We press ahead and I find myself wondering what comes next, from out of the murk, wondering whether the dust and the wind are all that are lying behind the portent of this ominous right drift. Somehow, there is that part of my thought that will be disappointed if there is not something more carnivorous than this waiting to battle.
The little towns of the brown plain slowly appear and slowly vanish behind as the wind shifts to blow more directly against the front of the biplane. Of course, I remind myself, the wind is not blowing on the airplane at all; the only wind that I feel is the wind that the airplane makes in its passage through the air and the blast of the propeller at work. We are like a goldfish in a deep river of air, swimming through the air and at the same time being carried along in its bosom. The classic illustration for the young in flight is, “If you are aloft in a balloon in a hurricane, you could light a candle in the open air and the flame wouldn’t even flicker. You’re moving just as fast as the wind, my friend, just like a goldfish in a river.”
I doubt that the candle/hurricane theory has ever been tested, but it all seems very logical and the goldfish must know that it is true. Still, it is difficult to accept this totally from the windy, gritty cockpit of an airplane over a long and lonely highway. Perhaps if I had a candle.
If I had a candle, I would still need the balloon. Settle down, pilot, and think about your flying. If the visibility gets very much worse, you know, you are going to have to land.
One solitary automobile on the highway passes me handily and I must draw my comfort from the fact that it is a new and luxurious machine. He could probably go one hundred miles per hour if he wanted to. In the tiny towns, the people have left the outdoors to the wind, and for the long minutes that the collection of houses drift beneath me they bring rippling reflections of the little villages along the roads of France. Deserted. Utterly deserted. Shutters closed, even in the center of the day. I never did discover where French villagers live, and left Europe as mystified as the other squadron pilots as to what the villages and the houses were for.
Vaguely through the sand comes a longer line of gasoline stations clinging to the highway. There is a city coming, and I look to the map on my knee. City city city, let’s see. City should be. Big Spring. A strange name, at this moment. North of the city there will be an airport and I should think about landing. No, I won’t land. There are two hours left in the tank, and I might fly out of the worst of the dust if I continue. Climb to cross the city, although I’m certain that no one hears the sound of five cylinders over the howl of the wind. Still, in a few things, conforming to regulation becomes a habit. Seven minutes to cross the city. I am certainly not moving very quickly. But if I stick to my task the wind should shift to become a right crosswind, drifting me to the left and portending good things to come.
A long wait. The parachute turns again to stone beneath me, incapable of being the cushion it was designed to be. A gradual Midland floats past below. An equally gradual Odessa, with tall buildings reaching up out of the depths of the ground and making me feel a little giddy to look down the lengths of them. Like many pilots, I would rather fly to fifty thousand feet in an airplane than look over the edge of a two-story building. A few people in the streets of Odessa, clothes flapping. And ahead; isn’t the sky growing a little brighter? I squint my eyes behind the goggles and maybe, just maybe, the sky is clearer to the west. And the expectant in me goes dead. This is all there will be. A brief dust storm, not even wild in its briefness, and the adversary is defeated. I circle in to land at Monahans and need less than one hundred feet of runway to roll to a stop. What a safe feeling. I can practically fly the airplane after it is on the ground, in the wind alone.
Once facing away from the wind, though, one must be very careful on the ground. An airplane is not built to move slowly along the ground, and unless it moves cautiously and uses its flight controls carefully, a strong wind can pick it up and casually, uncaringly, throw it on its back. It can take many insults from the sun and the weather as it stands on the ground, but one of the two things it cannot take is a very strong wind. The other, of course, is hail.
Easy easy now to the gas pump. Swing into the wind. Let the gritty engine die. It is a shame that there will be no more dragons to attack on this trip. Ahead can only be better weather and later even a tailwind once more. Those first pilots didn’t have such a very difficult time of it, after all. Only a little part of Texas to cross, part of New Mexico and Arizona, and we are home. Almost an uneventful flight. If I hurry, I can be home tomorrow night.
So thinking, I put the hose to the gas tank and watch the scarlet fuel pour into the blackness.
11
THE SKY IS ALMOST CLEAR when we once again trade land underwheel for sky underwing and turn to follow our faithful navigation highway, which lies like a cracked arrow pointing toward El Paso. Tonight at El Paso, or if I’m lucky, at Deming, New Mexico. We fly low once again with the sky burnt umber in the dust at our back and the sun turning quietly to shine in our eyes. We fly through a tall invisible gate, into the desert. The desert is very suddenly there and looks at us with a perfectly blank expression; no smiles, no frowns. The desert simply is there, and it waits.
Dimly ahead, hazy blue outlines, mountains. They are mountains still of fantasy, faint and softly shimmering. There are three of them, to the left, to the right, and one, with impossibly steep sides, barely to the right of course. The sleeping thirster for adventure wakes, saying, Perhaps a battle? What comes ahead? What do you see out there? A chance to wrestle against great odds? But I put him once again murmuring to sleep with the assurance that there are no windmills ahead, no dragons to slay.
For long minutes as I fly, I relax in the sun and the wind, the biplane needing only a gentle touch to follow its whiteline compass down the road to the horizon. The road turns imperceptibly to the left and the airplane turns to follow. The sun and the wind are soft and warm and there is little to do but wait for this flight to reach El Paso, as though I had bought my airline ticket in Monahans and now it is up to the captain to bring me to destination.
I can never help thinking, as I cross the deserts, of those who looked through this air a hundred years ago, when the sun was a fireball in the sky and the wind was a jagged knife along the ground. What brave people. Or did they leave their homes for the West not out of bravery but out of just not knowing what lay ahead along this path? I look for wagon tracks and find none. There is only the highway, the Johnny-come-lately highway, and this white line, angling south of west.
They deserve a lot of respect. Months to cross a continent, that even an old biplane can cross in a mere week. A cliché, that, and easily said mockingly. But it is hard, over this land, not to think of those people. Imagine that, people down there on the surface, in the sun, driving oxen! If the sameness and the mile-on-mile exist for a biplane that covers seventy miles in a single hour, how much more it must have existed for them during those months.
Looking up from the gunbarrel road to the horizon, a little shock of ice, and within me the adventurer jerks bolt upright. The three mountains are there ahead, and clearer. But the mountain in the center, with the impossibly steep sides, has moved to stand squarely across my path. From the top of it drifts a short anvil of white. And now beneath it I can see a black column of angled rain. I’m not alone out here after all; the tall white thunderstorm ahead is an absorbing, hypnotic personality in the sky.