Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THERE WERE TWO BOYS and a dog, waiting.

“You in trouble, mister?”

“Nope, no trouble,” I said.

“D’ja see me wavin’ at you?”

“Didn’t you see us wavin’ back? You don’t think we’d fly over and not wave, do you? Geemanee, what do you think we are, anyway?”

We unloaded our supply mountain and carried it across the deep green grass into the shade of a crumbling hangar. By the time we had the signs up and were open for business, there were eleven boys and seven bicycles scattered across the airplane and the grass.

It was an uncomfortable time. We didn’t want to scare them all away, but neither did we want them walking through the fabric of the wings.

“Sure you can sit in the front seat, fellas, just stay on the black part of the wing, there, don’t walk on the yellow. Careful, there.” I turned to one boy looking soberly on. “How many people live in Kahoka, my friend?”

“Two thousand one hundred and sixty.” He knew the exact figure.

There was a sharp explosion near the tail of the airplane and a little spray of grass jerked into the air. “Hey, fellas, let’s keep the firecrackers away from the airplane, OK?”

There was some giggling and laughing from one knot of boys, and another explosion burst beneath the wingtip. More than anything at that moment, I felt like a junior-high teacher with a problem in discipline.

“NEXT GUY THROWS A FIRECRACKER BY THIS AIRPLANE I’M GONNA PICK UP AND THROW ACROSS THAT ROAD! YOU WANTA PLAY WITH THAT STUFF, YOU GET IT OUTA HERE!”

Violence worked at once. There were no more explosions in a hundred yards of the biplane.

Boys surged around us like pilot fish around sharks. When we walked clear of the airplane, everybody walked clear. When we leaned on the wing, everybody leaned on the wing. They were busy daring each other to fly… a giant challenge.

“I’d fly, if I had the money. I just don’t have the money.”

“If I loaned you three dollars, Jimmy, would you fly?”

“Nope,” Jimmy said. “I wouldn’t pay you back.”

Their fear of the airplane was staggering. Every boy spoke of crashing; what do you do when the wings fall off… what if you jump and the chute doesn’t open? There was going to be great disappointment in Kahoka if we didn’t dive into the ground with at least one fatality.

“I thought you were all brave guys,” Stu said. “And here nobody’s got the courage to go up one time.”

They gathered together, found that they could raise three dollars, and sent a spokesman. “If we paid you three dollars, mister, would you do some stunts for us?”

“You mean nobody goin’ for a ride?” I said. “You all just watchin’ from the ground?”

“Yeah. We’ll pay you three dollars.”

It was human society at work. If individual daring is ruled out, we can band together as spectators.

The boys all massed at the end of the strip, sitting down in the grass by the road. I taxied to the far end of the strip, so that we’d be taking off over their heads and toward town, all good advertising.

They were just little dots when the biplane’s wheels lifted off the grass, but instead of climbing, we stayed low, skimming the grasstops, picking up speed and pointing straight into the young crowd.

If the engine quits here, I thought, we pull up, turn right and land in the bean field. But the boys didn’t know this. All they could see was the biplane growing into a huge thing, roaring right straight at them, not turning, not climbing, coming bigger and louder than a five-ton firecracker.

They had just begun to scatter and dive for cover when we pulled steeply up and banked hard right, to keep the bean-field in gliding range.

We circled the town once for advertising, and then back over the strip we dropped down through loops and rolls and cloverleafs and a one-turn spin. The airshow lasted ten minutes, including the climb, and I waited to hear some general disappointment that three dollars could be shot up so fast.

“That was nice, mister!”

“Yeah! Gee, that part right at first, where you went zzzZZZZOOOOOOMM! right at us! That was scary!”

In a minute the first automobiles arrived, and we were glad to see them. Stu went into action, telling the joys of flying on a hot day like this, selling the idea of Kahoka from the cool, cool sky.

As Stu strapped him in, the first passenger said, “I want a thrill.” A man walked to the cockpit just as we began to taxi out, and said in a low voice, “This fella is sort of the town cut-up. Take ’im up and turn ’im upside down a few times/OK?”

