Pushed to the Edge: Part Four, The Wing Walk

Somewhere out there over the south coast of California, there's a flock of crows that thinks it saw God, or maybe the Devil, or else a man doing something so demented as to make him more dangerous than either of those other guys. They were flying along below me when I spotted them. But then, almost everything was below me. I was standing there in my tennis shoes on top of Joe Hughes's Super Stearman Wing-Walker Special, looking down at the plane and the clouds below that, then the crows and, below them, the fire roads and chaparral of the coastal hills, and I was thinking many things, but mostly that I had crossed some invisible line that separates those who are playing with a full deck from those who are playing with nothing higher than nines.

The damn thing about these stunts is that you can't do them without thinking about death in a very personal and vivid way. No matter what you do to distract yourself, there is a moment when you actually picture your own dying, and once you get that movie up there in your skull, it rides around like a rat behind your eyes and it's very hard to get rid of. This time I got a preview of my death scene while we were still on the ground. I was standing next to the parked Super Stearman and Joe was in the forward cockpit demonstrating what I was going to do in the air.

"You'll be sitting on top of the seat belts," he said, "and you'll reach up and grab these handles on the wing, stand up on the seat--the prop wash will be pretty strong at this point--then grab the bar like this, pull yourself up onto the back of the seat and don't let go, because if you do, you'll take the tail of the plane right off with you on your way past, and then we'll both buy the farm."

That was it. I got the picture: no tethers, no parachute, no safety belt, nothing but my white-knuckle grip between me and the tail of the plane I was going to knock out of the air with me.

"That's where they got that term, you know," Joe said. "The old barnstormers and wing walkers used to fly over a town and drop a lot of leaflets saying they'd be doing a show that afternoon out over some nearby farmer's field. When something went wrong, they called it buying the farm."

"Let's not you and I buy anything, OK?" I said.

"Don't worry," Joe told me, "you can do it."

I was trying to believe that, but I didn't yet. I was just beginning to understand what a wing walk entailed and standing there on the ground next to the plane, trying to imagine what it would be like at 2500 feet, was giving me that thick taste in my mouth and tying up the muscles between my shoulder blades. Here we go again, I thought to myself, but what for? The big fear is the same every time you get it. I've done three dangerous things in nine months and there's no way to beat it. You suffer it. Not gracefully, or courageously, or stoically, you just suffer it and then go ahead and do the thing anyway--like running a red light.

I watched Joe go through the routine again and decided I hadn't decided yet. I didn't tell Joe that, but I'd already told Baron Wolman, the photographer who was with me. The two of us were driving north along Highway 1 around Huntington Beach, toward Meadowlark Airport, and he was excited. Baron's a private pilot, a green one with only about 200 hours in the air, but he has the aviation fever on him. He'd rather be flying a small plane than almost anything and, by now, most of his working life is dedicated to financing his time in the air and he can talk the side of your head off about the whole thing. At one point in our drive that morning, he caught himself in the middle of a sentence about what a great story this was going to be and he said, "I keep forgetting. This is just another assignment for me, but you're actually going to do it."

"Maybe I am and maybe I'm not," I told him. "That coin is still in the air. I'm not going to know for sure till I see what I have to do, till I talk to Joe, check him out, see if his hands shake, you know. It's still entirely possible I'll come to my senses and walk away from this thing."

The weather along the beach was foggy and cold. It was the middle of December and we were between storms in a series that was pounding down from Alaska full of wind and enough rain to break the drought. The low, gray sky didn't seem right for a wing walk, but the forecast said it might break up.

We'd agreed to meet Joe in the little diner that's hard to tell from the other sheds on the place and when we stepped in the door, he was sitting at a table near the window in a leather flight jacket, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and a mustache that sat like a pair of wings above his lip. He smiled and said hi in an accent he'd grown up with in Texas.

When I asked, Joe said that he was 47 and that he'd been flying for nine years. He was running his own construction company at the time and after one ride in a small plane, he said to himself, "I have to have a piece of that...all I can get." Then, without knowing what the gauges on the instrument panel were for, or even what they were called, he bought a plane. Between then and now, he'd done over 7000 hours in the air, as a stunt flier for the movies, as an aerobatic pilot and as the man who revived the wing walk.

