A Gift of Wings

by Richard Bach

  She was right. But the mountain was only a fraction meaner than all the rest of the dead land about us.

  In seeing the land, though, I found my right to bring her there. In her mountain signal, the wife that I had tried so hard to shelter and protect was discovering her country, seeing it as it was. As long as she could see it this way, and with joy instead of fear, with gratitude instead of concern, that was my right to bring her. In that moment, I was glad that she had come.

  Arizona rolled by, and the desert gave grudging way, an inch at a time, to higher land and scrub pine. Then in a rush it surrendered to broad forests of pine, and tiny rivers, and some lonely pastures, with far-set ranch houses.

  The biplane rolled smoothly through the sky, but I was concerned. The engine oil pressure was not behaving properly. It slowly fell back from sixty pounds pressure to forty-seven. This was still within its limits, but it was not right, for oil pressure in an airplane engine should be a very steady thing.

  Bette was asleep now in the front cockpit, letting the wind sweep over her head as she rested on a mound of furry coat. I was glad she slept, and concentrated on mental diagrams of the inside of the old engine, trying to think of what the trouble could be. Then, two thousand feet above the ground, the engine stopped. The silence was so unnatural that Bette awoke, and looked down for the airport where we must be landing.

  There was none. We were fifty miles from any airport, and the more I worked over the engine, moving fuel selectors, setting ignition switches, the more I knew that we would never make it to an airport.

  The biplane sank swiftly out of the sky, and I rocked the wings to our friends, telling them that we were having a little trouble. They turned toward us immediately, but they could do nothing more than watch us go down.

  Forests carpeted the mountains behind and the mountains ahead. We were gliding down into a narrow valley, and along the edge of that valley, a ranch, and a fenced pasture. I turned toward the pasture. It was the only strip of level ground as far as I could see.

  Bette looked back at me, and raised her eyebrows. She didn’t seem frightened. I nodded to her that everything was all right, and that we were going to land in the pasture. I was ready to allow her to be frightened, for I would have been had I been in her place. This was her first forced landing; it was my sixth. One part of me stopped to watch her critically, to see how she took this engine failure—this event that, as far as the newspapers told her, inevitably resulted in a gigantic fatal crash and tall black headlines.

  There were two fields, side by side. I chose the one that looked the smoothest, making one final gliding circle to land. Bette pointed near the other field, raising her eyebrows in question. I shook my head no. Whatever you are asking, Bette, no. Just let me land the airplane now, and we’ll talk later.

  The biplane swept down, losing height quickly, crossed the fence, and slammed hard onto the ground. It bounced one time back into the air, then came down again, bumping and thundering across the rough hard field. I hoped there weren’t any hidden cows. There were some on the hillside. In a few seconds’ rolling, my question about the cows became an academic thought, for we were down, and stopped. It was utterly quiet, and I waited for my wife’s first comment after her first forced landing. I tried to guess what she would say. “So much for Iowa”? “Where’s the nearest railroad”? “What are we going to do now”? I waited.

  She lifted her goggles and smiled.

  “Didn’t you see the airport?”

  “WHAT!”

  “The airport, dear. A little field over there, didn’t you see it? It has a windsock and everything.” She hopped down from her cockpit and pointed. “See?”

  There was a windsock, all right. The only minor balm I held was that the single dirt runway looked shorter and rougher than the pasture we had landed upon.

  That part of me that was watching and checking and grading my wife, and that was all of me, at that moment, broke down and laughed out loud. Here was a girl I had never met, I had never seen before. A beautiful young lady with tousled hair and engine oil edging a big white goggle-print around her eyes, smiling impishly up at me. I have never been so helplessly charmed as I was on that afternoon by this incredible young woman.

  There was no way to tell her how well she had passed her test. The test was over and done in that moment, and the book thrown away.

  For a second the ground shook as our companions roared low overhead. We waved that we were all right, and pointed that the biplane was undamaged. They dropped a message, saying that if we signaled, they would come down and land. I waved them away. We were in good shape. I had some antique-airplane friends in Phoenix who would be able to help with the engine. The monoplanes flew low one more time, rocking their wings, and disappeared over the mountains to the east.

  That night, after the engine was repaired, I said hello to the lovely young woman who rode the front cockpit of my airplane. We unrolled our sleeping bags in the icy dark, heads together, and looked out at the whirling blazing center of our galaxy, and talked about what it felt like to be a creature that lived along the edge of so many suns.

  My biplane had carried me back into its own year, into 1929, and these hills around were 1929 hills, and those suns. I knew what a time-traveler felt like, to drift back into the years before he was born, and there to fall in love with a slim dark-eyed young mistress in flying helmet and goggles. I knew that I would never return to my own time. We slept, that night, this strange young woman and I, on the edge of our galaxy.

  The biplane thundered on across Arizona and into New Mexico, without the monoplanes at its side. Long hard flights it made; four hours in the cockpit, a moment out for a sandwich and a tank of fuel, a quart of oil, and back again into the wind. The windswept notes that my new wife handed back showed a mind as keen and bright as her body. They reflected a girl looking on a new world, with eyes bright for seeing.