In every town we worked, all summer long, the one dominating personality was the watertower. In fact, the watertower became as much the symbol Town to us as it had become for the people who lived in its shadow. But now, up in the sun and the wind and the leather and the wires of the biplane, our passengers were for the first time looking down on that tower and its great black town-name painted.

I watched my riders carefully, at Kahoka, and every one of them looked long and thoughtfully at the top of the water-tower, and then out to the road that led off over the horizon. It was part of the flight, when I saw this, to fly a separate little conquering circle over the shining four-pillared thing and its eight-foot letters KAHOKA. To rise above that tower was an event unforgotten.

By sundown we had flown nineteen passengers.

“What do I keep telling us, Stu,” I said as we walked through the dark toward town. “We get right close in and we can’t lose!”

We finished our hamburgers at the Orbit Inn and walked into the town square in the dark. The stores were closed, and silence drifted like slow fog in the branches of the elm trees.

There was a bandstand in the park, slope-roofed and faced about by rows of quiet wooden benches, all peaceful and silent in the warm summer night. The Seyb Emporium was across the way, and the sundries store, the hotel, with its wooden fans turning in the high lobby air. If I gave a dollar for every change in this square since 1919, I would still have been rich from the day’s earnings.

We walked down the quiet sidewalks, back toward our field, listening to the faint strains of radio music rippling out from the yellow light of the houses.

The peace of Kahoka, however, did not extend to its mosquitoes. It was Erie all over again, and worse. At last I devised a Method D of Mosquito-Avoiding, which requires one to lie down fully clothed on a sleeping bag, throw a silken hammock over his head, and leave only a tiny hole for air. This worked fairly well, though it didn’t spare me the hypersonic hum of a thousand tiny wings.

We were awake at the first cock-crow, about the time that the mosquitoes retired for the day.

I got up and poured a couple quarts of oil into the engine and looked it over well; we might have a busy day, close in. I had just closed the cowl when a car stopped by the field, sifting a cloud of fine flour-dust up from the dirt road.

“Are you flying yet, this morning?”

“Yes ma’am. All ready to start engines for you.”

“I missed you yesterday and I was afraid you might leave…” She was a schoolteacher, there was no question about it. She had that kind of confidence and control over the world that comes only from forty years of channeling American history into ten thousand high-school pupils.

The 90-mile wind over the morning town destroyed the set of her silver-blue hair, but she gave no heed. She looked down on Kahoka and out toward the horizon farms exactly as children did, without any consciousness of herself at all.

Ten minutes later she gave Stu three one-dollar bills, thanked us both, and left in a slow trail of summer dust.

There is America, I thought. There is real frontier America, reflected in daughters a hundred years removed from her pioneers.

“What do you think of that?” Stu said. “I think we’re in for a good day when they start coming out this early to fly.”

“What’s the estimate?” I began the walk toward town and breakfast. “How many passengers today?”

“I’ll say… twenty-five. We’ll fly twenty-five people today,” Stu said, falling into step.

“Aren’t we optimistic, this morning. Oh, it’ll be a good day, for sure, but not that good. We’ll fly eighteen people.”

We were joined at the restaurant by one of our passengers of the day before, one Paul, by name, who owned a drag strip on the road out of town.

“Have a cup of coffee with you, for just a minute here,” he said.

I was reflecting at the moment that there is nothing so horrible in the world as a stale glazed doughnut for breakfast.

“Always wanted to fly,” Paul said. “Always wanted to, but never got around to it. At first, my folks were against me flyin’, then my wife was thumbs down. But last night I kind of got the go-ahead to go again.”

The doughnut was modifying my thinking. What would the world be like if we all had to have permission from wives and family before we did anything that we wanted to do; if we were all required to committee-think our desires? Would it be a different world, or are we living in one that is pretty much that way right now? I refused to believe that we were, and put the doughnut into the ash tray.

“You should get old Kenny up. Man, he would just go wild in that thing! I’m gonna bring him out. Bring ’im out tonight! I’m gonna see you guys get a good crowd… it’s a fine thing, your comin’ here. That little old airport just sits out there and nobody cares about it. Used to have a flying club with a couple airplanes, but they all lost interest and now there’s just one plane left. You might get it goin’ again.”

