by Richard Bach
In the journal we wrote whatever we didn’t feel like saying aloud.
“This is really something!” Chris Kask wrote on the fourth day. “Every day is a string of surprises—some really unbelievable things have been happening. A guy lends us his Mustang, a guy lends us his Cadillac, everybody’s letting us sleep in the airports and really going out of their way to be nice. It doesn’t matter where we are or if we ever get to Oshkosh. Anywhere is okay.”
The kindness of people was something the kids couldn’t believe.
“I used to walk with Chris in a store or follow him down a street,” Joe said, “and watch people watching him. His hair was as long as it is now—longer. They’d pass him and they’d look, sometimes they’d even stop and make some face or some remark. Condemn him. You could see the distaste in their eyes, and they didn’t even know who he was!”
After that I took to watching people watching our hippies. Always there was a shock there, seeing them for the first time, the same startlement I had felt when I first saw them. But if either of them had a chance to talk, though, a chance to show that they were gentle people who did not plan to whip out bombs and blow everybody to pieces, that flicker of hostility vanished in something less than half a minute.
Once we were trapped by weather over the ridges of western Pennsylvania. We fell back from it, then circled and landed our planes in a long field of mown hay by the town of New Mahoning.
Scarcely had we stepped out onto the ground when the farmer arrived, his pickup truck rolling soft and crunchy on the wet stubble.
“Having some trouble, are you?” He said that first, and then he frowned when he saw the kids.
“No, sir,” I said. “A little. The clouds were getting a bit low and we thought it might be better to land than to maybe fly into a hill up there. Hope you don’t mind …”
He nodded. “It’s OK. Everybody’s all right, are they?”
“Thanks to your field. We’re fine.”
In minutes three other trucks and a car nosed down the dirt lane and onto the field; there was curious lively talk everywhere.
“… saw them flying low over Nilsson’s place there, and I figure he was in trouble. Then the two others come around and they went down and it got quiet and I didn’t know what was going on!”
All the farm people with haircuts, all of them smooth-shaven, they flickered their eyes over the long hair and the headbands and they weren’t sure what they had, here.
Then they heard what Joe Giovenco was saying to Nilsson.
“Is this a farm? A real farm? I’ve never seen a real … I’m from the city … that isn’t corn is it, growing out of the ground?”
Frowns vanished in smiles like slow candles lighting.
“Sure that’s corn, son, and that’s the way it grows, right there. Sometimes you worry. This rain, now. Too much rain, and then a big wind right after, and the whole crop gets knocked flat and you’ve got troubles, sure enough …”
Somehow, that was a good scene to watch.
You could see the thoughts in their eyes. The hippies a fellow sets his jaw against are the sullen ones that don’t care about the rain or the sun or the land or the corn … the ones that don’t do anything but cut the country down. But these kids, now, they’re not that kind—a man can tell that right away.
When the ridges cleared, we offered rides in the airplanes, but no one was quite ready to go up. We started engines, then, and bounced up from the hay into the sky, rocked our wings farewell and went our way.
“Amazing!” Chris wrote in the journal that night. “We landed in a field and talked to farmers with Swedish and Irish accents—I didn’t know this existed in Pennsylvania. Everybody is so nice. Friendly. It’s really opened my eyes. A lot of my natural defenses are broken down. Just don’t worry and trust things to work out. All my little plans for the future have really been shaken. I’m just not sure of anything anymore and that’s good because it teaches you to go with the flow of things.”
From that day we wafted west in pure blue air over the pure green land and farms like sunlight growing.
After all our explaining on the ground, Chris and Joe were ready to take the controls themselves. Their first hours of dual instructions were given in formation flying.
“Small corrections, Joe, SMALL CORRECTIONS! You want to hold the other plane just about … there. OK? You’ve got it, you’re flying. Small corrections, now. Add a little power, close it in a little. SMALL CORRECTIONS!”
