A Gift of Wings

by Richard Bach

  The only important part of Bert Stiles was set to paper near an Eighth Air Force runway those thirty years ago, and that same paper is here for us to touch and know and see within, this minute. That important part is what makes any man what he is and what he means.

  To talk in person with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, for instance, we would have had to peer through a constant cloud of cigarette smoke about his head. We would have had to listen to him worry over imaginary diseases. We would have had to stand at the airport and wonder … would he remember to lower the landing gear today?

  But as soon as Saint-Exupéry ran out of excuses not to write (and these were many), as soon as he found his inkwell amid the clutter of his room and when at last his pen touched paper, he set free some of the most moving and beautiful ideas about flight and man that have ever been written. Few are the pilots, reading his thought, who cannot nod and say, “That’s true,” who cannot call him friend.

  “ ‘Careful of that brook (said Guillamet), it breaks up the whole field. Mark it on your map.’ Ah, I was to remember that serpent in the grass near Mortril! Stretching its length along the grasses in the paradise of that emergency landing field, it lay in wait for me a thousand miles from where I sat. Given the chance, it would transform me into a flaming candelabra. And those thirty valorous sheep ready to charge me on the slope of a hill.

  “ ‘You think the meadow empty, and suddenly bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels.’ An astounded smile was all I could summon in the face of so cruel a threat …”

  In the very best among the writers of flight, we might expect to find some very lofty and difficult thought set to paper. But not so. In fact, the higher the quality of the writer, and the better a friend he becomes to us, the more simple and clear is the message that he brings. And strangely, it is a message that we do not learn as much as remember, something we find that we have always known.

  In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry lays out the idea of this special kind of friendship that airplane pilots can have with other pilots who have written of flight.

  “ ‘Here is my secret,’ said the fox to the little prince, ‘a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

  “ ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye,’ the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.”

  Saint-Ex writes of you and me, who are drawn to flight in the same way that he was drawn to it, and we look for the same friends within it. Without seeing that invisible, without recognizing that we have more in common with Saint-Exupéry and David Garnett and Bert Stiles and Richard Hillary and Ernest Gann than we have with our next-door neighbor, we have left them all untamed, and they are no more friends than a hundred thousand unknown faces are friends. But as we get to know that real man who is set down on paper, that man to whom the living mortal devoted his lifetime, each of these becomes, for us, unique in all the world. What is essential about them, and about us, is not seen with eyes.

  We are friend to a man not because he has brown hair or blue eyes or a scar on his chin from an old airplane crash, but because he dreams the same dreams, because he loves the same good and hates the same evil. Because he likes to listen to the sound of an engine ticking over on a warm, quiet morning.

  Facts alone are meaningless.

  FACT: The man who wore the uniform of commandant in the French Air Force, who carried a flight log written with seven thousand hours and the name Saint-Exupéry, did not return from a reconnaissance flight over his homeland.

  FACT: Luftwaffe Intelligence officer Hermann Korth, on the evening of July 31, 1944, the evening when Saint-Exupéry’s was the only aircraft missing, copies a message—“Report by telephone … destruction of a reconnaissance plane which fell in flames into the sea.”

  FACT: Hermann Korth’s library in Aix-la-Chapelle, with its honored shelf for the books of Saint-Exupéry, was destroyed by Allied bombs.

  FACT: None of this destroyed Saint-Exupéry. Not bullets in his engine or flames in his cockpit or bombs tearing his books to shreds, for the real Saint-Ex, the real David Garnett, the real Bert Stiles are not flesh and they are not paper. They are a special way of thinking, much like our own way of thinking, perhaps, but still, like our prince’s fox, unique in all the world.

  And meaning?

  These men, the only part of them that is real and lasting, are alive today. If we seek them out, we can watch with them and laugh with them and learn with them. Their logbooks melt into ours, and our flying and our living grows richer for knowing them.

  The only way that these men can die is for them to be utterly forgotten. We must do for our friends what they have done for us—we must help them to live. On a chance that you may not have met one or two of them, will you allow me the honor of introductions?