The first year, he and his wing walker, John Cazian, had done 48 performances at air shows. The second year, they'd performed over 100 times and, by 1978, Joe had flown the act 1600 times with various wing walkers.

"By now," he said, in the kind of braggadocio that is indigenous to all daredeviltry, "I probably have more experience at this than anybody in the history of the world. People love it. They can really identify with that person up there on the wing."

Joe has never walked the wing himself and when asked if he ever would, he likes to say, "Nope. I don't understand why anybody would want to do that. I'm at home strapped into the cockpit."

"You really don't understand?" I asked.

"Sure I do," he said. "I know what it means to set a challenge for yourself and then meet it."

Now and then during our conversation, Baron and Joe wandered off into technical talk with each other and I looked out the window at the fog. It wasn't burning off.

After a while, Joe's wife, Dian, came in and sat down at the table. She is a pretty woman with blue eyes, slender and soft-spoken, and Joe told us that she was a pilot herself, with over 2000 hours in the air. She was going to fly the chase plane, so that Baron could hang out the window and take pictures.

"Sometimes," Joe said, "she can read my mind up there, anticipate me, which is a big help when you're flying in tight formation."

We talked some about the weather and Joe said he thought there was enough ceiling to do it but that he hoped it would clear some by afternoon. Then he asked me, "You think you're ready?"

"I'm not sure," I told him. "I feel good physically, but I still don't know exactly what I'm going to have to do and I'm a little anxious about that; and this weather is not good for the head."

"Well, I'll tell you one thing," he said. "Safety comes first, I promise you that. I know what happens when it doesn't--I've been there. I still don't know how I got there and I never want to go back."

He was almost talking to himself at the end of his last sentence and he was staring down into his coffee.

"I know about that," I said, "but you probably don't want to talk about it at this point and I don't need to hear it right now. Why don't we talk about it after I do this?"

I knew what he was talking about. Baron had told me. It had happened in the late summer of 1975 at the National Air Races in Reno. Gordon McCollom, 25 years old, a champion gymnast, a physical-education teacher, was the wing walker. They'd finished the regular act and had decided to do their most spectacular stunt. A ribbon was tied between two poles 24 feet above the runway. Gordon strapped himself into the rig. Joe made the approach, turned the plane upside down to make the low-level pass that would allow Gordon to pick the ribbon up and something happened. The plane dipped and Gordon was crushed to death. The rudder of the plane was torn off, but somehow Joe pulled it up and out and then landed. A movie camera caught everything and that night it was on national television.

Baron had seen the film, but I hadn't and I was glad I hadn't. I didn't want to dwell on it or even think about it. Sitting there talking to Joe, I liked him and had begun to trust him because of the way he talked about flying and wing walking and other things. And when Gordon's death was alluded to, I found myself feeling a lot more sympathy for Joe than I did fear for myself. In fact, in a strange way, I think I trusted him more because of that grisly hour in Reno than I would have without it.

A moment later, a young girl in pants and a leotard top appeared over my shoulder. "This is Donna," Joe said. "She's our current wing walker." She smiled shyly. She is 19, a ballet dancer and a gymnast, and she has the lean, quick look of both.

"Have any advice for me?" I asked her after we had talked awhile.

"Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut," she said.

"You sound like my stepfather," I told her.

"Let's walk down to the hangar and get the plane ready," said Joe. "Maybe this soup will clear while you practice."

Baron almost swooned when Joe rolled open the tin door of the hangar and pointed to the Super Stearman.

"There's over a hundred thousand dollars in this plane," he said as he took the blocks out from under the wheels. "You put a lot of yourself into a thing like this. It becomes part of you after a while. 'Course, I've flown over 4000 hours in it and after that long, it becomes a friend, a glove."

It is a beautiful plane, even if you don't have birdman fever. It's so white it almost glows, and from the chrome spinner over the prop to the fabric on the tail, there isn't a ding or a nick or even a grease spot. The Stearman is a classic-looking biplane, anyway. Boeing manufactured them as World War Two primary trainers and the scuttlebutt then was that if you could fly one of them, well, you could fly anything. It's a hot, highly responsive aerobatic plane, and Joe has modified this one all the way through. It has a 650-horsepower, 1340-cubic-inch Pratt & Whitney engine (which provides three times its original power) and he has equipped it throughout with space-age avionics, specifically, (continued on page 148)Wing Walk(continued from page 142) the Bendix BX 2000 solid-state integrated-circuit communication-navigation system. Joe says that his mechanic, Dave Horal, is the genius behind the Super Stearman, and to keep it in ultimate flying condition takes ten mechanic hours for every hour in the air.

