A Gift of Wings

by Richard Bach

  The other airplane was also on Victor 138, also at 12,470 feet, but it flew in a direction that would take it head-on through the spinner of the Swift, through the cockpit and aft fuselage, thence through to the rudderpost and the clear air beyond. The other aircraft was thirty feet below what was exactly the wrong altitude. I had the right of way, but he had the C-124, which was at one time the largest four-engine transport in the world.

  The Swift and I decided not to argue about rights, and turned gently out of the way. The ’124, we saw, is actually a very large airplane indeed.

  I was astonished. Why, that man is a professional pilot, an Air Force pilot! And he’s at MY altitude. He’s at the wrong altitude! He’s eastbound at the westbound altitude. How can a professional pilot, how can he possibly be so wrong, in such a gigantic airplane?

  It wasn’t a near miss. The ’124 is a sufficiently monstrous chunk of iron to be seen long before near-miss time. But still, there it was, dead on my altitude, a hundred tons of aluminum-steel, going the wrong direction.

  Had I been involved in an overlong session with my map, and had the giant in fact vaporized the Swift, no doubt exists as to the report that would appear in the news. After explaining that the Swift had been smashed to powder against a minor wing fairing of the transport, and perhaps showing the small dent that we would have made there, the news would have concluded like this: “FAA spokesmen expressed regret over the incident, but did admit under questioning that the light airplane had not filed a flight plan.”

  Across the country on an oil pressure gage

  Do you ever get the feeling that everybody else knows something you don’t know? That everybody else in the world is taking for granted something you haven’t even heard about, as if you missed the Big Briefing In The Sky or something?

  One of the primal points covered in the Big Briefing apparently was that People Don’t Fly Old Airplanes From Coast To Coast. People In Their Right Minds, that is. Then along comes old Bach, who missed the Briefing.

  The airplane that I wanted was a 1929 Detroit-Parks P-2A Speedster open-cockpit biplane, and it was in North Carolina. I wanted to trade my Fairchild 24 for it, and I was in California. Now doesn’t it seem the most logical thing in the world to fly the Fairchild to North Carolina, pick up the biplane, and fly it to California? If that sounds logical, you missed the Briefing too. There’s always us two percent who never get the word.

  Therefore, not knowing any better, I flew my gentle, smooth-purring, instrument-humming cabin monoplane to Lumberton, North Carolina, and traded it for a ratchety, roaring, snarling, windy biplane whose only reliable instrument was an oil pressure gage, that had never heard of an electrical system, let alone a radio, and was extremely suspicious of any pilot who did not learn to fly in a JN-4 or an American Eagle.

  Also discussed at the Briefing, I’m sure, was You’ve Got To Be A Mighty Good Aviator To Land Old Biplanes In A Crosswind On A Hard-Surface Runway. Which explains why suddenly there I was at Crescent Beach, South Carolina, listening to a strange scrunching, tearing sound as my groundloop collapsed the right main landing gear, demolished the right wheel, and turned the right lower wing into a frayed and haggard pretzel. Later I listened for a while to the distant roar of the Atlantic Ocean, and later still, after dark, to the tin pelting of sad rain on the hangar into which my wreckage-pile had been towed. And there were only twenty-six hundred miles to go. I longed for hemlock to drink, or a bridge from which to throw myself into the sea. But we who missed the Briefing are so helpless and deserving of pity that we somehow manage to crawl through life despite our shortcomings. Pity, in this case, came from the former owner of the Parks, by name Evander M. Britt, custodian of an unquenchable fount of southern hospitality. “Now don’t worry, Dick,” he said when I called. “I’ll be down right away with a set of new landing gear. There’s an extra wing here if you want it, too. Don’t you worry. I’ll be right down.”

  And with him, driving through the rain, Colonel George Carr, barnstormer, fighter pilot, squadron commander, antique airplane restorer. “Is that all that’s wrong!” Carr said when he saw the wreckage. “From what ’Vander told me, I thought you had hurt something! Help me with this jack, and we’ll have you in the air tomorrow.”