  MR. HARALD PENROSE, No Echo in the Sky (Arno Press, Inc.)

  MR. RICHARD HILLARY, The Last Enemy (also published with the title Falling through Space)

  FLT. LT. JAMES LIEWELLEN RHYS, England Is My Village (Books for Libraries, Inc.)

  MRS. MOLLY BERNHEIM, A Sky of My Own (Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.)

  MR. ROALD DAHL, Over to You

  MISS DOT LEMON, One-One

  SIR FRANCIS CHICHESTER, Alone over the Tasman Sea

  MR. GILL ROBB WILSON, The Airman’s World

  MR. CHARLES A. LINDBERGH, The Spirit of St. Louis (Charles Scribner’s Sons)

  MRS. ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, North to the Orient (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)

  MR. NEVIL SHUTE, Round the Bend, The Rainbow and the Rose, Pastoral (Ballantine Books, Inc.)

  MR. GUY MURCHIE, Song of the Sky (Houghton Mifflin Company)

  MR. ERNEST K. GANN, Blaze of Noon (Ballantine Books, Inc.), Fate Is the Hunter (Simon & Schuster, Inc., Ballantine Books, Inc.)

  MR. ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERY, Wind, Sand and Stars (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.), The Little Prince (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)

  If the book is in print, the publisher is listed. Otherwise look in libraries and secondhand bookstores.

  A light in the toolbox

  That which a man believes, the philosophers say, is that which becomes his reality. So it was for years as I said over and again “I’m no mechanic,” I was no mechanic. As I said “I don’t even know which end of the screwdriver to hit the nail with,” I closed a whole world of light from myself. There had to be somebody else to work on my airplanes, or I couldn’t fly.

  Then I came to own a crazy old biplane, with an old-fashioned round engine on its nose, and it didn’t take long to discover that this machine was not about to tolerate a pilot who didn’t know something of the personality in a 175 horsepower Wright Whirlwind, something about the repair of wooden ribs and doped fabric.

  That was how the rarest event in life came to me … I changed the way I thought. I learned the mechanics of airplanes.

  What everybody else had known for so long was brand-new adventure to me. An engine, for instance, torn apart and scattered across a workbench, is just a collection of odd-shaped pieces, it is cold dead iron. Yet those same pieces, assembled and bolted into a cold dead airframe, become a new being, a finished sculpture, an art-form worthy of any gallery on earth. And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and the dead airframe come to life at the touch of a pilot’s hand, and join their life with his own. Standing separately, the iron and the wood and the cloth and the man are chained to the ground. Together, they can lift on up into the sky, exploring places where none of them has ever been before. This was surprising for me to learn, because I had always thought that mechanics was broken metal and muttered curses.

  It was all there in the hangar to see, the moment I opened my eyes, like an exhibit in a museum when the light is turned on. I saw on the bench the elegance of a half-inch socket set; the smooth, simple grace of an end-wrench, wiped clean of oil. Like a new art student who in one day first sees the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Augu
ste Rodin and Alexander Calder, so I suddenly noticed the work of Snap-On and Craftsman and the Crescent Tool Company, gleaming silent and waiting in battered toolbox trays.

  Art of tools led to art of engines, and in time I came to understand the Whirlwind, to think of it as a living friend with whims and fancies, instead of a mystic sinister unknown. What a discovery that was, to find what was going on inside that gray steel case, behind the spinning flash of the propeller blade and the flickering bursts of engine roar. No longer was it dark inside those cylinders, around that crankshaft; there was light—I knew! There was intake and compression and power and exhaust. There were pressure oil bearings to hold whirring high-speed shafts; carefree intake valves and tortured exhaust valves darting down and back on microsecond schedules, pouring and drinking fresh fire. There was the frail impeller of the supercharger, humming seven times round for every turn of the propeller. Rods and pistons, cam-rings and rocker-arms, all began to make sense, clicking to the same simple, straight logic of the tools that had bolted them in place.

