Staggerwing and Me

"In developing aviation, in making it a form of commerce, in replacing the wild freedom of danger with the civilized bonds of safety, must we give up this miracle of the air? Will men fly through the sky in the future without seeing what I have seen, without feeling what I have felt? Is that true of all things we call human progress--do the gods retire as commerce and science advance?"

--Charles A. Lindbergh

Sooner or later, if you're a pilot, almost everyone you know will ask why you fly. The query usually comes in a rather avid, not altogether politely curious tone, a little like asking a nice girl how she ever got started, or a man why he's homosexual, or what it feels like to be black, as if the questioner expects an insight into a way of life so strange any true commentary must take the form of titillating revelation.

In proper spirit I reply, "It's like opium. Just as addictive and a lot more expensive." Or, "It saves me a helluva psychiatrist's bill and it's much more fun." Flip answers to a heavy question, but not without an element of truth.

I learned to fly five years ago from a small and none-too-sterling outfit in San Antonio, Texas--the proprietor crashed the company's best charter plane into a graveyard the day before I started--and haven't spent 30 consecutive days on the ground since. A long spell earth-bound, anything more than a week, and I begin to suffer from a most unpleasant malaise not unlike withdrawal. I snap at friends, am incapable of work, feel as though I've just contracted the latest foreign flu. My wife, who from a keen sense of self-preservation has learned to detect the symptoms early, will say, "You need to get your rocks off. Go make it with your airplane."

And I say, "But there's no reason to. I haven't got a trip." (continued overleaf)

"Just take it up and do a few rolls. Then do a Cuban eight. Cuban eights always make you feel better."

"The FAA might catch me." The FAA is the Federal Aviation Administration, Government watchdog of the sky. It takes a very dim view of unauthorized aerobatics.

"No they won't. They never have before. Do what I tell you. I know you'll feel better."

And off I go to the airport to commune with my airplane, a machine I think of as either the big yellow bird or the bitch, depending on the state of her mechanical health. Sick or healthy, she's never far from center stage in my life.

Officially she's a Beechcraft Model D-17S, a cabin biplane with retractable landing gear and negative stagger (that means the top wing is behind the bottom). Power, one Pratt and Whitney radial, 985 cubic inches' displacement, capable of 450 horsepower. A direct descendant of engines made famous in the long ago by men like Wiley Post (who first tested jet streams and had only one eye) and Roscoe Turner (who carried a pet lion as copilot). Popularly she is called a Staggerwing. Technically she belongs to aviation's Bronze Age. The prototype of her genre first flew in November 1932. Her wings are made of wood, spars like railroad ties breathed on by a master cabinetmaker, ribs that look like spruce miniatures of the Golden Gate Bridge. Her rudder post is a squared-off telephone pole. She is covered with fabric, painted with many coats of dope that I spend a lot of time trying to keep polished to a high gloss. Her interior is spacious and handsomely upholstered. She carries four in great luxury, five in tourist-class comfort, and one time in Mexico we had nine in her. Practically ... to fly her is to love her.

First, she is quite beautiful. Her wings end in graceful ellipses, like those of a Battle of Britain Spitfire, and her fuselage behind the cabin tapers down to a waist like a Vargas Girl's. The windshield slants rakishly. Her engine, nine cylinders arranged in a circle, each one bigger than an entire Volkswagen motor, is a glorious maze of chrome push-rod covers and cooling fins and breather ducting, and her spinner and prop, a giant scythe of a Hamilton Standard, glitter more brightly than all the diamonds in Cartier's. She is nostalgia unlimited and an object lesson in pure efficiency.

I climb in, twist through a labyrinth of monkey-bar-size cabin bracings to the left seat. The pilot who checked me out on the plane said, "Getting in is the hard part. If you don't give yourself a concussion, the worst is over." I fasten the belt, watch happily as my hands go about the half-dozen tasks necessary to bring the Pratt to life. I think of my old flight instructor, a Baptist missionary who flew every kind of plane from J-3 Cubs to KC-135 tankers with the same inimitable tender elegance. He once said to me, "Starting modern opposed engines is easy. Starting turbines is so easy it's boring. But firing up a radial is like building a house. You get a real sense of accomplishment when you finish."

Fuel valve on center main. Mixture rich. Throttle cracked. Hit the wobble pump for five pounds of fuel pressure. Work the primer, a cantankerous device for getting gas to the cylinders that on a cold morning would reduce Charles Atlas to tears of frustration. Magnetos hot. Battery switch on. With one hand press the starter button. With the other work the wobble pump again. With the other jiggle the throttle. With the other be ready to prime again....

Sometimes nothing happens. Once I was going to give an FAA man a ride, impress him and by proxy the rest of the Federal Government with the incomparable splendors of old airplanes and my flawless piloting technique. The prop wouldn't even turn over. But when she does go, it's like dawn on an English airfield in every good bad World War Two movie you ever saw. A strained utterly distinctive whine, a few prop blades flash, a pop like a 12-gauge shotgun, another, great farts of blue-black smoke, the prop blurs, and she is running, a thundering grumble that is at once very loud and slightly irregular and gentle, a little like the purring of the biggest, meanest lion who ever lived, amplified a thousand times.

In the cockpit I am transformed. A friend, who's something of an old-airplane nut himself, says, "I like to fly the Staggerwing with you. You grin like a horny Marine in a whorehouse all the time." It's true, probably. I no longer feel like Tom Mayer, itinerant writer and nine-to-five man in the University of New Mexico English Department. I am at the controls of a piece of history, the flagship of an era, the living emblem of a better, freer, more hopeful time. Who knows which famous ghosts ride my co-pilot's seat?

But at least a corner of my mind is all technician, absorbed by the realities of oil pressure and cylinder-head temperatures, radiator-door settings and prop cycle and magneto drops. A Staggerwing is no docile museum piece, and I have great respect for her demands. In her heart, she makes few concessions to more modern planes. She's a big fast ship by any standards, everything about her designed for performance, honest enough if your hand is sure and firm, but no toy for children or weekend duffers.

Like all old-timers, she rests nose high--a tail dragger in the vernacular--and her taxi visibility is nil. During ground handling I remember the pilot--an excellent pilot, too, with more hours aloft than I have alive--who made kindling wood of a sawhorse in a plane somewhat like her. The Pratt is one of the most trustworthy instruments ever devised, but any engine needs fuel. My Staggerwing has seven tanks, enough to keep her airborne nearly eight hours, but her plumbing is as complicated as the New York subway system. During approaches I remember the words of a student I was trying to teach to land another tail-wheel plane. They apply to the whole breed. "On the ground this thing has all the stability of Ralph Nader's Corvair with one rear tire blown out on an icy freeway at rush hour."

