long series of miracles, of which this field at Walworth was the latest, I thought so.

Our morning check of the biplane showed that we had come up against our first problem of maintenance. The tail-skid was wearing thin. At one time it had a steel roller and metal plate to guard it, but the constant takeoffs and landings had worn those away. If we had to, we could whittle another skid from a tree-branch, but this was the time for preventive work. We talked about it on the way in for breakfast, and decided to look around the hardware store.

Close as it was to the resortlands of Lake Geneva, Walworth was becoming a very modern small town, and we found Hardware in the shopping center.

“May I help you?” the clerk said.

“Well, yes,” I said, slowly and carefully. “We are looking for a tail skid shoe. Would you have anything in that line?”

How strange it was. If one doesn’t stay well within the bounds of what one is expected to say, his words might as well be Swahili.

“Beg pardon?”

“A tail… skid… shoe. Our tail skid is wearing out.”

“I don’t think… a what?”

“We’ll browse around, thanks.”

We walked the rows of hardware, looking for a long narrow strip of metal, with holes for screws to mount it on the wooden skid. There were some big hinges that might work, a mason’s trowel, a big heavy end wrench.

“Here we go,” Stu said, from across the room. He held a tail skid shoe. The label on it said Vaughn Spring Steel Super Bar. It was a small flat crowbar that had clearly been made by a tail-skid-shoe company.

“Oh, you mean a pry-bar!” the clerk said. “I wasn’t sure what you were looking for.”

The room where we had breakfast had been in town somewhat longer than the shopping center. The only thing that had changed since saloon days was they had replaced the bat-wing doors, turned the furniture into museum pieces, and mounted lifelike detail drawings of “Hamburger,’ “Cheeseburger,” and “French Fries” in wide glowing plastic cases over the mirror, and over at least a thousand glasses stacked upside down.

Hanging on the wall was a rough old triangle of oak, notched like a great blunt saw along one edge, and bolted to some other moving sections of wood. “Wagon Jack” was printed on a board a few inches beneath it.

“Stu.”

“Yeah.”

“The tail of the Parks weighs more than all the rest of the airplane put together. We’ve got to lift it to put on our new skid shoe.”

“We’ll lift it.”

“Do you figure we could maybe borrow that wagon jack over there, somehow, and use it?”

“That’s an antique wagon jack,” he said. “They’d never loan it out to pick up an airplane.”

“Won’t hurt to ask. But how do we make it work?”

We looked at the Jack, and it was dead quiet in our booth. There was no possible way that the Jack could have lifted anything. We couldn’t imagine how it might have picked up any wagón ever built. We sketched all over the backs of napkins and placemats, drawing little wagons and the way that the oaken triangle might have done its work. At last Stu thought he understood, and tried to explain it to me, but it didn’t make any sense. We didn’t bother to ask about borrowing the Wagon Jack, and paid our bill mystified by that thing hanging on the wall.

“We could start the engine,” I said, “and pick up the tail with the propblast. ’Course it might get a little windy while you sit back under the tail and put the thing on. About a hundred miles an hour, the wind.”

“While I sit back there?”

We’d find some way to do it, I was sure.

Stu’s thought wandered from the immediate problem. “How about flour?” he said. “Should I try flour? Take a bag of flour and cut it open just before I jump, and leave a trail coming down?”

“Give it a try.”

So The Great American invested in 59 cents’ worth of King’s Ransom Pre-Sifted Flour. It was five cents cheaper than any other brand, is why we bought it.

The answer to the problem of holding the tail in the air was solved as soon as we returned to the biplane. It was simple.

“Just take a couple of those oil cans, Stu, that we haven’t opened yet. I’ll pick up the tail good as I can and you set those cans under the rudder post to hold it up. OK?”

“Are you putting me on? That big heavy tail on these cans of OIL? There’ll be oil all over the place!”

“A college man, and he says a thing like that. Have you never learned the Incompressibility of Fluids? I shall lecture upon that subject, if you wish. Or if you would rather, Mister MacPherson, you can just get down under the tail and stick those cans under the rudder post.”