Before many hours were gone, they could actually hold the airplanes in formation with each other. It was hard work for them, they made it much harder than it had to be, but still they soaked it in and waited like vultures after takeoff to pounce on the controls and practice some more.
Next they began making takeoffs themselves … squirrely weaving panic-stricken disasters at first, leaping in the last instant over runway lights and snow markers along the sides of the strip. When they got smoother, we practiced stalls and a spin or two coming down from formation, and at last they began making landings, learning, absorbing like sponges dropped in the sea.
Every day, too, we learned of their life and their language. We practiced talking Hippy, my notebook becoming a dictionary of that tongue. Joe insisted that I had to slur my words much more carefully—we practiced saying “Hey, man, what’s happening?” over and over again, but it was harder than formation flying … I never did get it right.
“ ‘You know,’ ” Joe said, “means ‘Um’ or ‘Duh.’ ‘Right on’ means ‘I agree emphatically,’ said only to obvious statements and usually said by dummos.”
“What is it,” I asked, “when you ‘make the scene’?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never made it.”
Though my dictionary had much about the language of drugs (marijuana is also Mary Jane, grass, pot, stuff, smoke, and Cannabis sativa; a ‘nick’ is a five-dollar bag of grass, ‘spaced out’ is how one feels while smoking it), neither of the kids had brought any along on the Cross-Country Adventure. This puzzled me, since I thought that any hippy in good standing had to smoke a pack of marijuana a day, and I asked about it.
“You smoke mostly out of boredom,” Chris said, which explained why I missed seeing them with any drugs. Fighting storms, landing in hayfields, learning formation and takeoffs and landings—boredom was not a problem that we had to face.
In the midst of my language practice I noticed the kids had begun to pick up flying jargon without any dictionaries at all.
“Hey man,” I asked Joe one day, “this word ‘rushing,’ you know, I don’t quite dig it. How do you, you know, use it in a sentence?”
“You can say, ‘Man, I’m rushing.’ It’s the feeling you get on smoke when the top of your neck feels like it’s going into the back of your head.” He thought for a while, then brightened. “It’s exactly like how you feel pulling out of a spin.” I suddenly understood about rushing.
Words like “tail-dragger,” “rag-wing,” “touch-and-go,” “loop,” “hammerhead” popped up in their talk. They learned how to pull a propeller through by hand to start an engine, they followed us on the dual controls through every slip, skid, short-field landing, and soft-field takeoff we made. Even details, they picked up. Joe had his hands full flying formation one morning and called to me in the back seat of the Cub. “Could you give me a little up trim, please?” He didn’t hear, but I had laughed at that. A week earlier, “trim up” had been something you did to a Christmas tree.
Then one evening around the fire, Chris said, “How much does an airplane cost? How much do you need to fly one for a year, say?”
“Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred dollars,” Lou told him. “Fly it for two dollars an hour …”
Joe was astonished. “Twelve hundred dollars!” There was a long silence. “That’s only six hundred apiece, Chris.”
The fly-in at Oshkosh was a carnival that left them unimpressed. They had not been caught by airplanes as much as by the idea of flight itself
, by the idea of riding some airborne motorcycle up off the ground, leaving roads and traffic lights behind, and setting out to discover America. More and more this began to occupy their thinking.
Rio, Wisconsin, was our first stop homeward. There we carried thirty passengers on joy rides over town. The kids helped the passengers into the planes, explained flying to those just come to watch, and found that it was quite possible for a fellow to break even this way, if he had a plane of his own. That afternoon we earned fifty-four dollars in contributions and donations, which bought us gas and oil and suppers for a few days to come. At Rio, the town treated us to a picnic complete with salads and hot dogs and beans and lemonade, balancing out those nights lost to wet bedrolls and hungry mosquitos.
Here Glenn and Michelle Norman left us to fly farther southeast, to meet friends and see farther into the USA.
“There’s nothing more poetic or joyful-sad,” Chris wrote in the journal, “than seeing a friend fly away in an airplane.”