Since this is still 1972, I must also contend with the FAA, that bureaucratic handmaiden of science and commerce, and other planes. Alternator on. Radio on. Earphones on. Transponder--a little box that communicates with radar screens--to stand-by. Key the microphone. My best John Wayne voice. (My wife calls it my Captain America accent, giggles uncontrollably whenever she hears me on the airways.) "Santa Fe tower. Stagger Beech November six seven five four three, north hangars, taxi take off."

From half a mile away, behind a wall of inch-thick green-tinted plate glass, comes the cool bored reply. "Five four three, runway two zero, wind calm, altimeter...."

Take-off in the old girl is the essence of exhilaration. Line up on the center stripes, lock the tail wheel, quick last scan of the engine instruments to make sure the needles are all cradled in the green arcs. Long breath accompanied by the inevitable quickening of pulse. Throttle to the fire wall. The lion grumble swells to an earth-trembling gut-deep roar, a note of pure power--no anemic opposed-engine buzz here--and we accelerate down the runway quickly, very quickly indeed, a yellow bolt launched from yesterday's crossbow. The tail comes up, an instant later the main wheels break ground and we are climbing. The whole process takes little more than the length of a football field (about half the distance most comparable new planes need), for Staggerwings were conceived in the days when any cow pasture was an airport. It's a trait I've been thankful for more than once in the Seventies.

I flip the gear switch to retract position and commence my final earth-connected act. The first Staggerwings had fixed gear, but in the interests of economy and speed the Beechcraft company (continued on page 138)Staggerwing(continued from page 134) hired Rube Goldberg to redesign all three wheels so that they'd tuck into the plane's belly in flight. The result was a characteristic contraption of bicycle chains and sprockets and large rubber bands called bungee cords actuated by an electric motor of feeble potency and dubious reliability. To help matters along, I grab hold of a big crank, ostensibly for emergencies only, and twist with the vigor of a sailor weighing a heavy anchor.

After considerable grunting and churning, a red light blinks on, tells me the wheels are up and locked. The bird is clean, running free in her element, easy as a shark in the open ocean. She climbs like the proverbial stripe-assed ape. We have 200 feet passing the control tower, nearly 1000 by the end of the runway if we feel like it. Not a ship on the field can do better, including the turboprop Convairs that belong to Frontier and Texas International.

We turn left, still climbing steeply, head for an area against the high peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where we will be unlikely to meet other planes, away from the prying eyes of the Feds. I do my best to scan every corner of the sky thoroughly. Santa Fe is not a busy field, but the specter of mid-air collision is never far from the surface of my mind near any terminal. In spite of sheafs of rules, perfect visibility and radar, I have almost been picked off three times.

Once, practicing aerobatics in a designated area near Washington, D. C., I rolled level on top of an Immelmann and found myself eyeball to eyeball with a 727. We both broke into turns so steep I'm sure the airline had to deal with a small encyclopedia of passenger complaints. I had nightmares for a month. Another time was east of Las Vegas, New Mexico, a town with somewhat less air traffic than an average county seat in Outer Mongolia. I was in the Staggerwing, flying straight and level at a Government-prescribed altitude, when a Cherokee Six, an ungainly aerial-station-wagon Piper, nearly chewed through my right top wing. In order to catch us he must have been descending in a near-terminal-velocity dive. He never even saw us, leveled out, and when we overtook him, he complained on the radio that our proximity was scaring his passengers. And a few months ago on the same field, a Learjet pilot misunderstood a command from the tower, took off when he was supposed to hold. I was departing on another runway and we came within death's eyelash of meeting at the intersection.

Fewer than five minutes have passed since we started our take-off roll and we're 3000 feet above the New Mexican terrain. You can see 75 miles in any direction. The sky is a great inverted bowl of cold deep blue, unblemished except for the white plumes of several jet contrails to the south.

We do a couple of steep turns, exercises that enable us to feel each other out at the same time we make sure there are no other planes around. All clear. Pull the seat belt up another notch. Here we go. Nose down slightly for speed. Now bring the nose up and twist the wheel to the right and step on the rudder and the horizon spins, a marvelous kaleidoscope of sky and mountain and sun dazzle, and we are level again and still have plenty of speed and bring the nose up and around we go the other way. The old girl was born to roll, has very good fast ailerons. I open a side window just a crack to hear the symphony in the flying wires. Nose down for speed again and then back firmly on the wheel and the big yellow bird rockets past vertical, with the wind in her wires like a flock of banshees and the mountain horizon hangs in front of us but the peaks are all upside down. I let the nose cleave through them and we are rushing downhill, accelerating incredibly on the backside of a loop.

For perhaps 30 minutes we make the earth and sky whirl and cavort, disappear and reappear in a variety of mad perspectives. We do a gentle and simple series of primary aerobatics. Loops, barrel rolls, chandelles, modified point rolls, a couple of Cubans. The old girl ballerinas through them with never an indication of stress or strain or protest. The ancient wings pirouette, the bright spinner describes a lazy freehand on the sky, the big Pratt bellows and howls with delight in exercise. The yellow bird is as graceful and precise as Peggy Fleming or Pavlova on the best days of their lives.

And me? I sit there in a state I can only describe as perfect contentment. My hands and feet do what they must with the assurance of much practice, my eyes monitor instruments and judge heights and distances, but it's all so easy. There's plenty of time to savor each sensation, and to think as well. It is peaceful up here. No intrusions, no telephones, no students, no typewriter, just sky and airplane and wind. Time and space, those frameworks of sorrow and frustration, are suspended, altered, fractured, infinitely variable, completely controllable. Who could help but be happy?

I remember a man with the unlikely name of Force O'Rear Treadaway, of Uvalde, Texas. Easy-moving, erect, silvery, as at home in the air as an old albatross. Nothing could surprise him, or frighten him, for he had seen everything before, not once but many times. He had the tempered dignity of a good judge, was in fact empowered by the Government to pass on my qualifications for a commercial pilot's license.

We were flying a tiny Cessna trainer in the bumpy sky north of Del Rio on my check ride, a few days after Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. It was an uncomfortable time to be in Texas. My liberal friends were agonized with the exhumation of old tragedy; an oilman said, "Well, at least they can't blame us this time"; a mechanic I met summarized red-neck reaction: "Great. Only one more to go." The event and its ramifications were far from no one's mind, a cocklebur in the collective conscience, but Treadaway and I seemed bent on business as usual.

He asked me to do a lazy eight, a maneuver that properly executed requires very delicate control through a wide range of air speeds and attitudes and should be one of the most graceful and soothing things you can do in an airplane. It was the only test item we had not covered. As the saying goes, I felt victory within my grasp. I'd been practicing hard and ran one off with drill-ground precision.

"Here," Treadaway said. "Let me try one."

"What did I do wrong?" I saw months of work wasted, felt an exquisite humiliation. For an examiner to take the controls usually means failure.

"Nothing."

He did several with a fluidity I could never hope to match, an expression of rapt attention on his face that I would now suspect to be a mature version of my own whorehouse grin.

"You do one."