“OK, professor. Ready when you are.”

With agonizing tremendous great effort, I lifted the tail a foot in the air for three full seconds, and Stu set the cans in place. They held, and I was as surprised as he was that they did.

“Now if you would like the mathematical details, Mister MacPherson, we can discuss them at length…”

The skid shoe was in place in ten minutes.

We stretched out under the wing to put Method C to the test, and sure enough, two cars stopped at the roadside before we were half asleep. Our passengers were girls on vacation from college, and they were goggle-eyed at the biplane.

“You mean it flies? Up in the air?”

“Yes ma’am. Guaranteed to fly. Look down on all the world. Three dollars a ride and a prettier day we couldn’t ask, could we?”

Jouncing out to the far end of the hayfield, and as we turned into the wind to begin the flight, my riders were overcome by second thoughts. They shouted quickly to each other, over the noise of the engine and the rattling of the hollow-drum flying machine. About the time they had decided that they had been out of their minds to even think of going up in this old dirty machine, the throttle came forward, they were engulfed in the great twisting roar of the engine, and we were clatterbanging over the hard ground, hurtling toward the highway and the cars and the telephone wires. They clutched the soft leather rim of the front cockpit and at the moment we left the ground they gasped and looked and held even tighter. Someone screamed. The wires flashed below and we climbed easily up into the sky.

They turned to look back at the ground and at me, quizzically. The realization swept over them that this madman sitting in the cockpit behind them now held the key to their entire future. He looked unshaven. He looked as if he didn’t have much money. Could he be trusted?

I smiled in what I hoped was a disarming way, and pointed to the lake. They turned to look at the table-napkin sailboats and the cut-glass sparkle of sun on the water, and I went back to picking my forced-landing fields, turning ever so slightly so that we would never be out of gliding range from them.

It was fun to see what a different pilot I became for my different passengers. I had flown a few folk who had left mink jackets in their Cadillac convertibles, and for these few I was a two-dimensional creature, a blank-faced chauffeur, taking this flying all as a very boring job and unaware that the lake from the air was even mildly attractive. A hired man cannot be expected to appreciate the finer things. These people got a straight conventional ride, a ride that they would get from an uninspired workhorse chauffeur. Take off. Circle town. Circle lakeshore. Circle town. Land. Everything by the book.

The college girls, all windblown ahead of me now, had taken the biplane for something of a gay novelty, and for them I was a gay novelty of a pilot, with a bright disarming smile. For them, I could know that flying can be pretty, I could even point a good place to look. One of the girls looked back at me with a how-pretty-it-is glance, and I smiled again, to say that I understood.

Most of the passengers flew just for the fun and adventure of the flight, and with them I made experiments. I found that I could make most people look where I wanted them to look; it was just a matter of banking the airplane in that direction.

I could test their aptitude for flying, too, by banking. When a person sits up straight in the seat, riding with the airplane through the turns, when he looks fearless down to the ground during a steep bank, when he doesn’t bother to grip the cockpit rim, he is a natural-born airplane pilot. About one passenger in sixty met the tests, and I always made it a point to tell them of the fact… that if they ever wanted to fly an airplane, they would be very good pilots. Most just shrugged and said it was fun. I felt sad, knowing that I couldn’t have passed those tests myself, before I began to fly.

For the girls, now, as I steepened the bank, the biplane was a noisy high carnival ride. At 40 degrees of bank, the girl on the right screamed and hid her eyes. When we leveled, she looked out again, and again we would gradually increase the bank. Every time, when we tilted to precisely 40 degrees, she would make some kind of cry and bury her face in her hands. At 39 degrees she looked down happy; at 40, she screamed. Her friend looked back at me and shook her head, smiling.

On the last turn before landing, the turn closest to the ground and with the most sense of speed and blurred action, we banked up to 70 degrees and fell like a cannonball toward the ground. The girl on the right didn’t uncover her eyes until we were stopped again next to her car.

I shut the engine down while Stu helped them from the cockpit.