  “The red balloon-sun bounces up from the horizon at dawn as if a child has let go of its string.”

  “Pasture sprinklers in early morning are white feathers evenly strung.”

  These were the sights I had seen in ten years of flying, and had never seen, until someone else who had never seen them either, framed them on scraps of notepaper and passed them back to me.

  “The free-form ranches of New Mexico give way only gradually to the precise checkerboard pattern of Kansas. The top of Texas passes by underwing incognito. Not even a fanfare or oil well to mark it.”

  “Corn from horizon to horizon. How can the world eat so much corn? Corn flakes, corn bread, corn muffins, corn on the cob, corn off the cob, cream corn, corn puddin, corn meal mush, corncorncorn.”

  Now and then, as we flew, a utilitarian question. “Why are we headed for the only cloud in the sky, answer me that!” Question answered with a shrug, she went back seeing and thinking.

  “Kind of takes the fun out of passing a train when you can see the engine and caboose at the same time.”

  A prairie city moved majestically toward us, steaming in from the ocean of the horizon. “What city?” she wrote.

  I mouthed the name.

  “HOMINY?” she wrote, and held up the paper in front of my windshield. I shook my head and mouthed it again.

  “HOMLICK?”

  I said it over and over again, the word whipped away in the slipstream.

  “AMANDY?”

  “ALMONDIC?”

  “ALBANY?”

  “ABANY?”

  I kept saying the name, over and over, faster and faster.

  “ABILENE!”

  I nodded, and she peered down over the side of her cockpit at the city, able now to properly inspect it.

  The biplane flew three days into the east, content to have brought me back to its time and introduced me to this quick young person. The engine didn’t stop again, or falter, even when cold rain poured down upon it, on the last miles into Iowa.

  “Are we escorting this storm to Ottumwa?”

  I coul
d only nod and wipe the spray from my goggles.

  At the fly-in, I met friends from around the country, my wife quiet and happy at my side. She said little, but listened carefully, missing nothing with her bright eyes. She seemed glad to let the wind play in her midnight hair.

  Five days later, we struck for home again, I with the hidden fear that I must return to a wife that I no longer knew. How much I would rather stay and roam the country with this mistress-wife!

  “A fly-in,” her first note read, hours out of Iowa and over the plains of Nebraska, “is individual people; where they’ve gone, what they’ve done, what they’ve learned, their plans for the future.”

  And then she was quiet for a long time, looking out upon the two other biplanes with whom we returned west, the three of us flying together into great flaming sunsets every evening.

  The hour came, as I knew it must, when we had crossed plains and mountains and desert once again, leaving them holding their challenge thrust silently into the sky. Her last note read, “I think America would be a happier place if every citizen, on reaching the age of eighteen, would be given an aerial tour of the entire country.”

  The other biplanes waved goodbye, and banked in steep sudden turns away from us, toward their own airports. We were home.

  Biplane once again back in its hangar, we drove quietly to our house. I was sad, as I am sad when I close a book and must say goodbye to a heroine that I have come to love. Whether she is real or not, I wish that I could spend more time with her.

  She sat beside me in the car as I drove, but in a few minutes it would be all over. She would comb her midnight hair neatly into place, away from the wind and the propeller blast, to become once again the focus of her children’s demands. She would walk again back into the world of shelter, a routine world that does not ask her to see with bright eyes, or to look down upon desert mountains, or to fight lofty windstorms. A routine that has never seen a double or full-circle rainbow.

  But the book was not quite closed. Sparkling now and then, here and there, at strange and unexpected times, the young woman that I discovered in 1929 and that I loved before I was born, looks up at me impishly, and there is the faintest hint of engine oil around the eyes. And she is gone before I can speak, before I can catch her hand and tell her wait.

  Adrift at Kennedy airport

  When I first saw Kennedy International Airport, there was no doubt that it was a place, a great island of concrete and sand and glass and paint, and derricks tilting their steel necks and taking rafters in their teeth and lifting them through the air to new constructions, to alloy roof-trees in a burnt-kerosene sky. It never occurred to me to doubt that. It was a sterile dark desert before dawn, it was pandemonium and a vision of the next century’s rush hour, when the jets lined up forty or sixty in rows waiting for takeoff, and arriving flights landed five hours late and children sat on baggage and cried and once in a while a grownup cried too.

  But the longer I watched, the more I began to see the fact: Kennedy isn’t a place quite as much as it is a cement-and-iron thought, with solid sharp edges at the corners; a proud stone idea that we have some kind of control over space and over time, and here within these boundaries we have all decided to get together and believe it.

  Somewhere else is abstract wonder about shrinking worlds and five hours to England and lunch-in-New-York-dinner-in-Los-Angeles. But here there is no abstract, there are no vague discussions. Here it happens. At ten o’clock on our watch we walk aboard BOAC Flight 157 and we expect, by three o’clock, either to have been killed in a monster crash or to be hailing a taxi in London.