Paul left in a few minutes, and we walked out into the sun-heat of July Missouri. A farm tractor drove swiftly by the square, its huge rear wheels singing on the pavement.

By ten-thirty business was going strong. One young man flew four times, firing rolls of color film through his Polaroid camera. He was leaving to join the Army in two weeks, and he spent his money as though he had to get rid of it all before the two weeks was up. I was reminded of the gay and happy lives of the young Kamikaze pilots a few years back… this poor fellow was going to be heartbroken if he somehow managed to survive his first week in the Army.

Next to fly was a giant of a man, and he was clutching a plastic bag full of candy bars. “Hey, Dick,” he said, reading my name on the cockpit rim. “How much you charge me to fly out over my farm, so I can toss these down to my kids? About nine miles north on State 81.”

“Gee. That’s 18 miles round-trip… ’d cost you… fifteen dollars. Awful steep price, but you see, whenever we go out of the local area…”

“Nothin’ wrong with that price. That’s fine. Kids’ll go crazy, see their ol’ dad comin’ over in an airplane…”

In five minutes we had left Kahoka behind and were chugging over the softly rolling hills and gentle farmland south of the Des Moines River. He pointed the way, and at last down to a white farmhouse set a half-mile back from the road.

We dropped lower and circled the house, and the chugging roar of the Whirlwind brought his wife and children running out to see. He waved hard at them, and they all waved back, two-handedly. “GO RIGHT OVER ’EM!” he shouted, holding up the candy-bag so I’d get the idea.

The biplane settled 50 feet above the cornfield, and came streaking in over the little crowd on the ground. His arm moved, the candy-bag hurtled down. Children were on it like mongeese, lightning-fast, and sprang up to wave again to their dad. We circled twice and he signaled to return.

I had never flown with a more satisfied customer. He had the smile of Santa himself, aloft in a red and yellow sleigh in the middle of summertime. He had come and gone as he had promised, the good little children were all happy, and now the story could come to a close.

But there was plenty of work waiting for the sleigh when we returned.

An elderly skeptic finally agreed to fly, but reminded me, “None of them dadoes, now, ’member. Keep ’er nice and smooth.”

It was a nice and smooth flight, until we were gliding down final approach to land. My passenger picked that time to suddenly begin waving his arms and shouting wildly.

I nodded and smiled, intent on landing, and didn’t hear him until we had rolled to a stop once again by the road. “What was the matter?” I said. “Something go wrong up there? What were you tryin’ to say?”

“HOO-EE!” he said, with the astonished smile of one who has cheated death. “Way we was comin’ down, there, all turnin’ and angled up… hoo-ee! I saw we was gonna land right in the pond, so I hollered, STRAIGHTEN ’ER OUT, BOY, STRAIGHTEN ’ER OUT! And you pulled ’er out just in time.”

The day was full hot, and as long as the engine was running, there was a flock of boys standing in the cool hurricane behind the tail of the biplane. They were all young trout in the river of air, flopping around happily whenever I pushed the throttle forward to taxi out. Between passengers, I put my goggles up and relaxed, myself, in the breeze over the cockpit.

Once, when I landed, Stu was talking with a pair of news reporters. They were interested in the airplane and in us; they asked questions, took pictures. “Thanks a lot,” they said as they left. “You’ll be on the ten-twenty local news.”

We flew passengers on and off all afternoon, but this was our second day at Kahoka, and it was time to think about moving on.

“I’m torn between staying here and making money,” Stu said, “and moving on and making more.”

“Then let’s stay on tonight and push off tomorrow, early.”

“Hate to leave a good spot. But we can always come back, can’t we?”

We lay in the heated afternoon shade of the wing, trying to escape into the cool of sleep. There was a small sound in the sky.

“Airplane,” Stu said. “Hey, look. Doesn’t that look familiar?”

I looked. Way up overhead there was a yellow Cub circling, looking down. It turned, dropped swiftly down, pulled up in a loop and around in a roll. It was the same Cub that had flown with the five-plane Great American, at Prairie du Chien.