As Baron and Dian and I helped roll the plane carefully through the low-clearance door, it became clear that this was going to be the tensest moment of Joe's day. He urged us to be careful, told us to come a couple of inches his way, yelled over to watch the left wing tips, and only when the plane was sitting outside the hangar did he relax.

Baron was taking pictures when Joe climbed up onto the wing to bolt the rig in place. It's a vertical bar about four feet high with two pads on it, one that hits you at the lower back as you stand in it, the other at the shoulder blades. At the lower back is a safety belt for inverted work. At the bottom, there are two metal footplates, each with a leather strap to slide your foot under. The whole thing is held steady by four quarter-inch stainless-steel-cable guy wires.

When everything was tight, Joe began his demonstration of the steps from the cockpit to the top of the wing, and that was when I got that hideous picture of myself flying off and straight back into the tail. I watched Joe and told myself there was nothing difficult about the short climb. A trip to the top of the monkey bars in a high wind, nothing more. Unless...I let go, or missed a step, unless the plane somehow jerked itself out from under me. But I knew I couldn't indulge those thoughts and I knew also, from my day on the ice cliff, that when my life depended on the power of my grip, four men with hatchets couldn't break it.

Joe had told me to bring stretch pants or something like them that would let me reach with my legs but wouldn't flap too much once I was up there. The flapping can blister your legs, which tells you something about prop wash. What I brought were the heavy wool knickers and red knee socks that I'd worn for the ice climb. Joe said they looked fine to him, Baron said they looked racy and daring, and Dian said they looked cute. "But men don't like to be called cute, do they? Let's say you look splendid."

"Cute's OK," I told her. "They've always called me cute, as long as I can remember. I think it's part of the reason I do stuff like this."

"Why don't you try it?" said Joe. "Go over it till you're comfortable with every move."

I buckled my knickers, zipped my jacket and climbed into the forward cockpit. As soon as my ass hit the seat, I felt my heart go into a trot. I looked at the stick between my feet, the gauges, the rudder pedals, and when I looked up at the handles on the wing, I saw, in large blue letters between them, the word Experimental.

True enough, I thought, and then I began to simulate for myself what I thought it would be like at 80 miles an hour a few thousand feet up:

All right, you'll be flying along, looking straight ahead, taking big Zen breaths, nothing in your head but the simple one-two-three-four of this thing, Joe taps you, you look back, he says go, you reach up and get the handles, stand up (prop wash, prop wash), grab the bar with the right hand, up onto the back of the seat, grab a guy wire with the left hand, left foot in the wing handle (wind pushing foot back), grab bar with right armpit, left armpit around guy wire, now push straight ahead and up, quick--right foot on plate, now snake the rest of the way under and up, right foot in--yes.

I stood there breathing as if I'd been in a bar fight. I was sweating the way you do when you're being arrested. My knees were weak and my head was light.

"Wait a minute," I said to myself. "You climbed a total of six feet here and the goddamn plane is still on the ground--think about it ... calm down."

It didn't work. I stood on the wing for two minutes or so, trying to turn down my internal heat, and when I couldn't, I started back down the way I'd come. For some reason, the backward moves into the cockpit were easier and felt more natural. I climbed up and back a half-dozen times more and instead of getting better and smoother, my moves got tighter and more awkward. I tried to number the steps and count them out, but number five turned out to be a different move every time I did the sequence and it unnerved me badly. I decided my body knew what to do if I'd just let it, so I junked the arithmetic.

Joe climbed up onto the wing with me at one point while I stood there in the rig trying to get my breath. "Let me show you how to do a headstand," he said. "It's easy." He took my place in the rig. "First you turn around like this, then you put your legs up over the wires here--it's hard to do on the ground, because you don't have the force of the wind helping you--then you lean your whole body back and down like this till your head touches the wing, then you just hang there. Nothing to it."

I looked at him hanging there upside down by his knees and I said, "Jesus, I don't know."

"Try it," he said.