  The comfortable web of the Antique Airplane Association closed about its member in distress, and from Gordon Sherman, president of the Carolinas-Virginia Chapter, as from the Celestial City itself, came a rare old wheel from his Eaglerock for my right main gear. In a few days the Parks and I were as good as the day we rolled from the factory, and having learned some lessons about the mixture of crosswinds and hard-surface runways, we gave humble thanks to our benefactors, accepted a survival-ration package from Colonel Carr, and began to nibble on the twenty-six hundred miles.

  We nibbled, too, at thirty-five years, and I discovered that the pioneer barnstorming pilots who flew the Parks and her sister ships were the oiliest and the coldest men of their time. I discovered that firsthand. After each day’s flying, in field or on airport, out comes a grease gun to force the sticky stuff into each rocker-box housing. Five cylinders, ten rocker-boxes. After each flight, out comes a rag to wipe the rocker-box grease from where it has been thrown onto everything behind the engine: goggles, windscreens, fuselage, landing gear, stabilizers. Wipe it off quickly, before it hardens. The Wright J-6-5 Whirlwind is an oily little personality itself, and opening the cowl to strain the fuel each morning marks the barnstormer with a tenacious film, the print of his calling.

  I had known, of course, from reading my air temperature gages in airplanes past, that the higher one flies, the colder grows the air. But I discovered that looking at COLD on a gage and having it smash and twist through the cockpit, slicing through leather coats and woolen shirts, are two very separate and distinct experiences. Only by ducking well forward under the windscreen could I avoid the thundering icy knives of a hundred-mile wind, and ducking well forward for three hours at a time can be less than comfortable.

  I discovered a great and basic fact early in my acquaintanceship with the Parks, as I flew westward with the first days of spring, 1964. One enjoys the land over which one flies in direct proportion to the speed with which he flies over it. Caught in headwinds over Alabama meadows, I saw for the first time that each tree in spring is a bright green fountain, gushing brilliant leaves into the sun. Some of the pastures are like the rolled greens of the most exclusive country clubs, and it was all I could do to keep from landing in them for the sheer fun of rolling along the bright untouched grass. The Parks wasn’t at all convinced that I was worthy to be her pilot, but from time to time she would show me these views of her world, views of What It Was Like Then. Farm after weathered farm sifted by, each reigning at the end of its own dirt road, guarding its fields and forests just as it did when the Parks was new and seeing it all for the first time herself. More than one farm drive harbored even the 1930 automobiles and trucks, pastures grazed 1930 cows, and I was for a moment the cold and oily Buzz Bach, helmeted and goggled barnstormer of the untrodden skies. It was so good an illusion that it was true.

  But as I looked away for a moment to write a note on the corner of my road map, the Parks showed unhidden jealousy. Roaring along straight and level, I glanced aside and wrote “trees are green fountains” on the map. By the time my pencil point was finishing “… ns,” the engine roar was much louder than it had been and the wind was screaming in the wires. I jerked my head up to see a great tilted earth rushing to crush me, and to hear a little soft voice say, “When you fly me, you must fly me, and not take notes or think of other things …” And sure enough, the Parks was impossible to trim to fly hands-off, and try as I might, she would invariably roll into a wild unusual attitude whenever I thoughtlessly diverted my attention from her needs.

  Hours blended and ran together into long days of flying as the face of the southern United States rolled along beneath me. Three hours of flying were enough to cover the front cockpit windscreen with oil and roc
ker-box grease, but the Whirlwind’s five cylinders thundered right along and didn’t miss a single beat.

  The Parks taught me something about people, when she judged me ready to learn. Get away from the cities, she said, and people have time to be outgoing and friendly and terribly kind. Take a little place like Rayville, Louisiana. Land on the little strip there as the sun is going down. Taxi to a short row of hangars, a fuel pump. Deserted, all. Shut down the engine, by a sign that says Adams Flying Service, with a Grumman Ag-Cat and a Piper PA-18 sprayer tied outside. Get out of the cockpit and stretch and start wiping rocker-box grease. And suddenly there’s a pickup truck and a voice. “Hi, there.”

  The truck has Adams Flying Service painted on its door, and the driver is smiling and wearing an old felt hat with the brim turned up in front.

