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All of that in less time than a breath, and less remembered.
The second answer made so much sense that it was the only one I heard. My bright lovely soulmate, she wasn't driving town to town looking for some guy in a cow-pasture selling biplane rides. My chances of finding her, won't they improve when she knows I exist? Here's a special opportunity, come coincidentally at the moment I need to meet her!
And surely coincidence will lead my forevermate to see the right television show, at the right time, it'll show us how to meet. Then public recognition will fade away. Hide out for a week in Red Oak, Iowa, or Estrella Sailport in the desert south of Phoenix, and I'll get my privacy back and I'll have found her, too! Will that be so bad?
I opened the door to the
airport office.
"Hi," she said. "What can we do for you today?" She was writing invoices at the counter, and she had a dazzling smile.
Between the smile and the question, she stopped my hello; I didn't know what to say.
How could I tell her that I was an insider, that the airport
ASt
and the beacon and the hangar and the Aeronca and even the aeronautical custom of a friendly hi after you land are part of my life, that they had been for a long time and they were slipping now, changing because of what I had done, and I wasn't quite sure I wanted them to change because I knew them and they were my only home on earth?
What could she do? Remind me that home is whatever we know and love, that home is with us wherever we choose to be? Tell me that she knows the one I'm looking for, or that a fellow in a white-and-gold Travel Air landed an hour ago and left a woman's name and address for me? Suggest plans wisely to manage one million four hundred thousand dollars? What could she do for me?
"Don't know quite what you can do," I said. "I'm a little lost, I guess. Are there any old airplanes in the hangar?"
"Jill Handley's Porterfield is out there, that's pretty old. Chet Davidson's Tiger Moth. Morris Jackson has a Waco, but he keeps that locked in a T-hangar. . . ." She laughed. "The Champs are getting pretty old. Are you looking for an Aeronca Champ?"
"It's one of the best airplanes in the history of the world," I said.
Her eyes widened. "No, I was kidding! I don't think Miss Reed would sell the Champs, ever."
I must have sounded like a buyer. Can people sense when a stranger has a million dollars?
She went on with the invoices, and I noticed her wedding ring, woven gold.
"Is it OK to look in the hangar for a minute?"
"Sure," she smiled. "Chefs the mechanic, he should be back there somewhere if he's not across the street for lunch
"Thank you."
I walked down a hall and opened the door into the hangar. It was home, all right. A factory-red-and-cream Cessna 172 in for its annual inspection: engine-cowlings off, spark plugs out, oil in the midst of a change. A Beech Bonanza, silver with a blue stripe down its side, perched delicately on tall yellow jacks for its landing-gear retraction test. Assorted lightplanes, I knew them all. Stories they had to tell, stories I could tell them back. A quiet hangar has the same soft tension as a deep-forest glade ... a stranger senses eyes watching, action suspended, life holding its breath.
There was a big Grumman Widgeon amphibian there, with two 300-horsepower radial engines, the new one-piece windscreen, mirrors on the wingtip floats so the pilot can check that the wheels are up before landing on the water. When one landed in the bay with its wheels down, the splash of that landing sold a great number of little mirrors to amphibian pilots.
I stood by the Widge and looked into the cockpit, my hands folded respectfully behind me. No one in aviation likes strangers to touch their airplanes without permission- not so much because the airplanes could be damaged as because it is unjustified familiarity, as though a curious stranger might walk by and touch one's wife, to see what she feels like.
Way back by the hangar door was the Tiger Moth, its upper wing standing out above the other airplanes like a friend's handkerchief waved above a crowd. The wing was painted the colors of Shimoda's airplane, it was painted white and gold! The closer I came, threading my way through the labyrinth of wings and tails and shop equipment, the more I was struck with the color of that machine.
The history that's been lived in de Havilland Moths! Men and women who were heroes to me had flown Tiger Moths and Gypsy Moths and Fox Moths from England all around the earth. Amy Lawrence, David Garnett, Francis Chiches-ter, Constantine Shak Lin, Nevil Shute himself-those names and the adventures they'd had, tugged me to the side of the Moth. What a pretty little biplane! All white, gold chevrons ten inches wide, vees pointing forward like arrowheads turning to angled gold stripes all the way out the wings and horizontal stabilizer.
There the ignition switches on the outside of the airplane, sure enough, and if it were a faithful restoration . . . yes, on the floor of the cockpit, a monster British military compass! I could hardly keep my hands behind my back, it was so handsome a machine. Now the rudder pedals should be fitted with . . .
"You like that airplane, do you?"
I nearly cried out, he startled me so. The man had been standing there half a minute, wiping oil from his hands on a shop towel and watching me inspect his Moth.
"Like it?" I said, "It's beautiful!"
"Thank you. She's been finished a year now, rebuilt her from the wheels up."