“Oh it’s WONDERFUL! It’s just WONDERFUL!” she said.

Her companion thanked us quietly, but the other girl couldn’t get over how wonderful it was. I shrugged. The wonderfullest parts to me were the parts that she had closed her eyes upon.

They left, waving, and in a few minutes Method C brought Everett Feltham back to us, with a box of rags.

“Hey, you sack rats! Why don’t you come on out to the house and eat up some strawberries, huh?”

It took us three minutes to tie the covers on the airplane and find a place in his car. We spent the next hours with Ev, fetching a case of oil for the biplane and sitting in the shade of his elms, consuming great bowls of strawberries and vanilla ice cream.

“Man, this barnstorming is rugged, Ev,” I said, leaning back in my lawn chair. “You don’t ever want to try it.”

“I’ll bet. You guys sure look overworked, lyin’ down under that wing out there. I wish I had a biplane. Be with you in a flash.”

“OK. Get a biplane. Join The Great American. Any other problems?”

Ev had a schedule to fly out of O’Hare International that afternoon, so dropped us off on his way toward Chicago. We said those goodbyes that flyers say, a confident sort of “See-you-’round,” certain that they actually will, as long as they don’t make any very dumb mistakes while handling their airplanes.

Stu dragged out his parachute, still field-packed from his last jump, and stretched it out on the ground for final packing. A pair of boys arrived to watch and ask questions about what it feels like to fall all alone through the air, and what the parts of the chute were called and where you learn to jump.

“Gonna jump today?” one said. “Pretty soon, maybe?”

“Not if the wind comes up much more.”

“Gee, it isn’t windy.”

“It is if you’re coming down in this thing.” He worked on in silence.

An airplane flew up from the south, circled town, then swung down low over our field. It was Paul Hansen in the Luscombe, flashing overhead at 120 miles per hour, pulling up steep into the blue, swinging back down for another pass. We waved to him.

The Luscombe flew across the field three times, measuring it. I put myself in his cockpit, looking down at the hayfield, flying the heavy-laden sportplane. I squinted my eyes and finally shook my head. I wouldn’t do it; I wouldn’t land. The field was right for the biplane, but the biplane had more than twice the wing area of the Luscombe. The field was too short for Paul’s airplane; he could make it, but just barely, with no margin over the telephone wires. If he landed here, I would make a big thing of how unwise he was.

On the fourth pass, he kicked the rudder back and forth to signal “No,” and flew out to the airport down the road.

The problems of working with a single-wing airplane, I thought. He needs just too much runway. And this is a good field, right in close to town, that saved us when we were broke, and that has lots of passengers yet to fly.

I pulled the covers off the Parks and made her ready to go. Darn. A good hayfield…

When I landed at the airport, Paul was tying down his airplane. He was still wearing his white shirt and tie.

“Halloo,” I said. “’D you get your pictures all took?”

“Yeah. Made it in here nonstop from Ohio, that’s why I didn’t stay any longer over the field there. Just about out of gas. And that field is too short for me.” He was apologetic, as if it was his fault that the field wasn’t right.

“No prob. Throw your stuff in the front seat and we’ll hop on over. If you trust me. No controls up front…”

It took a while for the 1960’s to fade from Paul, and as he helped Stu finish packing the chute, he told us about the shootings he had done. It was depressing to hear that the other world still existed, out there, with people still running around in business suits and discussing abstracts that had nothing to do with engines or tailskids or good fields to land in.

That evening, even without a parachute jump, the biplane had fifteen passengers to carry, and when she was covered for the night, we were sure again that an unorganized barnstormer could get along in spite of a few lean days.

There was the usual lively conversation over the restaurant table, but all the while, in the back of my mind, I was thinking about the Luscombe unable to work the short fields. If it had been hard to find this place where the biplane could land, it was going to be twice as hard to find a hayfield long enough for both airplanes to work well.

A barnstormer can survive, but is he stacking the cards against himself by working with an airplane that wasn’t built for short-field flying? Would the Luscombe be the downfall of The Great American and its dreams? I couldn’t get the questions out of my mind.