We alternated through several more, then started back to the field. I was sure I had failed, wondered how I could explain to my instructor, my friends, myself.

"You did fine," Treadaway said. "But I like to fly, too."

We bumped along awhile. I was puzzled, still very apprehensive. Treadaway took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes, smiled at me gravely.

"You know," he said, "if everybody knew how to fly, what happened in Los Angeles would never have happened."

So I got my commercial ticket and for years at dinner parties would amuse people with my story of the philosopher--flight examiner from Uvalde. Secretly I have always known him to be the wisest of men.

Finally it is time to come down. One last loop and I point the nose earthward. The air-speed needle slides smoothly around the dial to cover 230 miles an hour, which for any light plane is hauling ass. A Staggerwing could outrun all but the hottest racing planes of (continued on page 196)Staggerwing(continued from page 138) her day. Turn up the radio volume. Voice from the tower rudely in my ear, "Enter left base two zero."

Helped by gravity, the landing gear cranks down electrically, with much clattering of chains and wind buffeting, the bird's mild protest at returning to an environment she will never consider home. We touch, taxi to the hangar. I shut down the engine. The gyroscopic instruments make a friendly lingering whine. Everything appears different, sharper, fresher, newer, the world after a short afternoon rain. I make sure the Staggerwing is bedded comfortably, drive off in my car, but its controls feel puny and inexact, wrong. A part of me is still in the sky. I am tired, but it is the fatigue of a good massage rather than a day at the office. My mind is as clear as it will ever be. If someone asked me now why I fly, I could explain at least in part. There is the power and the quaint quirky romance, but most of all it is a way to tranquillity.

• • •

Forty-five minutes of play provides answers, but they are not the only ones. Lindbergh spoke of the "miracle of the air," and it is true, sometimes you do see things so beautiful, so extraordinary, so magical and profound that they may be described only in terms of the mystical. Such encounters invariably leave you changed; not made better or wiser, a safer pilot, more tactful, healthier or less an insomniac; no, the effects are in the realm of consciousness expansion.

Take a trip in central Mexico, a flight from the town of San Miguel de Allende to the metropolis of Guadalajara. It has been raining steadily for a week. The field at San Miguel, never more than a minimal sod strip, has been reduced to a near bog. The mountains--central Mexico is full of mountains, all shapes and sizes, which on occasion make for interesting problems in navigation--are invisible, packed in great wads of dirty cotton batting.

The time is break of dawn and the countryside is awash with fog and hush. It is too wet for roosters, too early for people, cold enough for warm jackets. The grass squishes underfoot as I do my walk around, check fuel tanks for water contamination, add a gallon of oil, pull the prop through by hand to make sure none of the bottom cylinders have filled with oil, spray silicone lubricant on the gear slide tubes, wipe the layer of rainy oil from the windshield.

My two passengers--wife and brother-in-law--untie the ropes that hold the wings and tail to earth in case of strong winds. My wife is barely awake and shivering. My brother-in-law, the mad midget, white-haired, 12 going on 87, a personality perpetually ricocheting between Einsteinian gravity and Dennis the Menace, is playing the good copilot.

"All untied. We going on instruments?"

"We'll have to," I say. The ceiling is maybe 200 feet.

"Good," my wife says. "I like clouds. It's all gray and cozy and introverted inside them."

We stow baggage, belt in, fire up. I taxi cautiously, head out the side window in the maelstrom of the prop blast for better view. Douglas does the same from the copilot's seat, hair streaming like some albino Indian chief on a war charge, a hand clasping his professorial horn-rims. At the east end of the runway I turn around, lock the tail wheel, run through my check list. The strip is on a hilltop, which creates some interesting optical effects. The runway is much foreshortened, like a slope photographed through a long lens. The wind sock is over the brow. Though actually mounted on a 20-foot pole, it looks from here as if it were pegged to the horizon. There is a cow off to the left, and I hope she has enough sense to stay there. I pull the carburetor heat on and the engine rpms increase, which means ice has been forming. Douglas notices, points.

"You got to watch it on mornings like this," I say. "Everybody belted in good?"

Carb heat to cold, throttle forward. We begin to trundle through the grass, very slowly at first, as the Pratt fights the grade and soft footing. We pass the cow, who raises her head solemnly to watch our progress. The tail comes up. The wind-sock pole appears like a periscope breaking water. The wheels unstick and I give the big yellow bird a mental pat on the back. She has used barely 1000 feet, even under these conditions. San Miguel is a true high-country bush field, well over a mile above sea level, less than a half mile long, and the air here never offers much substance to wings or prop. I think of a good dozen newer craft I have watched run along this grass to the last inch and stagger into the air graceless as a drunk.

"Gear up," I say.

"Rog," Douglas says and flips the switch for me.

I do my winching act, am applauded by the red light. I have held the bird low, not wanting to go on instruments in the midst of violent exercise. Dead ahead lies the town, and we thunder down the main street still at full power and windmill height, and I laugh thinking of the rattling windows and sleepy cursing tourists. For some reason it is only Americans who object to my machine, my low flying and impromptu air shows. I can walk nowhere in the town without at least a few small boys following me, shouting in Spanish, "Tomás, Tomás, when will you take us for a ride? When will you loop the loop again?"

I trim the nose upward a few degrees and the rate-of-climb needle crouches, then leaps. The prop hacks into an underbelly of mist. I wriggle deeper into the seat, settle on the gauges, adapt myself to a milieu where the senses are reduced to a role of pure treachery. An instant on the engine instruments--oil pressure, oil temperature, fuel pressure, cylinder heads, suction; an instant on the flight instruments--wings of the toy airplane in the gyro horizon steady, altimeter winding up, air speed 115, gyro compass steady and it agrees with the magnetic compass. My right hand reaches over my shoulder, turns the rudder trim on the roof to help control the torque and asymmetrical propeller thrust. Engine instruments, flight instruments, my glance swings back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.

The wings slice upward through the formless gray. A rain shower spatters on the windshield. There is no turbulence. Ahead of us, I know, are mountains, high ones, but in a few minutes we will be above their summits. Guadalajara is 45 minutes away and possibly it will be clear. Possibly not. Mexican telephones and reporting systems being what they are, I could as easily have learned about the weather on the far side of Saturn as in Guadalajara. I don't really care. I have plenty of fuel, know this run as well as a housewife knows the walk from sink to refrigerator. Guadalajara has instrument approaches, but if the weather is so bad I can't even use those I have a dozen alternate strategies. Only engine failure is a matter for real concern, and I trust this greathearted lion of a Pratt more than I trust myself.