I climbed back into the rig, turned around, swung one leg at a time up over the guy wires and started to lower my head. "Oh, Joe, this is not good," I said.

"It's much easier up there; it's hard here on the ground."

"I don't think I want to do anything I can't practice and this hurts like hell."

"All right," he said. "I don't want you doing anything you're not comfortable with. But you want to do some kind of trick while you're up there. I'll show you what I call body surfing."

He took his place in the rig again, then stood down out of it and put his feet in the handholds on the wing. "Then all you do is let go and lean forward and kind of surf the wind. Don't worry, it'll hold you up."

I tried it. "Maybe," I told him.

" 'Course, the other thing is going upside down and all you got to do for that is reach behind you and get the belt, then hook it around your waist. I'll take it from there."

"I might not want to go upside down, either," I said.

"Well, there's nothing to that," he said. "Climbing up there is the toughest part."

"I know," I said, "but going upside down at the carnival always leaves my head a little weird and I think I'm going to want all my faculties in top shape, you know."

I took a break, wandered back into the hangar, sat down and made some notes. Then I spotted a picture of a demolished Stearman that was hanging above Joe's workbench. The plane lay in a field somewhere; the frame was in pieces, the fabric was in shreds, the engine was hanging off its mounts. Joe saw me looking at it.

"That happened last May," he said. "I was flying 9000 feet over New Mexico and my carburetors iced up and I lost power. I was over a lonely stretch of highway and I thought I was going to be OK, because the only vehicles on it were two cars up ahead traveling in the same direction as me. I figured I'd be fine as long as they kept going, so I made my turn, then my approach, and just as I was setting down, I saw the cars stop and these two jokers get out to (continued on page 181)Wing Walk(continued from page 148) watch. It was too late for me to do anything else, so I just flipped it off the road. Totaled it, as you can see. And I'll tell you what kind of genius Dave Horal is. I had a rock concert to perform at near Sacramento about a month later. He organized a team of 30 men who rebuilt this whole plane--an eight-month job--in 24 days."

I looked at the picture again. "Amazing," I said, and then I noticed a sign just above it. It read, When you are up to your ass in alligators, it's difficult to remind yourself that the initial objective was to drain the swamp. It made me want to go out and practice some more, and while Baron and Joe rigged a robot camera on the tail, I did. Twenty or so more times, up and down, pausing on the wing to talk to myself, to look for blue patches in the gray sky. There weren't any.

When the camera had been bolted to the tail and after both planes had been checked, Joe looked at the soup over us and said, "Why don't we go ahead and give it a try? I think we've got enough ceiling to make it. We'll stay out along the beach."

Joe and Dian talked over the flight plan, and then he got a leather flight helmet with goggles and handed it to me. It was Donna's and my head and hair were too much for it, so that when I buckled the chin strap, it cut off half my air and raised the pitch of my voice. I tugged it down, tried to stretch it, but it wasn't much use.

Joe put his leather helmet on, and then Baron took a picture of the two of us. Joe said, "You ready?"

"Let's do it," I said.

"After you," he said, and motioned to the forward cockpit. I climbed in. There was a smell like alcohol when he first turned the engine over, then gasoline as the big motor got into a baritone roar and washed us with warm air. The whole plane vibrated, but there was nothing loose, nothing rattled. Next to us, Dian started the engine of the Cessna 210 chase plane and idled it. She and Baron waved and I waved back at them. Then the stick in front of me waggled back and forth and the rudder pedals moved as if there were a ghost in the machine, then the engine noise rose and we began moving: out around the hangar, across the potholes in the tarmac, onto the runway and down to the run-up area at its northern end. We parked there for a minute of preflight checks and Dian caught up. I was talking to myself:

"The next time your feet hit the ground, you will have wing-walked," I said. "Breathe."

Joe wheeled the plane around, gunned the engine and almost as soon as we began to run, I felt the whole plane soar. With that much power and that much wing area, the nose didn't lift, the whole plane did, and as soon as it was airborne, you could feel the tight responsiveness of it. I put my hand up into the prop wash to get some idea of what I'd be climbing up into. It was strong, but not too. And it was cold.

We banked and below us in dull rows were the dull houses with their swimming pools, without any mature trees. L.A. has always been known for what it is because you can see every bleak moment of it from the air, I thought.