  Everything at Kennedy has been built to make that idea fact. The concrete is there for that cause, and the steel and the glass, the airplanes, the sound of engines; the ground itself was trucked in and poured over Jamaica swamps to make that idea fact. No lectures here about cutting space-time into shreds, here’s where we do it. We do it with the sweeping blur of a wing in the air, with that ground-rumbling full-throttle blast of mammoth engines leaning hungry into the wind, round metal mouths open as wide as they’ll go, devouring ten tons of air a minute, attacking it cold, torching it with rings of fire till it’s black with agony, blasting it a hundred times faster out carbon tailpipes, turning empty air to heat to thrust to speed to flight.

  Kennedy Airport is a fine act, by an excellent magician. No matter what we believe, London will appear in five hours before our eyes, and, finishing lunch, we’ll have dinner in Los Angeles.

  Crowds. I don’t like crowds. But why, then, do I stand here at the rush hour in one of the biggest airports in the world, and watch the thousands of people swirling about me, and find myself happy and warm?

  Perhaps it is because this is a different kind of crowd.

  The rivers of people anywhere else in the world, pouring along sidewalks, pressing through subways and train stations and bus terminals in the morning and evening, are rivers of people who know just where they are and just where they are going, they have passed this way before and they know that they will pass this way again. So knowing, not much humanity shows in the masks they wear—that humanity lies within, struggling with problems, contemplating joys of past and future. Those crowds aren’t people at all, but carriers of people, vehicles with people inside, all shades drawn. There is not much to be said for watching a procession of curtained carriages.

  The crowds at Kennedy Airport, though, do not come this way every morning and every evening, and no one is quite sure of just where he is or just where he should be. With this, a misty state of emergency invests the air, in which it is all right to talk to a stranger, to ask for directions and help, all right to lend a hand to somebody a little loster than we. The masks are not quite so firmly in place, the curtains not quite so fully drawn, and you can see the people inside.

  It occurred to me, standing on the second-floor balcony, looking down, that these are the people from all over the world who are making their nations run, these are the ones directing the path of history. It was startling, the intelligence to be seen in that humanity, and the humor, and the respect there for others. These are the people in control of the governments, the ones who protest wrongs, and change them; these are the members of the final jury of their land, with more power than any court or military, who can overthrow any injustice that reaches their combined hearts, these are they whose ideals are appealed to by men who seek the accomplishment of any good thing. For these, newspapers are printed, things are created, films are made, books are written.

  There must be criminals in the crowds at Kennedy, too, there must be petty small men, and greedy and cruel. But they must be greatly outnumbered, else why that warmth I know, watching them all?

  Here in the currents of the International Arrivals Building, for instance, is a dark-haired girl in wine-colored traveling clothes, moving slowly through a packed crowd that she wishes to move swiftly through. It is eight-fourteen of a Friday evening. She works her way toward the automatic doors at the north wall of the building, perhaps arriving, perhaps leaving. Her face is not quite set, she is paying some attention to the problem of moving, but not a great deal; she is patiently forging ahead.

  Now from her right the crowd has given way to a heavy steel baggage cart, a moving hillock of leather and plaid. She does not notice it coming, bearing down upon her. It is her turn to give way to the cart, and still she does not see it as she moves toward the door.

  “LOOK OUT, PLEASE!” The porter shouts and tries to brake the cart in the last instant before it gently rams her. He does turn it slightly, and the iron wheels roll two inches in front of her.

  The dark-haired girl in the wine-colored suit sees the cart at last, stops instantly, in mid-step, and without making a sound she grimaces “EEEK!”

  The cart rumbles past as she smiles at herself for her drama, at the porter in apology for not watching out.

  He says a word, “You be careful, miss,” and they go their way, smiling still. She is gone out one door, he out
another, and I stand there and watch and somehow feel tender and loving toward all mankind.

  It is like watching a fire, or the sea, this watching of people at Kennedy, and I stood quietly there for weeks, munching a sandwich sometimes, just watching. Meeting, knowing, bidding farewell in the course of seconds to tens of thousands of fellow people who neither knew nor cared that I saw, going their way about the business of running their lives and their nations.

  I don’t like crowds, but some crowds I like.

  The form said:

  Lenora Edwards, age nine. Speaks English, minor traveling alone; small for her age. Address Martinsyde Road Kings Standing 3B Birmingham, England. She is arriving alone on TWA and is making a flight to Dayton, Ohio. Please meet and assist with transfer. Child is coming for three-week visit with her father. Parents divorced.

  For one day I joined Traveler’s Aid, because I’ve always been curious about Traveler’s Aid, seen them at their little posts at train stations and never really aiding anybody, that I could see.

  Marlene Feldman, a pretty girl, former legal secretary, was the one who took the form, handed me a Traveler’s Aid armband, and led the way to the International Arrivals Building. Our little girl’s flight was to have arrived at three-forty on a holiday weekend. At six o’clock we learned that by seven o’clock we might know what time it would be expected to land.

  “She will probably not make her connection,” Marlene said in a voice that was used to preparing for the worst. She must have been a good legal secretary. Now she was unruffled and in control, grasping the threads of unraveled plans and trying to weave them back together, for the sake of Lenora Edwards.