“That’s Dick Willetts!” I said. “That’s… now how did he know… sure, that’s him!”

A few minutes later the Cub was down on the grass, rolling to a stop beside us. A good sight. Dick was a tall, calm and very skillful pilot, a reminder of how lonely it was to barnstorm with one single airplane.

“Hi! Thought I might find you down this way, somewhere.”

“How’d you know where we were? You call Bette or something? How’d you find us?”

“I don’t know. Just thought you might be around here,” Dick said, sitting relaxed in the Cub’s cockpit, puffing slowly on his pipe. “This was the last place I was going to try, really.”

“Hm. That’s fantastic.”

“Yeah. How’s it goin’, barnstormin’?”

Dick stayed and flew through the afternoon with us, and carried five passengers. I had a chance to stay on the ground and listen to the people after they had flown, and discovered that there is a great driving force toward believing that the pilot that one flies with is the best pilot in the world.

“Could you feel it when he landed?” one man said. “I couldn’t feel when he landed. I could hear it, but I couldn’t feel it, it was so smooth.”

“Y’know, I have a lot of faith in him…”

“What do you think of your pilot, Ida Lee?” a coveralled farmer asked his wife, after she had flown with Dick.

“Everything was so pretty, and fun,” she said. “I’d say he’s good”

Just before five p.m. I saw that my fuel was getting too low to last through the heavy flying till sunset, and at the same time we found that the man who had the key to the gas pump was out of town.

“I’ll hop over to Keokuk, Richard,” I said, “and you keep the folks happy, flyin’.”

“Take your time,” he said.

In twenty minutes I was looking down in dismay at the Keokuk airport. It was all concrete runway, with new construction everywhere. To land on the hard surface would be to grind the tailskid to nothing, and I didn’t have enough fuel to find another airport. But there was one short section of grass left on the west side of the field, and we landed there.

We had to cross a new runway to reach the pumps, all along the edge of the runway was a muddy deep ditch, with a five-inch lip of concrete to jump. We taxied back and forth along the edge of the runway, picked the least muddy section for crossing, and charged at it straight on.

It didn’t work. The mud slowed the biplane to a walk, and by the time we reached the concrete lip, full power on the engine wasn’t enough to drag it across.

I shut down the Wright, holding unkind thoughts about aeronautical progress and the wholesale destruction of the grass runway, vowed never again to land at Keokuk or any modern airport, and went for a towing machine.

A tractor, mowing grass, was the answer.

“Hi!” I said to the driver. “Got a little problem here, trying to cross your new runway. Think that machine of yours could tow me out?”

“Oh, sure. She can tow airplanes ten times that size.”

He left his grass-mowing at once and we rode together back to the airplane. When we got there, there was a line service man from the flight school across the field, looking in the cockpit.

“Looks like you got stuck,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “But we’ll have ’er out in a minute here and I’ll come over get some gas from you.” I took a coil of stout rope from the tractor and tied it from the iron hitch to the landing gear of the biplane. “That oughta do ’er. We’ll kinda help the wingtips here and you see if that tractor can do the job.”

“Aw, she’ll do the job. Don’t you worry.”

The tractor made it look easy. In a few seconds the biplane was standing free on the concrete, ready to start engine and taxi for gas.

“Thanks. You really saved me, sir.”

“Think nothin’ of it. She can pull airplanes ten times that big.”

The line service man was looking nervously at the big steel propeller, hoping that I wouldn’t ask him to swing that by hand to start the engine. It is a frightening thing to one who has never hand-propped a Wright, but we had no choice; the starting crank was in Kahoka.

“Why don’t you hop in the cockpit, here,” I said, “and I’ll swing the prop.” I walked back as he climbed aboard and showed him the throttle and ignition switch and brakes. “Just pull the throttle back a bit after she starts/’ I said. “She should start right off.”

I pulled the propeller through a few times, and said, “OK, give me contact and brakes, and we’ll start her goin’.”

I pulled the big blade down and the engine fired at once. Good old reliable Wright.