Almost immediately after climbing out of our take-off, we were in the fog. From the ground, it had looked as if it (continued on page 184)Wing Walk(continued from page 181) were 1000 feet up, but it was much lower, really, perhaps 500 feet. Visibility was a half mile, maybe less. We flew west to the beach and then circled over the oil fields and the coast highway till Dian caught up to us and then took a position off our right wing and slightly above us. She was no more than 50 yards away from us and the fog was fuzzing our view. I didn't like it. The visibility in front of us was so limited it occurred to me that if we met another small plane flying north along the coast, it was going to take a radical maneuver to keep from a head-on. I told myself it wasn't my worry. Joe had to take care of that and everything else that called for any aerobatic skill. All I had to do was climb to the top of the monkey bars without thinking too much about the fact that they were on the top wing of an in-flight biplane. I looked straight ahead, I counted my teeth with my tongue, I took deep air through my nose, I told myself to concentrate.

We flew straight and steady and the noise from the engine was constant and smooth. I waited for Joe to reach forward and tap me. It didn't come. Five minutes. I was only vaguely aware of the chase plane now, adjusting its position forward and back, up and down. Still no signal. I wanted to do it. I was as ready as I was going to get. I didn't want to sit there thinking about it anymore. It's the thinking that tears you up. "You're all right," I said out loud. "You're all right."

I felt a finger in my ribs. I stiffened and turned around to look at Joe. He was shaking his head no. At first it didn't register, and when it did, a spark of relief went all the way through me, then almost immediately, a horrible, frustrated, sinking feeling took its place. It wasn't over; it hadn't even begun. The next time my feet hit the ground, I would not have wing-walked. I was going to have to go through it all again. I undid the strap on my helmet and pulled my goggles up.

We banked steeply and then headed north for Meadowlark. On the way, I put both of my arms up into the prop wash. It was powerful, very powerful, and it scared me. We made our approach, landed and taxied. Joe cut the engine. I climbed out onto the bottom wing, took off my helmet and when my hair hit the air, a wave of fatigue rolled over me that was totally unexplainable in terms of anything physical I had done.

I told Joe I'd tested the prop wash on the way back and that it seemed brutal.

"I saw you do it," he said, "but we were going 130 when you did. We'll only be going 80 when you climb out. There's a big difference. Don't worry. Anyway, it's too low up there. We're going to have to wait it out. It might still clear this afternoon. Let's go get some coffee."

We drove several miles to a restaurant and as we did, I watched the sky. There were some small blue moments in it, but for the most part, it was still gray, almost drizzling. Baron and Dian and Joe talked about flying and though I tried for a while, I couldn't listen. In the restaurant, we ordered food and I went on brooding, aware of the half-light coming through a window behind me. The waitress brought me a hamburger. I had two bites and both of them went down and then sat in my stomach like clay. I was dying inside of if, maybe and perhaps. I couldn't hold anything in my head except my own worst fantasies. I was weak and rummy and nauseated. Then a shaft of sunlight came through the window and splashed over my neck and shoulders. It was as if someone had thrown hot soup on me. I whipped around and saw a mammoth chunk of blue in the overcast, bigger than any we'd seen all day. A minute later, it was gray again, and then, a minute after that, more sun. Somebody, I don't remember who, said something. I didn't answer, couldn't. I had my hands folded in my lap and they had begun to shake. No, I thought, cloud over, you bastard, rain, blow, save my wretched ass...I can't do it like this.

A few minutes later, Joe said we ought to head back to Meadowlark, so we'd be ready to take off if the clearing continued. We stood up from the table and I took the check to the cashier. Joe and Dian waited outside on the sidewalk. Baron came over to me and said, "How you doing?"

"Not good," I told him. I almost blurted it. "I've got the shakes. It's this waiting. I'm sick to my stomach, weak, it's got me."

"Let's tell Joe," he said. "You shouldn't do this if you don't feel good."

"I know, but I don't want to blow it like this."

"Don't worry about that," he said. "Come on, let's tell Joe."

On the sidewalk, I said, "Joe, I don't know if I can do this today. I'm scared. It's this damn waiting; I feel terrible. I don't want to blow it, though. I mean, if this is as good as the weather is going to get, I don't want to blow it...but, Jesus...."