  “Thought you were a Stearman at first when you went over my farm, but you were too little to be a Stearman and that didn’t sound like any 220 engine. What kind of airplane is that, anyway?”

  “Detroit-Parks. Just like a Kreider-Reisner 34, if you know that airplane.”

  The talk started about airplanes and the man was Lyle Adams, owner of his own crop-dusting company, once a bronc-rider, bulldogger, charter pilot to the wilderness for parties seeking to fish and hunt in unsullied lands. Over dinner Adams talked of flying and crosswinds and ground-loops, asked some questions, answered some. He invited the cold, oily barnstormer to his home, to meet his family, to look at photographs of airplanes and flights gone by.

  At five-thirty the next morning he was down to take the aeronaut to breakfast, and to help him start the engine. Another takeoff, a wing-rocking farewell, and long cold morning hours in the twisting knife-wind as the sun pulled itself into the sky.

  We followed U.S. Highway 80 for several hundred miles through the wilderness of western Texas, most of it at a five-foot altitude above the deserted road to avoid an ever-present headwind. The big land is always there, always waiting, always watching every turn of the propeller of airplanes that dare cross it. I thought of my survival rations and water jug, and was glad they were along.

  Ahead, a thunderstorm, standing upon its wide slanting pillar of hard gray rain. “An adventure waits!” I said to the Parks, and pulled the seat belt tighter. I could follow the railroad to the right and avoid the rain, or the road to the left and fly through it. I’ve always thought it a good practice to pick up gauntlets when they’re thrown, so we followed the highway. Just as I had completed tying myself to the mast, as it were, and the first drops of rain slashed across the windscreen, the engine stopped. One adventure at a time, I quickly began thinking, and as we wheeled hard to the right, I was thinking of the survival kit. The desert looked terribly empty. On her own, the Whirlwind gasped back into life, sputtering and choking. Fuel was on, mixture rich, plenty of fuel in the tank. The magnetos. The magnetos were wet. Switch to right mag and the Whirlwind ceased her coughing and purred along, blinking her eyes. Switch to left mag and she stopped cold, misfired, backfired. Switch quickly back to right mag. Map, map, where’s the map? Nearest town is, let’s see … (wind roar increasing in the wires) … is Fabens, Texas, and twenty miles west: between here and Fabens … (wind screaming now) … Oh, not now, airplane. I’m just looking at the map! Isn’t that all right? Pull the nose back up to the horizon, move the stabilizer trim up a notch … Fabens is twenty miles and if I follow the railroad it will turn to the left … (wind dying away, going soft and quiet, shadows shifting across the map) … OK! OK! Please don’t give me a hard time here. Can’t you see that desert down below? Do you want to lose a wing or a wheel on one of those rocks?

  The Parks settled down to follow the railroad, but whenever I wanted to scare myself, I twisted the magneto switch to LEFT and listened to the engine choke and die away. It was a comfort, minutes later, to land in the blowing sand of Fabens, Texas. I spread a sleeping bag under the wing, with parachute and jacket for a pillow, and dreamed no dreams.

  In the morning the magnetos were dry and ready for business, and business was seven hundred miles of desert. Our country certainly does have a lot of sand in it. And rocks. And weeds growing brown in the sun. And railroad tracks straight as fallen pines stretching away to the horizon.

  As we were crossing the border into Arizona, the left mag began complaining again. So it was five hundred miles on the right mag, between the gunnery ranges south of Phoenix, through the dust storm over Yuma. It got so that the left magneto didn’t scare me at all. So that one magneto can run the engine if the other one quits. Airplanes used to have single-ignition engines. If the right magneto fails, I land on U.S. Highway 80 and break out the survival kit. By Palm Springs, California, the left mag was working again. Must be when it gets hot it quits; let it cool for a while and it’s OK.

  Almost home, I thought. “Almost home,” I said to the Parks. “Won’t be long now.”