I was walking casually toward the cockpit when I saw that the man in the pilot’s seat was frozen in horror, and that the engine was much louder than it should have been. The throttle was nearly full open, and in all the wind and sudden noise, my helper had forgotten what to do. He sat there, staring straight ahead, as the biplane, all by herself, began to move.

“THE THROTTLE!” I screamed. “CUT THE THROTTLE!” Quick visions flashed of the Parks leaping into the air with a man at the controls who had no faintest idea how to fly. I ran toward the cockpit, but already the airplane was rolling swiftly across the concrete, engine roaring wildly. It was a dream, like running from a railroad train. I threw myself desperately at the cockpit, grabbed the leather rim with one hand, but could not move any farther. The immense propellerblast kept me from moving; it was all I could do to race alongside the biplane.

The vision of my airplane a total wreck gave me one burst of strength to claw my way against the hurricane, up onto the wing. We were moving 20 miles an hour, accelerating quickly. I clung to the edge of the cockpit with every ounce of strength I could squeeze from my body. The man was cold wax in the seat, his eyes glazed, his mouth open.

The biplane was moving far too fast, and turning, now. We were going to groundloop. In one desperate motion I reached over the cockpit rim, grabbed the throttle and slammed it back. It was too late, and all I could do was hold on as we went around. The tires cried out, dragging sideways, one wing lifted, the other went hard down, scraping concrete. I clung there and waited for a wheel to collapse, or the gear to break away.

After five seconds tense as shredding steel, the wings leveled and we coasted to a stop, all in one piece.

“That,” I said, panting, “was a ground loop.”

The man climbed like a robot from the cockpit, and not one word did he say. He set his feet on the ground and began walking woodenly toward the office. It was the last I saw of him.

The engine was still running. I set myself down into the seat and talked to the biplane for a while. This had been her way of telling me not to leave her to unknowing people, and I promised that I would never let that happen again.

It was nearing sundown by the time we landed at Kahoka, and Dick was ready to leave.

“I gotta get goin’,” he said. “I told my wife I’d be home at seven, and it’s seven right now. I shall do some violent aerobatics over the field and be on my way. Let me know when you’re back around here.”

“Thanks, Richard. We’ll do ’er.”

I propped the Cub for him and he was off. He flew a pretty set of aerobatics overhead, as he promised, plus a few strange things of his own—flying sideways through the air, flat turns, steep climbs and pushovers.

The crowd was on us before Dick had disappeared in the west, and we flew the last hour steadily, till dark. By the time we covered the airplane and walked to the Orbit Inn, we felt as if we had been working for a living. We had flown twenty-six passengers by the end of the day, and Dick had flown another five. He had made his gas-and-oil money, and Stu and I split $98.

“Almost made it, Stu. Almost broke a hundred-dollar day.” We felt affluent, and ordered double milkshakes.

Stu was worried that we would miss the ten-twenty local news, so we walked into the hotel lobby and found the antique television set going unwatched.

It was an interesting lobby. The fans washed mild vertical air down over us, in reminder of times that hadn’t quite gone by. There was a bell on the counter, the kind that dings when you tap the button on the top. Against the wall was a monster Firestone Air Chief radio console, four feet high and three feet wide, with stick-on paper squares over the pushbuttons: WGN, WTAD, WCAZ. If I pressed those buttons, I wondered, would I find Fred Allen, strolling in gentle static down Allen’s Alley; or Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy; or Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy? I was afraid to try.

The ten-twenty news came and went without any mention of those delightful barnstormers out by the edge of Kahoka, and Stu was crushed. “My one chance to get on television! One chance! And I ended up on the newsroom floor!”

That night Stu tried using cheesecloth for a mosquito net, taping a peak of it to the bottom of the wing. From what I could see in the dark it looked good, but it didn’t work. The mosquitoes learned at once that the trick was to land, to walk under the edge of the net, then take to the air once they were inside. It was another hard night.

As we settled sleepily into the breakfast booth, I said, “Well, Stu, is it moving-on time?”

“Oi thonk so,” he said, yawning. “’Scuse me. Darn mosquitoes.”

We were blessed with a charming waitress, who had somehow missed her Warner Brothers screen test. “What are we having for breakfast this morning?” she asked sweetly.