  I went from engines to airframes in my studies, and learned about weld clusters and bulkheads, stringers and rib-stitching, pulleys and fair-leads, wash-in, offsets, rigging. I had been flying for years, and yet this was the first day I ever saw an airplane, studied it and noticed it. All these little parts, fitting together to make a complete aircraft—it was great! I raged in the need to own a field full of airplanes, because they were so pretty. I needed them so that I could walk around and look at them from a hundred different angles, in a thousand lights of dawn and dark.

  I began buying my own tools, began keeping them on my desk, just to look at and touch, from time to time. The discovery of the mechanics of flight is no small discovery. I spent hours in the hangar absorbing Michelangelo airplanes, in shops studying Renoir toolboxes.

  The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own. Yet I learned, courtesy of a crazy old biplane, that to see beauty and to find art I don’t have to fly every moment of my life. I have only to feel the satin metal of a nine-sixteenths-inch end-wrench, to walk through a quiet hanger, simply to open my eyes to the magnificent nuts and bolts that have been so close to me for so long.

  What strange, brilliant creations are tools and engines and airplanes and men, when the light is turned on!

  Anywhere is okay

  It was just as if somebody had thrown a hundred-pound firecracker, had lighted the fuse two hours after midnight, thrown the thing high in the dark over our airplanes, over us asleep there in the hay, and run like crazy.

  A ball of dynamite fire shattered us alive, bullets of hard rain burst like hail across our bedrolls, black winds tore us like animals gone wild. Our three planes leaped frantic against their ropes, strained up hard against them, tugged and kicked and clawed at them mad to go tumbling in the night with that maniac wind.

  “Get the strut, Joe!”

  “What?” His voice was blown away in wind, drowned in rain and thunder. In the lightning flash he was frozen the color of ten million volts, as were trees, leaves flying off, and the horizontal raindrops.

  “THE STRUT! GRAB THE STRUT AND HANG ON!”

  He threw his weight on the wing in the instant the storm snapped branches from the trees—between us we held the Cub from taking both of us under its wings and cartwheeling across the valley.

  Joe Giovenco, a hippy teenager from Hicksville, Long Island, from the shadow of New York City, whose total understanding of thunderstorms had been that they made faint rumblings beyond the city in summertime, clung to that strut with python strength, personally battling wind and lightning and rain, his hair blowing in fierce dark tangles about his face and shoulders.

  “MAN!” he shouted a second before the next dynamite went off, “I’M REALLY LEARNING A LOT ABOUT METEOROLOGY!”

  In half an hour the storm rolled by and left us a warm dark calm. Though we saw the sky flickering and crunching in the hills to the east, and though we looked warily west for other lightnings, the calm stayed and we snaked at last back into our ragged wet bedrolls. Moistly though we slept, there was not one of the six of us out there in the night who didn’t count the Invitational Cross-Country Adventure with the best wishes of his life. Yet it was nothing tried against great odds. All that brought us to it, or it to us, was that we shared a certain curiosity about the other people who live on our planet and in our time.

  Maybe the headlines started the Adventure, or the magazine articles or the radio news. With their ceaseless talk of alien youth and generation gaps grown into uncrossable deep chasms and the only hope the kids have for the country is to tear it down and not rebuild at all … maybe that’s where it started. But considering all this, I found that I didn’t know any such kids, didn’t know anybody unwilling to talk to those of us who were kids ourselves, yesterday. I knew there was something to say to one who says “Peace” instead of “Hello,” but I didn’t know quite what that might be.

  What would happen, I thought, if a man with a little cloth-wing airplane came down to land on a road to offer a knapsacked hitchhiker a ride? Or better, what would happen if a couple of pilots made room in their planes for a couple of city kids for a flight of a hundred miles or so, or a thousand miles or so; a flight of a week or two across the hills and farms and plains of America? Kids who have never seen the country before, outside their high school fence or expressway overpass?

  Who would change, the kids or the pilots? Or would both, and what kind of change might that be? Where would their lives touch, and where would they be so far apart that there could be no calling across the gulf?