  But there were storms west of the mountains, and rain, and great winds swept down the passes. If only I had the Fairchild with its instruments and radios! We tried the pass at Julian, the Parks and I, and were shaken and whipped and thrown back into the desert for our audacity. We tried to pass to San Diego, and for the first time in my life, indicating seventy-five miles per hour, I was flying backward. An eerie feeling, one that makes one look quickly to the airspeed indicator for assurance. But assurance notwithstanding, the Parks was simply incapable of flying west against the wind. Then north again, to a long and personal battle with the pass at Banning, and with Mount San Jacinto. You big bully! I thought, and glared up at the mountain, its peak swirling in storm cloud and snow. We tried the rain again, and this time the magnetos, angry at the mountains, didn’t mind it at all.

  Still it was fight and fight and fight till we finally clawed our way to land on the rain-slick runway at Banning.

  An hour later, rested and ready for more fighting, I saw a break in the clouds to the west, over a low range of hills. We took off and caught the rain again, rain that stings like steel pellets thrown and rain that washes one’s goggles bright and clean. And with it, turbulence from the wind over the hills so that the engine stopped time and again as negative G pulled fuel from the carburetor.

  And suddenly it was all over. The last range of hills was past, and ahead were clouds broken with giant shafts of sunlight streaking down. Suddenly, like flying over into the Promised Land, as though a decision had been made that the little Parks had fought hard enough, had proved herself, and now the fight would not be necessary. One of those moments a pilot doesn’t forget: after the gray whistling steel-shot rain, sunlight; after the smashing turbulence, mirror-smooth air; after glowering mountains and furious cloud, a little airport, a last landing, and home.

  Miss that Big Briefing In The Sky, and you have to find out for yourself about flying coast to coast in old airplanes. If you don’t get the word from someone else, an airplane has to teach you.

  And the lesson? People can fly old open-cockpit biplanes thousands of miles, can learn things of their country, of the early pilots to whom aviation owes its life, and of themselves. Something perhaps, that no Briefing could ever teach.

  There’s always the sky

  I was supposed to write a story about the man, not to kill him in cold blood. But somehow I couldn’t make him believe that—it was one of those rare times that I had met a person so frightened he was alien, and I stood helpless to talk with him as though I spoke ancient Urdu. It was disconcerting, to find that words sometimes have no meaning, and no effect at all. The man who was to have been the central figure of the story advised me clearly that he was on to me, he knew that I was a puppet, a boor, an ingrate, and a mob of other unsavory characters all wrapped in a faded flying jacket.

  A few years earlier, I might have experimented with violence to communicate with him, but this time I chose to leave the room. I walked out into the night air, and in the dim moonlight by the shore of the sea—for this was to have been a story of the man and his resort paradise.

  The brea
kers boomed along the dark beach, flickering blue-green-phosphorous like gentle peaceful howitzers firing in the dark, and I watched the salt ocean rush in swift and steady, slow and back, hissing softly. I walked half an hour perhaps, trying to understand the man and his fear, and finally gave it up as a bad job. It was only then, turning away from the ground, that I happened to look up.

  And there, over the elegant resort lands and over the sea, over the oblivious guests at the indoor bar and over me and all my little problems, was the sky.

  I slowed, there on the sand, and at last stopped and looked way on up into the air. From past-horizon north to past-horizon south, from beyond land’s end to beyond the depths of the western sea, lived the billion-mile sky. It was very calm, very still.

  Some high cirrus drifted along under a slice of moon, borne ever so carefully on a faint, faint wind. And I noticed something that night that I had never noticed before.

  That the sky is always moving, but it’s never gone.

  That no matter what, the sky is always with us.

  And that the sky cannot be bothered. My problems, to the sky, did not exist, never had existed, never would exist.

  The sky does not misunderstand.

  The sky does not judge.

  The sky, very simply, is.

  It is, whether we wish to see that fact or to bury ourselves under a thousand miles of earth, or even deeper still, under the impenetrable roof of unthinking routine.

  It happened a year later that for some reason I was in New York City, and everything was going wrong and my total assets equaled twenty-six cents and I was hungry and the very last place I wanted to be was in the prison streets of sundown Manhattan, with iron-barred windows and quintuple-lock doors. But it happened that I looked up, which is something one never does in Manhattan, of course, and again, as it had been by the sea—way on up there, way high over the canyons of Madison Avenue and Lexington and Park—was the sky. It was there. Unhurried. Unchanged. Warm and welcome as home.