Every component-the struts, the wheels, every rivet and bolt, even the wings-rattles and rocks, as though at any moment they could each decide to take a separate journey of their own.
I feel every turn of the props, and the sensation is much like being in the front car of an old wooden roller coaster. It is never a smooth ride on the ground in a taildragger. I release the brakes and slowly taxi to the runway. The props catch, and their rotations, slow at first, are soon a blur. The engine coughs and sputters, then roars to life.
It’s a cold day, but my grip is sweaty on the throttle. Without the added height they lend me in the cockpit, I can’t see over the instrument panel or below the nose of this resurrected taildragger.
On this bright, windless morning, the Yellow Pages of three surrounding counties are stacked in my seat. I cram dry toast into my pocket, leave through the front door, and pedal my bike up the hill from our house to the airfield beyond the fairgrounds, about a three-mile ride during which I shrug off the notion that I need my Mom-or anyone other than my instructor Keith-to see me leave the earth in the airplane Dad rebuilt piece by piece in his garage. I interpret her refusal to drive me to the airfield as a last-ditch effort to stop me. She could be persuaded to pull a baby from a crib on a moment’s notice for a trip to the library or to deliver milk to someone who called with a last-minute order, or, once, to get a better view of a weird rainbow that hovered over the bluffs east of town when there had been no rain for weeks. And I think Mom withholding a ride is not in deference to my still sleeping baby brother. That is to say, she does not offer and I do not ask. My younger siblings have rushed to catch the school bus. “I’ll wait right here,” she says, seated at the kitchen table not yet cleared of half-eaten bowls of oatmeal. “Do you want to come? Lots of times, people’s families come and watch.” The closest Mom draws to acknowledging my desire to fly, or even the flying itself, is to ask, “Are you really going up there today, Mary?” I have said almost every time I head out to the garage to watch Dad and his friend Neal reassemble and restore the old Stinson Voyager, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Mom.” Usually, she doesn’t have a response for that, but last night, she said, “Oh, yeah? Whose life?” And then I was the one with nothing to say.
His smile and optimism gone new vegas series#
The airplane is only another episode in a never-ending series of crazy “found” projects: the broken-down school bus Dad gutted and repaired to transport our family and everything we owned from Alaska to New Mexico in the dead of winter the old upright piano he found on the roadside and brought home so we could learn to play Bach and Chopin and Hank Williams, mostly by ear and despite the missing bass strings and the worn-out thoroughbred mare, whose owners had given up on her, along with her crazy-eyed, green-broke colt that everyone feared. She would never say “flying” or “flight” or “airplane.” She disapproves of the whole enterprise, has a grudge against my dad for encouraging me to fly and then leaving her to make it happen.Īnd Mom has reason to be skeptical, to be tired. She does not want me going “up there,” as she calls it. Mom is quiet at breakfast-highly unusual for the woman who assails us with a steady stream of instructions the moment her alarm clock rings. He raised his welding hood and looked up at me with a smile that conveyed a confidence I never had on my own. And I was immediately infected with his vision and optimism. Weeks later, when he finally fired up the engine, and it coughed into a rumbling authority that turned the chipped and sand-cut propellers, he heard and felt something he was utterly unable to resist: flight. He hauled the old Stinson Voyager, in pieces, to our garage at home, and began what he called his first aviation rescue rebuild. The sagging but undamaged wings were, to him, an unbroken promise. He read potential in the fogged instrument panel. He saw possibility in the rotting fuselage and worn tires. I am sure he thought, at first, he would have fun rebuilding and selling the plane’s engine, but then he was overcome by the optimism and vision with which he had been afflicted all his life. He was there as a contract welder, but he is a motor-head who carries poetry in his lunchbox. My father found the airplane nose-down and half buried in sand after a violent windstorm at an airfield near Winslow, Arizona.
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