En route we may break out on top, but I don't count on it. We've hardly had a glimpse of blue in a month, this is the zenith of the rainy season, and my guess is that we will see neither earth nor sky again until a few moments before touchdown. I am confident of the outcome of our journey, yet I am not wholly comfortable. The truth is that I do not like instrument flying. High-performance airplanes must be useful if they are to be at all. That is a fact of economics. I could never afford the Staggerwing if she were not able to take me where I need to go under almost any meteorological circumstances, quickly and with a minimum of fuss. But I don't care for timed turns, black boxes, bearings, localizers, radials, glide slopes, beacons, binders thick with approach plates, the alphabet soup of VORs, MDAs, ADFs, DHs, ILSs, HATs, all the appurtenances (continued on page 200)Staggerwing(continued from page 196) of blind navigation. It smacks too much of the age of computers.

We pass through 11,000 feet. The local mountaintops are a good 1000 below us. I adjust the radios to Guadalajara frequencies. As soon as the needles on the navigation set twitch with life I will try to call, obtain destination weather and a clearance. I plan to level oil at 12,000, an altitude that I know will put us 1500 above any peak within 25 miles of our route. Later, if it becomes necessary to detour to Uruapan or Apatzingán, we will have to go much higher.

"How's Susan?" I ask.

"Asleep," Douglas says.

"You want to fly?"

He looks at me archly over the top of his glasses. "Are you crazy?"

I often let him steer during cruise. As yet he is too short to reach the rudder pedals, and I have never given him any instrument instruction. Still, he reads a great deal about airplanes, can match me fact for esoteric fact in conversation, and it is understood between us that he will become a pilot.

"Well, maybe you're not quite ready for actual IFR."

Back and forth, back and forth move my eyes. Everything is normal. This is really very easy, at least when there is no turbulence or ice, when your engine is healthy and you carry six hours of fuel in reserve. I make a minor adjustment in the elevator trim and fold my arms across my chest. The bird flies on rock steady even without my touch. Douglas eyes me skeptically.

"See," I say. "Nothing to it. These old ones were so stable they didn't need autopilots."

"Sure. It's calm. I'd like to see you do it if we were in a thunderstorm."

Twelve thousand feet, and what have we here? The clouds are definitely thinning, gray of wet concrete changes to a film of milk. Suddenly we pop out. The vista is awful, in the literal sense of the word, like nothing I have ever seen before.

Technically we are between layers, for many thousands of feet above is another deck of clouds. Below is a lumpy plain of the familiar grimy cotton. But between, the sky is like some vast cathedral, an enclosed yet nearly infinite space suffused with incredibly subtle lighting. I have long thought that whoever is in charge of heavenly effects is a great if wasteful artist, a genius in the use of primary colors on massive canvases, but rarely is he moved to attempt the delicate. You expect him to overwhelm you with brightness and dazzle, not something like this.

The air is alive with sea colors and pastels in stained-glass tones, aquamarine blues and greens, a masterful tint of crimson in an upper corner. There are dozens, no, hundreds, of vaporous rainbows. They arch around us in profusion, form long corridors and vaults of stupendous height. Tendrils of cloud hang suspended, glowing lavender and turquoise and pale green as if lit from within.

I level us off, trim the bird, make power adjustments and lean the mixture, but it is all I can do to wrest my attention from the world outside. I bend across to Douglas, so that I can speak to him in a whisper.

"Wake Susan."

He nods, twists between the seats like an eel. In a moment he belts back in and I feel my wife's hand on my shoulder. I turn and she smiles.

We fly on through a mounting impression of quiet. The Pratt rumbles, the air flow hisses, yet we seem to move on stately and ethereal silence, a ghost ship running with the wind down some skyscape from a dream. This is a place never intended for human beings. Lindbergh said that flying was sometimes "like a vision at the end of life forming a bridge to death." He must have had some morning such as this in mind. Perhaps this is a glimpse of eternity. I am in no way a churchgoer; in fact, except for weddings and funerals, have not set foot in one since prep school and loathsome mornings of compulsory chapel. But I think this is the kind of feeling the great Catholic architects must have been trying to create. If the builders of Chartres could see this they would understand and feel very inadequate.

Beneath us now are a few breaks. Through one we see a little Mexican hill town--tile roofs and cobblestones and whitewash and the inevitable church. Somehow it is in direct sunlight. Pink stone is transformed to living blood. A little later we see a breast-shaped mountain, also in sunlight. It is a green twice as bright as an ad for bluegrass seed, deep as an Iowa sky at midsummer dusk. A field of the Lord if man ever saw one. The gaps close, the big yellow bird glides on.

Thirty minutes pass, and we are still openmouthed with awe, not yet accustomed to the sublime variety of this new realm. We point fingers at each tangle of rainbows and hall of violet cloud stalactites, as if to reassure ourselves they are not mirages. Occasionally our path leads through a feathery scrap of cloud and the cabin is filled with a dozen misty colors. A rainbow curves away from our lower wing. It's near enough so that I could roll down the window and grab a handful.

But the radio picks up the Guadalajara omni station strongly, and it's lime to think about coming down. Earphones on, a crackle of static. Communications set to approach control. I give our identification, position, altitude, ask for weather. I speak in English, the international language of aeronautics--theoretically the control-tower personnel in Timbuktu should be able to speak English.

"Beech five four three," the controller says. "Weather Guadalajara is seven hundred foots overcast. Raining light. One-mile visibility. You make the instrument approach?"

"Yes."

"Hokay. You clear for instrument approach runway two eight. Call the tower outbound. Altimeter two nine nine eight. No other traffic."

I repeat, motion Douglas to get my book of approach charts. A last long look around and we sink back into the clouds. Our personal rainbow dissolves away from the wing root. The altimeter unwinds, a scientific recording of descent from the supernatural. My eyes take up their sliding rhythm across the panel, pause to make sure the book is opened to the right page. We are enveloped in gray again and noises assume their normal proportions. Susan is right. It is cozy in here, familiar and comforting after what we have seen. Five minutes pass. A flag on an instrument flips, now says From instead of To. We have crossed the station; through the clouds below is the airport. I dial the tower, say, "Five four three outbound for procedure turn."

"Five four three, report procedure turn inbound."

"Procedure turn inbound."

I twist a knob, turn the plane to a new heading, reduce power. Carb heat on. Punch the stop-watch button on the dashboard clock. We are descending steadily to 8500. Monitor head temperatures so they do not cool too quickly. Richen mixture gradually. Three minutes on the stop watch. I take up a new heading. Another minute, another turn.

I discover that I am enjoying this as I never have instrument work. The little series of mathematical problems succumbs to precise mechanical maneuvers. Everything the bird and I do is quantifiable, explicable, a clear result of specific action. This time the process makes me aware of myself, who I am and what I am capable of, in a way that is very pleasant.

"Five four three procedure turn inbound two eight."

"Report runway in sight."

The Staggerwing locks on the inbound heading, slides down the undimensioned gray. Six thousand feet. We should break out soon. I glance up, still the gray cloak. I review the missed-approach procedure mentally. Five thousand eight hundred.

"Runway in sight," Douglas says.

"Good boy."