  The only way to find out what can happen to an idea is to test it, and that is how the Invitational Cross-Country Adventure came to be.

  The first day of August, 1971, was a misty dim day—afternoon, in fact, by the time I landed at Sussex Airport, New Jersey, to meet the others.

  Louis Levner owned a 1946 Taylorcraft and liked the idea of the flight sight unseen. For a target we chose the EAA Fly-in at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, reason enough to fly even if everybody else canceled out at the last minute.

  Glenn and Michelle Norman of Toronto, Canada, heard about the flight, and though they weren’t quite hippy kids they were strangers to the United States, eager to see the country in their 1940 Luscombe. And waiting there at the field when I landed were two young men who had labeled themselves Hippy for all the world to see. Hair down to their shoulders, headbands made of rags, dressed in faded dungarees, knapsacks and bedrolls at their feet.

  Christopher Kask, thoughtful, nonviolent, almost non-speaking among strangers, had won a Regents scholarship out of high school, a distinction reserved for the top two percent of the student body. He wasn’t sure, however, that college is America’s best friend, and to get a degree for the sake of finding a better job did not sound to him like real education.

  Joseph Giovenco, taller, more open with others, noticed everything with a careful photographer’s eye. He knew there was a future in video tape as an art form, and video tape he’d be learning, come fall.

  None of us knew just what would happen, but the flying sounded like fun. We met at Sussex and we cast anxious looks at the sky, at the mists and clouds there, not saying much because we were not yet sure how to talk with each other. We nodded at last, packed our bedrolls aboard, started engines, and rolled fast along the runway and into the sky. Over the noise of the engines, there was no way to tell what the kids thought, airborne.

  My own thought was that we weren’t going to get very far in the first flight. Clouds swirled up deep gray broths on the ridges west, with chunks of fog steaming in the branches of the trees. Blocked to the west, we flew south for ten miles, for fifteen, and finally, with the soup boiling and thickening all about us, came down on a little grass strip near Andover, New Jersey.

  In the silence of that place, the rain began ever so gently to fall.

  “Not what you mi
ght call an auspicious start,” somebody said.

  But the kids were undampened. “All the land in New Jersey!” said Joe. “I thought it was populated!”

  I hummed the tune to Mosquitoes, Stay Away from My Door as I unrolled my blanket in the grass, glad that we weren’t all gloomed by the terrible weather, hoping that tomorrow would dawn bright and see us on our way over our horizons.

  It rained all night long. Rain with the sound of gravel pouring on drum-fabric wings, thudding into grass dryly at first, then with splashings as grass became marsh. By midnight we had given up hope of any star or of any sleep in the marsh; by one a.m. we were huddled and folded into the airplanes, trying at least to doze. At three a.m., after hours without a word, Joe said. “I have never been in rain this hard in my life.”

  Dawn was late, because of the fog … we had fog and clouds and rain for four days straight. In four days of taking to the air with every small break in the sky, in four days of dodging rainstorms and detouring them and hopping from one little airport to another we had flown a grand total of sixty-two miles toward Oshkosh, one thousand miles away. We slept in a hangar at Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; in an airport office at Pocono Mountain; in a flying-school clubhouse in Lehighton.

  We decided to keep a journal of the flight. Out of this, and out of our talks under the rains and amid the fogs, we began to know each other, ever so slightly.

  Joe was convinced right off, for instance, that airplanes had personalities, that they had characters like people, and he didn’t mind saying that the blue-and-white one over there in the corner of the hangar made him nervous. “I don’t know why. It’s the way it sits there looking at me. I don’t like it.”

  The pilots jumped on that and told stories of airplanes that lived in different ways and did things that couldn’t be done—took off in impossibly short distances when they had to, to save somebody’s life, or glided impossibly long ones with engines stopped over jagged lands. Then there was talk about the way wings work, and flight controls and engines and propellers, and then about crowded schools and drugs on campus, then of how it is that sooner or later what a person holds fast in his thought becomes true in his life. Outside, the black rain; inside, the echo and murmur of voices.