South we flew, four of us now in two airplanes, south and east and north again.
For crowded skies, that Monday afternoon, we saw a total of two other airplanes in all Chicago’s metropolitan airspace.
For 1984, we saw the horses and buggies of the Indiana Amish on the country roads below, and three-horse teams hitched to plows in fields.
Our last evening out we landed in the hayfield of Mr. Roy Newton, not far from Perry Center, New York. We talked with him for a while, asking his permission to stay the night on his land.
“Course you can stay here,” he said. “Except you won’t light any fires, will you? The straw around …”
“No fires, Mr. Newton.” we promised. “Thanks very much for letting us stay.”
Later, it was Chris who spoke. “You can sure get away with murder, in an airplane.”
“Murder, Chris?”
“Suppose we had come along with a car, or on bikes, or walking. What are the chances he’d be so nice about letting us stay here like this? But with airplanes, because it’s getting dark, we’re welcome to land!”
It didn’t sound fair, but that’s just the way it is. That is a privilege one has, as a pilot, and it was not lost on the kids.
Next day we were landed back to Sussex Airport, New Jersey, and the Invitational Cross-Country Adventure was officially finished. Ten days, two thousand miles, thirty hours of flying.
“I’m sad,” Joe said. “It’s all over. It was great and now it’s all over.”
It wasn’t till late night that I opened the journal once more, and noticed that Chris Kask had made one last entry in it.
“I learned a tremendous amount,” he had written. “This has opened my mind to a whole bunch of things that exist outside of Hicksville, L.I. I’ve got a new perspective on things. I’m able to stand back from everything a little more and see it from a different viewpoint. Something I’ve felt on this is that it’s an important thing not only to me but to everyone along and to everyone we met, and I realized this while it was happening, which is a very heady feeling. It caused many tangible and many intangible changes in my mind and emotions. Thanks.”
There was my answer, there’s what we can say to the kids who say “Peace” instead of “Hello.” We can say “Freedom,” and by the grace of a secondhand rag-wing lightplane, we can show them what we mean.
Think black
Think black. Think it above and below and all around you. Not a pitch black, but just a darkness without horizon or moon to give it reference or light.
Think red. Put some softly in front of you, on the instrument panel. Let it barely show twenty-two instrument faces with ghostly needles pointing to dim markings. Let the red flood gently around to your left and right. If you look, you can just see your left hand on the thick throttle, and your right holding the button-studded grip of the control stick.
But don’t look inside, look out and to the right. Ten feet from the plexiglass that keeps pressure around you is a spot of red light, flashing.
It’s attached to the left wingtip of the lead airplane in the formation. You know that the plane is an F-86F; that its wings are swept to a thirty-five-degree angle; that in its fuselage is a J47-GE-27 axial-flow jet engine, six fifty-caliber machine guns, a cockpit like yours, and a man. But you take it all on faith; you see only a dim red light, flashing.
Think sound. A dynamo’s whine behind you, eerie, low and unceasing. Somewhere on the dim panel in front, an instrument is telling you that the engine is putting out ninety-five percent of its rpm; that fuel is being fed to it at a pressure of two hundred pounds per square inch; that there is thirty pounds of oil pressure at the bearings; that the temperature in the tailpipe, behind the combustion chambers and the spinning turbine wheel, is five hundred seventy degrees Centigrade. You hear the whine.
Think sound. Think the hiss of light static in the foam-rubber earphones of your crash helmet. Static that three other men in a sixty-foot radius are hearing. A sixty-foot radius at thirty-six thousand feet, four men alone-together swishing through the thin black air.
Push with your left thumb and four men can hear you talk, can hear how you feel, seven miles above a ground you cannot see. Dark ground, buried under miles of dark air. But you don’t talk, and neither do they. Four men alone with their thoughts, flying on the flashing light of the leader’s airplane.