Rain patters at glass. Ahead is a long slab of black asphalt. It glistens luminously in the wet. I lower the gear, twist with my crank, to make sure it is down and locked. In moisture it's wise to place no faith in the yellow bird's electrical system. I've seen it short out in heavy dew. Flaps down.

"Five four three has the runway."

"Clear to land."

We cross the threshold. Nose up. A tad of throttle. The Staggerwing floats on, spinner rising and rate of sink decreasing with every millimeter we drop. This runway is forever, the longest in Mexico, no need to plunk down in the first 100 feet. I make the best landing of my life. The three wheels touch, but we cannot feel the contact. The air speed bleeds off to zero. Otherwise, the only clue that we are not still flying is a watery hiss, the tires aquaplaning.

We taxi to parking. The prop twirls through inertia revolutions into silence. Rain taps on the fabric. The gyros whine. We sit for fully two minutes, unable or not wanting to talk. Finally Susan leans forward, kisses me on the cheek. I reach over, ruffle Douglas' hair, a gesture he finds especially annoying. He punches me on the arm.

"Mongers, man," he says. "That was better than Star Trek."

The three of us laugh aloud.

• • •

Many intelligent laymen regard airplanes with hostility. They see them as one of those blights of the modern world akin to freeways and generating plants, a drain on the taxpayer, an assault on the acoustical balance of the environment, the keystone of military madness, an emblem of technology gone wrong. Given the context of general experience, I find it hard to disagree with them.

Even a fair portion of those who travel by air regularly, who put the technology to their own use, must consider the process a necessary dead time of expressways to the airport, Muzak at waiting gates, lines, bland-faced ticket agents and grown-up cheerleaders of stewardesses, a few martini and rubber-chicken hours in an alloy cocoon, journeys in sterility with undertones of queasiness. Airliners may be indispensable ingredients of our life style, quick and remarkably efficient, but in passage by jet any sense of flying, or of adventure shared, is as lost as Amelia Earhart.

And within the profession itself a majority of the people are unsympathetic types. Aviation is big business, even if you discount the Government, the airlines and the military, and long ago the impulses of greed blinded men to the joys of flight, caused them to embrace pure avarice as a way of being.

For example, at most auto filling stations in New Mexico, the gross net profit on a gallon of fuel is five to seven cents. Many airports in the area make a minimum of 17. I've asked several operators about this, but their answers ring with all the sincerity and credibility of an East Village pusher explaining hard times to a junkie.

Labor in repair shops is expensive, which is all right if you get your money's worth, for no one but an utter fool stints on the care of an airplane, but the attitude and too often the aptitude of mechanics is enough to enrage the most temperate owner. During the course of one year, I had an engine go rough in a serious situation because it had been timed incorrectly; a cowl nearly came loose in flight because it had been secured improperly; and a landing gear jammed when it was supposed to retract because the motor had been hooked up backward. At a shop where I'd been spending an average of $300 for many months an arrogant young foreman wanted to charge me $10.75 an hour for the use of an idle spray gun, two cents' worth of solvent and a mill of electricity. Another time I asked a mechanic to help me cowl the Staggerwing, a job about as time-consuming and difficult as moving a desk chair ten feet, and he said, "Not without a work order."

Too many pilots, who above all others ought still to be partial to the old mystique, are just as soulless. Take an acquaintance, a charter pilot who is an expert on modern milk-stool tri-gears, machines every bit as exciting as last year's Chevy economy sedan. He's a decent fellow, good beer company, kind to friends in distress, something of a rustic wit. Recently he has even grown fashionable sideburns. One day we were discussing the merits of the Staggerwing. In an unseemly excess of enthusiasm, I pointed out her superiority in nearly every regimen of performance to the newest and most expensive single-engine products, went so far as to suggest he might well employ one in the charter business. He looked at me with an expression of genuine outrage tinged with pity, like a priest who has caught a mentally retarded acolyte urinating on the altar during High Mass. "The Staggerwing's nothing but a ... a masculinity symbol," he said. "They may have been good planes once, but no customer would even want to ride in one today."

So if you fly biplanes and think paved runways of great length are an unnecessary luxury, and fancy yourself a round-engine man in the era of the turbine, it doesn't take much time nor any great sensitivity to realize you're part of a special sect, more than a bit of an outcast, a heretic, counted unclean of thought and not very bright by your peers. Consequently, you tend to cherish fellow travelers. You meet them in weird places at odd times, and they have no common denominator of age or background or class or physical type, although many are older--only a certain light in the eye that bespeaks rare knowledge of pleasure when you mention the old names and types and techniques. And even the successful ones and the young seem somehow slightly out of tune with the America of corporations and time clocks and institutions and Government agencies. I call them the true believers, and spending at least an hour or two a week with one of them has become a necessity for me as well as a pleasure, a renewal of the faith.

• • •

Last, and perhaps most important, flying provides a vehicle for self-discovery, a means to test your skill and knowledge and resolution against adversity. That is an aspect much downplayed by professionals, who out of congenital modesty will tell you there are old pilots, and bold pilots, but none who are both; and the manufacturers, who insist that flying may be learned rapidly and adequately by nearly anyone who can drive a car; and the FAA, which would have you believe that thanks to the thoroughness and wisdom of its rules, the splendid accuracy of the science of meteorology and the reliability of modern machinery (all licensed to FAA specifications), any flight that leaves the ground with proper preparation will be secure and serene.

Perhaps, but listen again to Lindbergh discussing the Atlantic crossing:

If I make the whole flight without meeting anything worse than those scattered squalls in Nova Scotia, I'll feel as though I'd been cheating, as though I hadn't earned success, as though the evil spirits of the sky had disdained to sally forth in battle. A victory given stands pale beside a victory won. A pilot has the right to choose his battlefield--that is the strategy of flight. But once that battlefield is attained, conflict should be welcomed, not avoided. If the pilot fears to test his skill with the elements, he has chosen the wrong profession.

Evil spirits, battlefields, a celestial malignancy to be challenged and conquered. Hardly. Flying is safe, really and truly. I myself have been known to deliver a half-hour lecture to doubting passengers, replete with quotations from actuarial statistics, to prove that travel in a good light plane, properly maintained and competently piloted, is the safest means of transport devised by man. And yet....

One time instructing in a Cessna the rudder came unhinged. I had checked the bolls myself that morning, so had two of my students. Had the elevator gone instead of the rudder I would have died for sure.

An acquaintance, a pilot of enviable reputation, ran into his own rotor wash in a helicopter. The machine was destroyed, the pilot shaken up considerably, the passenger seriously injured.

Another acquaintance, a professional, hit a hilltop three miles from an airport he had been using for years, spent months in the hospital, emerged in a framework of braces. His eyes were set in the bright vacant glaze I remembered from certain young Marines in Vietnam, the men stationed in the heavily shelled fire bases below the DMZ.

In Vietnam a helicopter flying formation not 100 yards from a ship in which I was riding exploded for no apparent reason. Three friends dead.