“Cherry pancakes, please,” I said, “bunch of ’em, with honey.”

She wrote the order, and stopped. “We don’t have cherry pancakes. Is that on the menu?”

“No. Awful good, though.”

She smiled. “We’ll give you cherry pancakes if you get the cherries,” she said.

I was out the door in a flash, into the market two doors down, and laying out 29 cents for a can of cherries. The waitress was still at the table when I returned, and I set the can down triumphantly. “You just take these and dump ’em right in the batter.”

“The whole can?”

“Yes, ma’m. Zonk. Right in the batter. Great pancakes.”

“Well… I’ll ask the cook…”

A moment after she left, I noticed that we had company. “Stu, there is an ant on our table.”

“Ask him where we’re going to go today.” He unfolded the road map.

“Here you go, little fella,” I said, and helped the ant onto the map. “This is known as the Ant Method of Navigation, Mister MacPherson. You just follow after him with a pen, now. Wherever he goes, we go.”

The ant was frightened, and traveled east across Missouri at a great rate. He stopped, wandered nervously south, turned west, stopped, turned northeast. The line under Stu’s pen passed some promising towns, as he followed, but then the ant struck out due east, toward the sugar bowl. He stepped across a fold in the map, and in that one step covered 300 miles, all the way across southern Illinois. Then he leaped off the map and ran for the sugar.

We consumed our magnificent cherry pancakes and looked at the line. Up to the fold, the ant had a pretty good plan. Push east and south, swing around in a big circle to end at Hannibal, Missouri. We’d get a taste of southern Illinois, and the county fair season was upon us as summer burned on. There might be some good places to work, at the fairs.

Decision made, water jug filled, we said goodbye to our waitress, tipping her for being pretty, and walked to the plane.

In half an hour we were off again, pushing into a headwind. The ant had not told us about headwinds. The longer we flew, the more annoyed I got at that dumb ant. There was nothing down there. A few little towns with no place to land, an isolated Army outpost, a million acres of farmland. If there was sugar to the east, we certainly weren’t finding it.

There was a fair in progress at Griggsville, Illinois, but no place to land, except in a wheatfield adjacent. The gold of that wheat was no illusion. At the going wheat prices, it would cost us $75 to roll down a landing-swath of the tall grain.

We flew on, and days passed, and our affluence dwindled.

There was a fair at Rushville, with horses and sulkies trotting stiffly around the quarter-mile, and crowds of potential passengers. But there was no place to land. We circled dismally overhead, and finally pushed on, cursing the ant.

At last we staggered into Hannibal, and talked with Vic Kirby, an old barnstormer who ran the airport there. We stayed a while with him, bought some gas at discount because all antique planes get discounts at Hannibal, and then at his suggestion, flew north to Palmyra, Missouri.

There was no comparison to Palmyra, Wisconsin, which was centuries away now, in the distant past. This strip was short and narrow, lined by farm equipment and tall corn. We stopped long enough to fly one passenger, and then were off again, aimlessly south, weaving back and forth across the Mississippi, then east again into Illinois.

Landing in a grass field at Hull, I figured we had set a record for biplane crossings of the Mississippi in one day.

We sold three quick rides in the town of five hundred souls, and found that the hayfield we had landed upon had only the day before been approved by the State of Illinois as a landing area. The flying club was going strong, volunteer-building a cement-block office.

“You’re the first airplane to land here since this field became an airport!” We heard it over and over again, and we were told it was an honor. But it was ironic. We wanted to have nothing to do with airports, we were just looking for little grassy places to land on, and here our hayfield had been declared an airport beneath our very wheels.

Flying all that day long, using two full tanks of gas, we had earned a total of twelve dollars cash.

“I don’t know, Stu. ’Cept for Pecatonica, Illinois just don’t seem to be our piece of cake, huh? Next thing you know, ol’ what’s-his-name is gonna be down here askin’ about our Illinois registration tag.”

Stu mumbled something, rigged his useless mosquito net and flopped down on his sleeping bag. “You were born in this state, weren’t you?” he said, and was asleep at once. I never did figure out what that remark was supposed to mean.