He looked at me as if he'd suspected it and he responded quickly, "I'll tell you what: We'll call weather when we get back to the airport and if the forecast is good, we'll scrub this afternoon and do it in the morning."

"All right," I said. "But if this is the best it's going to be, I don't want to miss it."

"I'm glad you told me," he said. "I thought you looked a little shaky. And, listen: I want this to be one of the best experiences of your life. That's the only way I want to do it."

On the way to Meadowlark, we talked some more and both Joe and Dian worked very hard at making me feel my decision was that of a wise man instead of a coward. I didn't know which it was and I didn't care.

When we got to the airport, Dian made the call and then told us, "Partly cloudy tomorrow. This is a clearing trend."

"That settles it, then," Joe said. "We go in the morning. You get some rest. You're doing fine."

On the way back to the motel, I told Baron that I had discovered the surest way to break somebody: You take him right up to the edge of the pit, let him get a real good look at the snakes down there, and then jerk him back, make him wait, let him stew in his own fear.

I got back into my room about five o'clock. I made some notes, then I lay down on the bed and passed out. Two hours later, I woke up and Baron and I went to dinner. At nine, I lay down again, passed out again and when I woke up, it was five in the morning and I was soaked with sweat. At first, I didn't remember where I was or what I was afraid of. Then I did and, for some reason, the first thought that came into my head was of Catherine of Genoa, a humorless 15th Century mystic I'd read about, who, they said, took no cognizance of things except as they presented themselves to her moment by moment. To her, only the present was divine, and when the duty that was involved in it was done, she let it pass away, as if it had never been, to make room for the duties of the moment that came after. A hundred other saints, prophets and charlatans have said the same thing and why Catherine was chosen to lecture me on it that morning I don't know. But I got a wonderful picture of her up on the wing in her robes and it turned my mood up. I took a long shower and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I did an hour of yoga and got up from it feeling fine. But by the time Baron and I got into the car and started north, the energy of my epiphany had begun to fade. I got quiet. Then I told Baron, "This is the last one. I'm through with these damn things. It's stupid to do this to yourself on purpose. It takes too much to work up to them...nobody knows ... I'm never going to be able to explain it, and after this one, I'm not going through it anymore. It makes me think I'm crazier than I've been admitting and I never thought that before."

"How do you feel right now?" he asked.

"I feel great physically," I told him. "I'm going to do it...doing it won't be hard ... hell, dying probably won't even be that hard if I do it...but waiting to do it...."

When I heard myself talking about death, it sounded melodramatic. I didn't expect to die, didn't even expect to get hurt. The sun was shining, there were surfers out along the beach. But once I'd talked about death, I had to deal with it again in my head. If you're going to die, I told myself, at least get some fun out of it.

It was about ten o'clock when we rolled the Super Stearman out of the hangar again. Joe and Dian and Baron got both planes ready while I ran, and did some more yoga, and talked to myself about the sanctity of the present moment. I felt fine and I attributed most of it to the sun, which was bright and warm and more than a match for the scattered clouds that were drifting in from the ocean.

When everything was ready, Dian helped me buckle my tight helmet, and then she and Baron got into the Cessna 210 and fired it up.

Joe smiled at me, shook my hand and said, "Good luck."

"Let's forget the headstand and the part about going upside down," I told him.

"You sure?" he asked. "Once you get up there and see how easy it is, you might want to."

"Well," I said, "you have to save something for the next life. I'll do the body surfing; that'll be enough."

He smiled, we shook hands again, then the two of us climbed into the plane, taxied to the gas pumps and, while Joe filled the tank, I stared straight ahead and tried to clear my mind. It worked pretty well, though my overworked heart wasn't paying much attention.

We took off and flew due south along the beach again. Ten minutes later, we were over South Laguna and we turned east. The chase plane came alongside close enough for me to see Dian talking into her headset and Baron at the rear window with his camera up to his eye. I looked at the air-speed indicator in front of me: 80 mph exactly. The clouds were above us and below us and at our altitude and they were wispy. The air itself was smooth and cool and Joe was holding the plane as steady as a marble desktop. I knew we were close. I looked up at the handles on the wing and felt old friend adrenaline coming into my blood. A few seconds later, Joe tapped me, and when I looked around, he nodded his head and put one thumb up. My heart went into overdrive. I told myself, Now!, grabbed the handles over my head and stood up into the prop wash. It was strong and noisy but much better than when I had put my arms up into it the day before. I got up onto the back of the seat and as soon as my head was above the wing, the air was smoother and quieter. I grabbed the bar and a guy wire with my armpits, got my left foot into the wing handle, and then in one move that felt like pushing up off the bottom of a swimming pool, I pulled myself up and into the rig. I hooked both feet under the straps, and when I looked up, I was staring straight at the Santa Ana Mountains, 20 miles ahead. When I looked down, I saw the blue, green and brown crest of the coastal hills.