Another professional, a man whose aeronautical beginnings dated back more than 40 years to Standards and Swallows and Eaglerocks, to Hissos and OX-5s. Liberty DHs and Sunday crowds at county fairs, was run down and killed by an Air Force jet not ten miles from the Albuquerque airport. Both planes were in radar contact.

A charter pilot of two decades' experience hit a hilltop on a night approach in Nevada and died.

A duster pilot, a friend in Mexico, crashed on take-off. The plane caught fire and he was incinerated while 20 people watched helplessly. Some said he had collided with an especially vicious dust devil. Not five minutes before, I'd drunk a Coke with him, helped him choose a ticket for the national lottery and taken off myself in the Staggerwing.

All these friends and acquaintances damaged or destroyed within a span of two years, and none of them were neophytes, innocents, only half-trained or plagued by poor equipment. Proof enough that progress and technology, science and commerce, have not had much success in shackling the evil spirits; reminders of the penalty for failure, evitable or otherwise, in aeronautical tourneys.

Every so often, no matter what your degree of experience or type of aircraft, you have a flight that pushes you to the limits of your resources, stands you face to face with the difficult and forces you to contemplate the truths of possible disaster. Such flights are not the norm, but they stud the logs of any serious pilot with a random consistency. Let me describe just one. It was not a record attempt in an untried craft, was in no way a tribute to some special talent of mine, for any number of more experienced men would have considered it a drafty and cold piece of routine, but for me at my level there was enough of the unexpected and the unknown to extend the boundaries of my abilities and cause me much anxiety and a glimpse of fear. And when it was over, a trace of pride in victory honestly won.

It began on a cold gray afternoon at a strip in the heart of the Texas rice belt, near a little elm-tree town called Cuero. The ceiling is low, visibility no more than a mile. I am walking around my new mount, an open-cockpit Stearman biplane, a type of mean reputation. They were built in the early Forties as military trainers, and wags said, "There are two kinds of pilots. Those who have ground looped a Stearman and those who will." The beast sits high on rangy legs and the main gear is placed far forward, none of which promises easy handling. And this particular specimen is no resurrected primary-training play toy, but a crop duster, in which role her original Continental 220 has been replaced by a gargantuan 1340 Pratt and Whitney of 600 horsepower. It is comparable to dropping a blown Indy Offenhauser into a battered jeep.

I am to ferry her to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and her former owner, a wise old ag pilot and charter-member true believer, has left me a note of much wit and equal foreboding. It reads in part: "Tom. She is a nice-flying old bird. I have checked her out. But be careful. (1) Be careful on the brakes or you will end up on your back. (2) Be careful with the throttle or you will end up on your back. Good luck. Henry." Dusters work on short strips and this Stearman has been re-equipped with truck brakes powerful enough to halt a locomotive, ten times over powerful enough to catapult a plane onto its back if improperly applied. The 600 horsepower, if not handled on a gentle rein, will accomplish the same. I can receive no check-out, a few comforting introductory circuits with someone ready to retrieve my mistakes, because the front seat and dual controls have been removed to make room for a hopper. It occurs to me that Henry is not here himself because he can't bear to watch.

I climb in, clad in long underwear, regular clothes, lightweight flying coveralls, winter flying coveralls, jackets, mittens over gloves, felt-lined boots, my old motorcycle hard hat. I am close to suffocation, feel as though I am working weights in a gym when I lift my arm. The 1340 Pratt sports a 24-volt starter, but the plane has no integral electrical system. Hence, what little view I have over the nose is filled with hood-raised automobiles connected to each other and finally to the starter by dozens of yards of jumper cables. A mechanic stands by with a fire extinguisher. Another is placed at the starter, an arm's length behind the prop.

"Switch off."

"Switch off," I repeat.

He engages the starter and the prop grinds through several revolutions.

"Switch on. Brakes on."

"Switch and brakes." I make the magnetos hot.

"Contact," he says. The old litany.

The Pratt catches with a report like a fieldpiece and a cannon ball of black smoke booms out of the stack, whizzes down the fuselage past my ear. The mechanics disengage the jumpers, the cars back away carefully from the lethal medallion of propeller. The Stearman is alive with the vibrations of a mighty power, rocks alarmingly on her springy gear, and the Pratt is only idling. Jesus, I think, what will happen when I shoot a little throttle to her?

I study the gauges carefully. There aren't very many of them, as agricultural flying is strictly seat of the pants. No flight instruments except altimeter and air speed, so I will have to stay out of the clouds. A glance overhead, the ceiling is oppressively low. I consider shutting her down, saying I'll wait until tomorrow. Nonsense. I've flown in worse weather in lesser planes, and I have a very long way to go. I can still see and I know that westward along my course the conditions are better. I motion the mechanics to pull the chocks.

Taxiing, I begin to gain confidence. Her brakes are indeed quick, but they have good feel. Just remember to touch, not stomp. She has excellent tail-wheel steering and I can get a fine forward view by leaning out the left side. I turn around at the end of the strip, run the engine up. If anything, the vibrations are less with a little boost. Only the compass bothers me. It twitches through variations of 30 degrees. Probably no problem; it will settle down as the bird smooths out in flight.

The big moment. I line up ever so carefully down the center line, feed in the throttle gently as a caress. Even so, we leap forward, accelerating like a double-A fuel dragster. I am ready with right rudder, but the bird has no excessive tendency to swing left. I raise the tail, still nothing abnormal. We are airborne. I note that the throttle is not halfway to the stop. What a machine!

A moment to sigh in relief, wave at the mechanics as they pass underneath, congratulate myself on still being alive. Then the problems start. I reach into one of the many pockets of the winter flying suit for my first map, but trying to unfold it in the manner I want is about as easy as typing on a motorcycle at speed. Finally I take the glove and mitten off my left hand. Instant frostbite, but I am able to force the paper into usable form.

Now, where are we? Cuero has been swallowed up in the mist. I spot a rail line. There are several leading out of town. I check the compass to see if this one is laid in the right direction. Surprise. The compass is spinning like a top. I can't obtain even the most wildly approximate bearing from it. The altimeter is also playing games--it's unwinding and presently informs me I am flying 1000 feet below sea level. But this compass problem is serious. East Texas is singularly featureless: I remember the panic of my first cross-country solo, conducted in the same area, when all roads looked alike and never ran exactly where the map said they should, but I had a radio in that plane and simply followed a signal back to San Antonio. Now I have no idea which way I'm going. I could turn around, but that probably wouldn't help matters. I decide to press on, as the runway was pretty well aligned with my course, and one railroad track was pretty well aligned with the runway. If I didn't turn while fiddling with the map I ought to be aimed in the general direction. Sooner or later the track will lead to something I can correlate with the map.

