If the people working in the green fields below could have listened very carefully, they would have heard, high in the eucalyptus-wind, mixed with engine noise from that little red-and-yellow biplane, a tiny voice singing. I no longer have to hurry.
The first buildings of Los Angeles and its thousand suburbs slide beneath us, and from habit we climb. No chance of being lonely if we must land now. Stop the engine this moment and we shall land on the city golf course. This, and it’s the parking lot at Disneyland, big enough to land transports on. This, and we have the engineered concrete bed of the Los Angeles river.
But in no moment does the engine stop, as if the biplane is eager to see her new home and hangar, and has no patience for failures. “You can’t go wrong with a Wright,” the barnstormers used to say, and so it has proved. After playing its few harmless practical jokes, the Whirlwind engine has laughed at us and shows now the truth of the saying. We haven’t gone wrong.
We turn one last time, to enter a busy traffic pattern. One last runway tilting beneath us, rising out of the city. Compton Airport. Home. We have come twenty-seven hundred miles across a country, and now, oil trailing back from our silver cowl, wet dust spraying from beneath our tall wheels, past fitting smoothly into present, our journey is done. We have been splintered across runways; frozen in midair; blasted in flying sand; soaked in rain; beaten in mountain winds; scourged in brittle sage; we have flickered back and forth through the years, a brightwinged bird in time, and we have arrived home. Has the arriving been worth the travail of the journey? A good question. I rather doubt that a biplane cross-country craze will soon be sweeping the nation.
We wheel slowly into a hangar and rumble its giant heavy door closed against the busy modern sounds of a busy modern time.
In the miles and sand and rain and years, we have learned only a little about ourselves, picked up just a tiny fraction of knowing about one man and one old biplane, and about what they mean to each other. At the last, in the sudden quiet of a dark hangar, man and biplane alone together, we find our answer to the question of the journey. Four words.
It was worth it.
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ISBN: 978-1-4516-9744-5 (ebook)