"Hot damn," I said out loud and then remembered the part about keeping my mouth shut. No telling what's flying around loose at 2500 feet above Southern California and whatever was there, I didn't want to eat it. Then I saw the crows. They were far below us. I looked around for birds at our altitude, but I didn't see any. We flew through a small cloud and I felt it on my skin.

The chase plane was just behind us and when I looked around, Dian was smiling and Baron was taking pictures. I waved, then I flew my arms out as if I were a condor, then I laughed to myself. I was still frightened, my body was still tight, but up there in the heat of it, I could see Mexico to the south, I thought, and Los Angeles to the north, the wind felt like water and the sun seemed closer than it does on the ground.

I had thought it might be something like surfing up there, but Joe kept the wing so steady, so flat that except for the wind and the noise, I might as well have been standing in the bed of a parked pickup truck.

Then he rocked the wings. That was the signal for me to do my trick. I took my feet out from under the straps and, one at a time, I put them behind me into the wing handles. Then I let go of the guy wires and leaned out over the front of the wing. The wind held me all right, but the view I got from that position was straight down, so I held it for only a few seconds. When I climbed back up into the rig, it felt safe and comfortable. Then Joe banked to the left and for a moment all the fear was back. I grabbed the guy wires and felt my eyes get big, and when he straightened out, I heard myself saying, "This is not right, it's pretty, but it's not right...doesn't look good on your record to have come out here and done this... you're getting much too good at ignoring your own best instincts...just get back in the cockpit, get back on the ground and go home."

We flew steady for a few minutes more and I hung on with both hands while we did. Then I felt the wings rock again, which was my signal to climb down. I stood out from under the straps, bent down into my armpit grip, then lowered myself by the handles and dropped the last two feet into the cockpit. I hit the seat and there might as well have been slippers and a joint and a roaring fireplace in there, because that's how safe and warm and good it felt. Joe tapped me and when I turned around, he had his hand up for me to shake. I did, and I smiled and I mouthed the words "Hot damn."

Baron and Dian pulled alongside and got a shot of me with both thumbs up, smiling like an idiot, and then we peeled off and headed north. A couple of minutes later, Joe tapped me and made a hand signal that we were going to do a loop the loop. Since I didn't have any belts on, he motioned for me to grab the underside of my instrument panel and I did. Then he put it into a highspeed dive, then pulled up. The g force pushed me down into my seat and I watched the horizon go upside down, then saw the ground coming up. Joe straightened it out, then streaked down a canyon toward the ocean and just about the time I thought we were going to pick up some telephone lines, he did a tight wing over and put us back on course.

On the way back, I admired the view, thought about what I'd done and just enjoyed the feeling of having tempted the Fates and found them sleeping. You can't help but feel proud and high after a ride as ambitious and wanton as that. It doesn't matter how deep-down scared you were before or how timid you were during the act itself; to have survived something that weird is such a victory that you begin to believe you somehow earned it. By the time Joe put the wheels on the runway, I was feeling damn near heroic.

Dian had landed ahead of us, so that Baron could get some shots of me climbing out of the plane, and when I did, I felt like Charles A. Lindbergh and was trying to look as much as possible like him for the camera. Joe and I shook hands and I thanked him. Then I signed his logbook and he told me I was one of only five people in the world ever to have climbed out of that cockpit to ride the wing.

"I hope to hell you got those pictures, Baron," I said.

"I got 'em," he said. "Don't worry. You're not going to believe it when you see what you just did."

Well, I've seen the pictures by now, they're beautiful and I believe them. But just barely.

"That was when I got that hideous picture of myself flying off and straight back into the tail."

"With that much power and that much wing area, the nose didn't lift, the whole plane did."

"I put both of my arms up into the prop wash. It was powerful, very powerful, and it scared me."