I relax a little, feel out the bird. She flies nicely but is none too stable. Take my hand off the stick and a wing drops. She is also slow, held back by a chemical and seed spreader affixed to her belly as well as by the drag of massive gear legs and myriad flying wires. It is said of Stearmans that no matter how many horses you give them they still cruise at 90 mph. Which brings up another problem--range. The Stearman carries only 44 gallons of fuel, enough to feed this Pratt for no more than an hour and a half at moderate power settings. Any flight of more than 125 miles will bank on luck and perfect navigation, and here I am lost already. In fact, I may have set a new record--lost two minutes after take-off.

Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. The ceiling is lowering and I am mildly alarmed. I know it was clear to the west, because I just flew in from there. It's getting colder, too. I'm down to telegraph-pole height, peering ahead alertly for landmarks. Also I search for towers. I'm well below the top of an average radio tower. I'd better find something pretty quick, or else pick a landing ground. There's an abundance of fields, but they're all quite wet and I'd chance nosing over. I can always use a farm road, but that is likely to incur the wrath of authorities. Still, the prospect amuses me. Set her down beside a farmhouse, stroll up to the kitchen door in my flying togs. "Ma'am, could you tell me which way to San Antone?"

Twenty minutes. Fear is beginning to constrict my chest. I do not like this at all. In places the clouds merge with the crops. And the engine is throwing oil. Most radials do so to some extent and I know very well that a few drops spread along the windshield and fuselage by the knife of the wind are nothing to worry over, but the narrow windscreen ahead of me is absolutely opaque. If I stick my head out to see, my face and shield are pelted with hot droplets.

Then a few houses pass under my wing, a road joins the track. I try to match these events to a position on the map and fail. A tower looms ahead, red warning lights blinking feebly. I break off to the left, give it wide berth in fear of guy wires. More houses, the edge of a town. Maybe I'm back in Cuero. I make for a water tower at no more than 50 feet. I can see tricycles and lawn chairs in back yards. If some irate citizen takes the Stearman's registration number I will have a lot of explaining to do to the FAA. Yorktown, it says on the tower. I never heard of Yorktown. I put the bird in a tight bank around the tower, search the map frantically. Christ. I swear aloud. Yorktown is south of Cuero. I have been headed toward Mexico, not the Rockies.

Thirty minutes later, I am circling the airport at Cuero. Someone once said the moment of truth in a new airplane is the first time you have to land her. I line up on a long final, feel sweat oozing out of my armpits. The runway looks too short and cruelly narrow, though I know its dimensions to be more than adequate. There are fuel pumps to one side, and I think that if I do lose control I must employ any expedient to avoid hitting them. Over the trees and I chop the power. The bird drops like a disconnected elevator. Evidently 1340 Stearmans are not fond of gliding. Back in with some power. Ease into a flare. Wait. Seconds stretch into years. Precious runway flees beneath. Nose up a bit more. The tires squeak, the Stearman rolls straight as a plumb line. It wasn't hard at all. Relief and a queer disappointment mingle.

One of the mechanics climbs up on the wing, alarm in his face. "What's the matter?" he shouts over the engine. "Don't she run good? Henry said she run fine."

"She runs all right, but the compass doesn't work. I got lost."

He peers in at the offending instrument, which is still spinning gaily.

"Hell," he says. "We never thought to check it. All our pilots know where they're going."

An hour later, I'm refueled and airborne again. A fresh compass, ripped from another airplane, is attached by baling wire to the dash, where it works sensibly beside its insane relative. The engine is still throwing oil, but it hasn't missed a beat, and I've taken precautions to ensure visibility. Tucked beneath my new compass are rags and a bottle of Plexiglas cleaner, so I can wipe the windscreen and my face shield any time I need to. The events of earlier are confined to memory, stored for some unforeseen future use. Such happenings rarely frighten me in retrospect, instead foster what may well be a dangerous illusion, for I feel that each problem coped with, each emergency overcome, merely burnishes the armor of my experience against the next.

Daylight is fading and ahead is an airport, New Braunfels, and I decide to land. We're not far from San Antonio, where I have friends, and I look forward with relish to describing the day's adventures. I circle the field once, noting the wind sock. It is an elaborate establishment, many runways of great breadth and length, and a number of modern machines parked on the ramp.

I land, taxi toward the tie-down area. Quite a crowd, at least five or ten people, is gathering to watch my approach. A man directs me into a slot and I chop the engine. People press up against the ship.

"Where you come from?"

"Cuero," I say.

"How long it take you?"

"About an hour." Cuero is almost exactly 55 miles away.

"Hot damn, she's a fast one, ain't she?"

"She's not made for speed," I say, a little defensively.

"How many horses?"

"Six hundred."

"Hot damn, that's a bundle."

"We heard you come over and we all come outside. We thought you was Orville and Wilbur."

Beneath the banter I sense respect, perhaps a touch of envy.

"You gonna spend the night?"

"Yes," I say. "Fill her with eighty and let's put in a gallon of oil. The heaviest you have."

The man in charge is very nice, efficient and considerate, and in a few minutes the Stearman is ready for tomorrow and I am scrubbing at the first layers of oil and sweat, waiting for my friends. My face in the lavatory mirror is wind-burned a deep red brown and Lava soap is not about to remove the grime from the creases in my knuckles. I'm beginning to look my part, an observation that pleases me.

Take-off next day goes well. The airport attendant is philosophical about being rooted from bed at five in the morning--I have 700 miles to cover, so an early start is imperative--and he's only a little nervous at standing a few inches behind the prop to work the starter. Airborne, I get my map out, pick up my course and begin to learn the true meaning of the word cold. The morning wind has an arctic edge, a thousand tricks to thwart the most extensive clothing. It sifts between layers until it reaches my skin with the consistency of ice granules. I pull every zipper to its limit, rewind my two scarves a dozen different ways, put my hands in my armpits, sit on them alternately, stamp my feet and kick hard at the tubular-frame members to help circulation ... all to no avail. I think of the old barnstormers and airmail pilots with new wonder. The tortures of riding an open-cockpit ship in the Midwest, say on Lindbergh's old run from St. Louis to Chicago, at night in the dead of real winter, defy imagination. Or the World War One fighter pilots, who took machines not so very different from this one as high as 20,000 feet, to patrol and fight. At 20 grand the temperature is usually many degrees below zero. Combat must have come as a welcome diversion.

For a half hour everything is placid. I rumble over the lake country between San Antonio and Austin, watch my progress across the map. There is an overcast, but it looks thin, lets the sun show through in places in a low-wattage glow, and I have plenty of room to maneuver. Then, quickly, the overcast begins to thicken and lower. I pass above a ranch strip, debate about landing to wait for improvement. But I have miles to go, promises to keep, time is important--the Stearman is meant to be towing sailplanes at a soaring meet this hour tomorrow--and yesterday the Pratt showed a stubborn reluctance to start again after it had been running. Today I've made up my mind to replace fuel and oil without shutting down. I cross a highway that eventually leads to Johnson City and the clouds drop even lower, no trifling matter now, for we have left the flatlands behind and are winding between hills.