Everything else about your life is normal, and everyday common. You go to the supermarket; the gas station; you say, “Let’s eat out tonight!” But every once in a while you are far away from that world. In the high blackness of a star-studded sky.
“Checkmate, oxygen check.”
You slide your plane out a little from the flashing light and look into the dim red of your cockpit. Hiding in a corner is a luminous needle, pointing two-fifty. Now your thumb hits the microphone button, there’s reason to talk.
Your own words sound strange in your ears after the long quiet. “Checkmate Two, oxygen normal, two-fifty.”
Other voices in the black:
“Checkmate Three, oxygen normal, two-thirty.”
“Checkmate Four, oxygen normal, two-thirty.”
Silence pours back in, and you close again on the flashing red light.
What makes me different from the man behind me in the grocery line? you wonder. Maybe he thinks I’m different because I have the glory-filled job of a jet fighter pilot. He thinks of me in terms of gun-camera film in the newsreels, and a silver blur of speed at an air show. The film and the speed are just part of my job, as preparing the annual budget report is part of his. My job doesn’t make me any different. Yet I know that I am different, because I have a chance that he doesn’t. I can go places he will never see, unless he looks up into the stars.
Still, it isn’t my being here that sets me apart from those who spend their lives on the ground, it’s the effect this high, lonely place has on me. I get impressions that can’t be equaled anywhere else, impressions that he’ll never feel. Just to think of the reality of the space outside this cockpit is a strange feeling. Eleven inches to my right, eleven to my left, is a place where man can’t live, where he doesn’t belong. We flick through it like frightened deer across an open meadow, knowing that to stop is to flirt with death.
You make tiny automatic motions with the stick, correcting to keep in position on the flashing light.
If this were day, we’d feel at home; a glance downward would show us mountains and lakes, highways and cities, familiar things we can glide down to and be at ease. But it isn’t day. We swim through a black fluid which hides our home, our earth. Engine failure now, and there’s no place to glide to, no decision to make where to go. My plane can glide for a hundred miles if the rpm falls to zero and the tailpipe cools, but I’m expected to pull the handgrips, squeeze the trigger, and float down through the darkness in my parachute. In the daylight, I’m expected to try to save the airplane, try to put it on a landing strip. But it’s night, it’s dark outside, and I can’t see.
The
engine whirls faithfully on, and stars shine steadily. You fly the flashing light, and wonder.
If Lead’s engine failed now, what could I do to help him? Simple answer. Nothing. He flies now twenty feet away, but if he needed my help, I’d be as far away as Sirius, above. I can’t take him in my cockpit or hold his airplane in the air, or even guide him to a lighted field. I could call his position to rescue parties, and I could say ‘Good luck’ before he fired his ejection seat into the black. We fly together, but are as alone as four stars in the sky.
You remember talking to a friend who had done just that, left his plane at night. His engine had been on fire, and the rest of the formation was completely powerless to help. As his plane slowed and started down, one of them had called, “Don’t wait too long to get out.” Those helpless words were the last he had heard before he fired into the night. Here was a man he had known and flown with, who had eaten dinner with him, who had laughed at the same jokes with him, saying, “Don’t wait too long …”
Four men, flying alone together through the night.
“Checkmate, fuel check.”
Once again, the voice from Lead cuts into the silence of the engine’s airy roar. Once again you move away, read the dim needle, pointing.
“Checkmate Two, twenty-one hundred pounds,” your stranger’s voice calls into the thin static.
“Checkmate Three, twenty-two hundred.”
“Checkmate Four, twenty-one hundred.”
Back in you slide, back to the flash of the red light.
We took off just an hour ago, and already the fuel says it’s time to go down. What the fuel says, we do. Strange what a complete respect we have for that fuel gage. Pilots who respect neither laws of man nor of God respect that fuel gage. There’s no getting around its law, no hazy threat of punishment in the indefinite future. Nothing personal. “If you don’t land soon,” it says coldly, “your engine will stop while you’re in the air, and you will bail out into the dark.”
