This is work, and not fun at all. If the wind would only be on my tail, it would be fun. Ahead, the clouds, watching me and grinning maliciously. The only way out of the valley ahead is to follow the road, and the cloud turns into fog that lies on the road like a big fuzzy barbell that can never be lifted. It is sad. We have fought so hard to get here. Perhaps we can land. If we land here, surely we can outwait the clouds and continue westward this afternoon. The meadows look very good for landing. Light rain in the air, but much sun too. Suddenly they combine off the right wing into a brilliant full-circle rainbow, a really bright one, almost opaque in its radiance. Normally the rainbow would be a beautiful sight, worthy of awe, but I still must fight to move an inch against the wind and I can only take snapshots with my eyes and hope that later, when I am not fighting, I’ll be able to remember the rainbow for what it is, and as fresh and as bright as it is.
I shall land, and save the advance I’ve made. So, decision made, down comes the little biplane from its rainbow, toward the wet green grass of the meadow. A good landing place ahead, worth inspecting closely. Grass is taller than it looked. And wet. Probably a lot of mud under that grass, and these are hard narrow high-pressure tires, perfect for bogging up to axles in. Look there: a cow. I’ve heard of cows eating the fabric right off old airplanes. Something in the dope that they like.
So much for that meadow.
Near a farmhouse, another field to check. Except for the trees, it looks soft and smooth. Should be able to hover right in over the top of them. But what would happen if the wind stops? I’d never be able to get out again. Remember, this valley is four thousand feet high, and that’s some pretty thin air. Only way I’d ever get off again would be in this hurricane wind. Hot day, or no wind, and I’d need four times as much room to get into the air at all. Two fields, two vetos. One more chance, anyway; maybe the pass to San Diego is open, down by the Mexican border.
Landing forgotten, we turn the headwind into tailwind and shoot from the high valleys of Julian like a wheat puff from a cereal gun.
Being cuffed about like a toy glider has a wearing effect on one’s nerves. Last chance, coming up. San Diego. South again across more miles of desert, thinking of nothing but how lonely it would be to have to land here, and how much land we really have in this country that we do not use. Think of all the houses that could be put on this one little stretch of desert. Now all we have to do is coax somebody to come out and live here.
One last highway, the one that leads to San Diego. I have only to fly along this road, as though I were an automobile, and I shall get to San Diego; from there an easy matter to fly up the beach to home. I am an automobile. I am an automobile.
We bank and follow the road. The wind is a living thing, and it doesn’t like the biplane at all. It punches at us constantly, it jabs and batters as if there is an urgent need for it to perfect its style and its rhythm. I hold to the stick very tightly. We must be making progress, but the hilltop to our left is certainly not moving very quickly. It has been there for two minutes. I check the road.
Oh, merciful heavens. We’re moving backward! It is a dizzying feeling, and the first time I have ever seen it from the cockpit of an airplane. I have to steady myself and hold even more tightly to the stick. An airplane must move through the air in order to fly, and almost always that means that it moves over the ground, too. But now white lines in the road are passing me, and I have the strange feeling that I had over Odessa, that I have when I stand at the top of a ladder or a tall building and look down. As if there is a tremendous fall coming in the next few seconds. The airspeed needle is firm on 80 miles per hour. The wind must be at least 85 mph on my nose. The biplane simply cannot move to the west. Nothing I can do will make her move in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.
This is getting ridiculous. We bank hard to the right, dive away from the wind, and I can pluck one single straw of consolation from seeing the highway scream past as I turn east. With the tailwind, my groundspeed must be 180 miles per hour. If I could only hold it, I could set a new biplane speed record to North Carolina. But I am wiser than to really believe that the wind will hold, and I know that just before I cross the South Carolina border into North Carolina the wind would shift to become an eighty-mile headwind, and I would hang suspended in the air one hundred yards from the finish line, unable to reach it. This is a wonderful day for playing all kinds of improbable games with an airplane. I can land the biplane backward today and take off straight up. I can fly sideways across the ground, in fact be more maneuverable than a helicopter could be. But I do not feel like playing games. I only want to accomplish what should be the simple task of reaching the other side of these mountains. Possibly I could tack back and forth, a sailboat in the sky, and eventually reach San Diego. No. Tacking is a meek and subservient thing to do, not befitting the character of an airplane. One must draw the line somewhere.
The only fitting technique is to fight the mountains for every inch I gain, and if the mountains for a moment prove the stronger, to retire, and rest and turn and fight again. For, when the fight belongs to the mountain, it is not proper to seek sly and devious means of sneaking around its might.
There is no mistaking the rebuff of the lesser mountain passes. They are making it clear that my adversary shall be the giant San Jacinto, ruling the pass into Banning.
I have burned a full tank of fuel in the fight to get across the mountains, and have gotten nowhere. Or, more precisely, I have gotten to Borego Springs Airport, one hard runway standing alone in the sagebrush and clouds of dust. Circling overhead, I see that the windsock is standing straight out, across the runway. In a moment it gusts around to point down the asphalt strip, and in another second it is cross again. To land on that runway in the gusting changing high-velocity wind will be to murder one biplane. Yet I must land, and haven’t the fuel to reach for Palm Springs again. I shall land in the desert near the Borego Airport.
An inspection of the dry land rules that out. The surface is just too rough. Catch the wheels in a steep sand dune and we’ll be on our back in less than a second, and only with incredible luck could we escape with less than forty broken wingribs, a bent propeller and an engine full of sand and sagebrush. So much for landing in the desert.
The infield of the airport itself is dirt and sand, dotted with huge sage. I turn the biplane down through the shuddering wind and fly over the windsock, watching the infield. It was level, once. The bulldozers must have leveled it when they scraped a bed for the runway. The brush is three feet high over it, four feet, some places. I could land in the brush, dead slow in the wind, and hope there aren’t any pipes or ditches in the ground. If there are, it will be worse than the open desert. We fly two more passes, inspecting the brush, trying to see the ground beneath it.
At the gas pump, a man stands and watches, a small figure in blue coveralls. What a gulf lies between us! He is as safe and content as he can be, he can even go to sleep leaning against the gas pump, if he wants. But a thousand feet, a hundred feet away, the Parks and I are in trouble. My cork-and-wire fuel gage shows that the tank is empty. We got ourselves into this affair and we’ve got to get ourselves out. The wind gusts at a wide angle to the runway, and a brush landing is the least of our evils. With luck, we will emerge with a few minor scratches.