Fear begins its insidious crawl up my chest. I'm following a gravel farm road, flying a tunnel between cloud and hillside. I tell myself there is nothing to worry about so long as there is room to turn around. But what if the clouds are dropping behind me in an impenetrable curtain? They shouldn't be--the weather forecast was favorable, this is mostly ground fog, a morning condition that usually dissipates rapidly with sun and heat--but I'd happily trade a month's university salary for gyro instruments, for even a simple vacuum-driven turn and bank. Then I wouldn't be helpless if the next turn revealed an impasse and I were forced to begin my retreat blind.

Instrument flight without instruments holds a special terror for me. Once I was practicing in a Link--an artificial training apparatus so realistic it is not at all uncommon to emerge from a session in one sure you have really been aloft in a storm--and the plane began to gyrate as if it were in a spin. Nothing I did brought it back under control. I shoved the nose down, added power, chopped power, employed full opposite rudder and still the wild descent continued until there was nothing left to do but sit there with my stomach knotted in panic. Just before impact, I came to my senses and climbed out, shut the machine off. The trouble was a blown fuse, but some corner of my mind refused to believe I wasn't dead and I walked around the room for several minutes touching things like desk chairs and paper clips with groveling humility. Spiraling into a Texas hillside with vertigo is definitely not the way I want to check out.

We pass a farm that looks like a leftover from The Grapes of Wrath. Barn of bleached boards with sagging roof, sagging corrals, junked cars with rusted fenders sitting on blocks, a few scraggly cows with hipbones stretching their hides, a sad house with all its lines and angles driven askew by wind and years, a windmill so rusty I can almost hear it crank over the sounds of engine and slip stream. What a place to crash.

Another twist in the road and I can go no farther. Clouds and earth are one. I add throttle, drop the left wings in a tight bank, feel the gs shove me hard into the seat. The right wings cleave into the overcast above. I concentrate on keeping the left lower tip on a gate beside the road, do not want to drift into a hill. We level out, fly back down the road and over the farm with my pulse pumping rapidly. A woman is standing in the front yard, wearing a long dull dress like a sharecropper's wife in a Walker Evans photograph. I wave but she does not return it, just wheels slowly to watch us pass. In a moment of fancy I imagine she might be Dame Death.

We pick up the blacktop, turn toward Johnson City. To follow this road will take us north, of course, but it's better than turning back. Forty-five minutes have elapsed. The cork in the glass-tube fuel gauge ahead of me bobs at the halfway mark on its journey to empty.

The Stearman plays with cars, passes them ever so slowly, but my mind is elsewhere. Twice I follow openings to the northwest but am forced back by lack of visibility. On one try I press an instant too long and am swallowed by a cloud. My turn is a desperation affair, for I lose all but the barest contact with the ground to veils of mist. I am aware again of blood shoving through my arteries at unnatural speed.

Even on the road the clouds are too low for comfort, and they seem to be getting lower by the minute. I work ahead of the bird on the map to ascertain the location of towers but never keep my eyes inside the cockpit for more than a few instants. It is best not to trust maps totally. I remember once in Mexico, on a day only a little better than this one, when I was following a rail line that disappeared abruptly into a tunnel.

Ahead now a power line crosses the road where it drives between two hills. The wires are at my height, perhaps 50 feet, just below the murk. I slide into the middle of the road, the low point, and drop. If a car comes through that pass the driver will be in for a distinct surprise. We flick under the lines with a wing span to spare, our wheels brushing the pavement.

An hour and 30 minutes. The fuel cork is bottoming now, and some time ago I employed every trick I know to stretch the last gallons. I have leaned the mixture, though we are thousands of feet below where that is advisable, and set the prop to turn 1600 rpm, so slowly I can count the separate blades. But there are clusters of houses, the harbinger of towns, and in a minute I am over Johnson City, spot the airport. I circle once, squirt cleaner on my face shield and wipe with the rag. No time to bother with the windscreen. I ease power back, slip over some high lines, flare and hear the lovely squeak of rubber on asphalt.

The runway is pocked with chuckholes and the field is deserted, home to not even a weekend pleasure craft. I taxi its length hoping to discover some sign of occupancy, climb out of the bird and chock her wheels without killing the Pratt, and run into the street. I feel like a man in a space suit, some television Martian invader. Drivers see me and cars swerve. My toes tingle with returning blood. I barge into the office of a heavy-equipment company; a blocky man with mechanic's hands looks up from a desk.

"Help you?"

"I need gas." I'm panting. "Landed at the field over there. About out of juice. Bird won't start when she's hot."

"There's a pump there," he says. "But the fuel ain't been used in a year. Contaminated for sure."

"What can I do?"

We hear the Pratt rumbling in the background. How many drops left?

"Well," he says, "tell you what we maybe can do."

Within ten minutes I am feeding auto gas from a Mobil pumper into the Stearman's tank. Several pickup loads of spectators watch. She takes 42 and a half gallons. I climb down, say to the Mobil man, "I thank you very much. What do I owe you?"

He thinks a minute. He is tall, sandy-haired, wears a droll expression. He looks at the bird--her fuselage sides are glistening with oil, the Pratt grumbles gratefully--and at me. "Nothin'," he says.

"No, I owe you. I really appreciate your coming out here."

"Hell, son," he says. "This time it's on the house. Flyin' a machine like that you need all the help you can get."

No one, least of all me, takes the line as humor.

The rest of the trip was eventful, perpetually interesting, even exciting, painfully cold, but never difficult. The clouds lifted a little, and then burned off. I indulged in the childish pleasure of flying over Lyndon Johnson's billion-dollar homestead on the Pedernales about ten feet off the rooftops with both prop and throttle at their forward stops. I hope it sounded like Pearl Harbor, made L. B. J. feel for just a moment as if he were in downtown Hanoi, though my extended middle finger was admittedly a poor substitute for high explosive. A man at a West Texas airport refused to sell me fuel unless I killed the engine--how he thought gasoline was going to blow forward against the 100-mile-an-hour wind from the prop to ignite on hot cylinders escaped me--so I had another fretful 20 minutes watching the cork before the next town. At a stop in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, the Stearman landed in a 20-mile-an-hour direct cross wind without a dicey moment. So much for the legends of ground loop.

And finally, after some eight hours of flying, I brought her home. The eastern sky was dark and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains a wonderful twilit purple. I felt flat and a little sad. I set up my last approach, fought through my fatigue and the cold to make it a good one, and touched and taxied her to the hangar as they turned the runway lights on. I was weary to the last molecule of marrow, partially deafened by the constant tear of wind and heavy snoring from the Pratt; my face was permeated with oil to the bottom layer of skin; my ears were crimped into aching nubs by the helmet and I knew my legs and back would be stiff for days. I pulled the mixture to idle cutoff, but as the rumble faded away and the prop spun on I had an almost irresistible urge to shove the mixture rich again, to catch her before she died and take off and climb for the evening star, doing rolls and loops along the way.