Nothing by Chance

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE DAYS FOLDED ONE INTO ANOTHER, and into events of August and September. County fairs, with special brushed cows and combed sheep waiting for judgment, dining only on the cleanest of polished straw.

Coins raining down on glassware with the sound of wind chimes in the night, above the song of the barker: “Nickel in the crystal glass, folks, and it’s yours to take home. Toss a nickel and win a glass…”

Quiet streets, old towns; where the Vogue Theater had been turned into a machine shop, and finally closed.

People with memories of old airplanes flying, and of droughts and floods, the good and bad of decades.

Foot-tall jars of Mrs. Flick’s Oatmeal Cookies, three for five cents.

Pioneer-dressed women in small-town celebration, and square dances in the streets.

Music amplified and echoing through the starlight, rippling across the still wings of a biplane and through the silken hammock of a barnstormer listening, watching the galaxy.

A great burly grizzled mountain of a man, Claude Shepherd, tending his monster-iron Case Steam Tractor, built 1909. Twenty tons of metal, barrels of water, bunkers of coal, giant huge bull gears driving wheels seven feet tall. “I got to love steam power from the time I was a little tad, on my grandfather’s knee. Smoothest power in the world, steam. When I was five, I could set the valves… never got over it, never got over lovin’ steam.”

Passengers, passengers, men and women and children rising up to see the sky, to look down on the water towers of towns everywhere Midwest. Every takeoff different, every landing different, every person in the cockpit ahead a different person, guided into gentle adventure. Nothing happened by chance, nothing by luck.

Sunrise into sunset into sunrise. Wild clear air, rain and wind and storm and fog and lightning and wild clear air again.

Sun fresh and cool and yellow like I’d never seen. Grass so green it sparkled under the wheels. Sky blue and pure like skies always used to be, and clouds whiter than Christmas in the air.

And most of all, freedom.