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EPILOGUE
IT DIDN’T take a winter to rebuild the biplane, it took two years.
Two years of saving dollars and working on the wreck-lifting away the smashed wood and fabric, the broken struts, the remains of the engine. In that time I finished and covered a new centersection for the top wing, replaced a dozen splintered sections in the body and wings of the plane, stood guard with water while torches replaced bent fittings with hot new steel, while new struts were formed from streamlined tubing.
Bit by bit as the months turned past. Fuel tank repaired—month, month—windscreen replaced—month, month—coaming formed from wrinkled metal back into a smooth curve, and painted.
In that time one part of my being was locked there in pieces and bolts across the hangar floor, no longer free, asking, over and again, “Why?” I was glad to pay the price for the discovery of my country, yet it seemed so unnecessary, and that part of me in the hangar was a heavy sad part indeed.
Friends. What a pure and beautiful word. Dick Mc-Whorter, in Prosser, Washington: “I still have a Whirlwind engine down in the hangar. It hasn’t run since 1946, and you’d better check it, but it looks good. I’ll hold it for you …”
John Howard, in Udall, Kansas: “Sure, I’d be glad to look at the engine for you. And say, I have some wing bolts …”
Pop Reid, in San Jose, California: “Oh, don’t worry, kiddo. We have a collector ring for that engine, and all the connections—never been used. You might as well have it, it’s just sitting around out here …”
Tom Hoselton, in Albia, Iowa: “I have more work than I know what to do with, but this is special. I’ll have the fittings welded up for you in a week …”
Very slowly, years passing while I struggled to earn a living with a bargain-basement typewriter, the biplane changed in the square cocoon of its hangar.
Fuselage finished. Wings attached and rigged. Tail on. Engine mounted. New cowling.
And then the day came that the old propeller on the new engine jerked around in a blurred silver streak, and very suddenly the biplane, two years dead, was alive again, bouncing hard echoes off the hangar doors. Up ahead in the roar and the wind, the black rocker-arms clicked up and down, spraying new grease back from their uncovered boxes.
So long dead, and I was alive. So long chained, and I was free.
At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.
And behind it, I thought, lifting the biplane up once again into the sky, lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand “coincidences” and friends come to show us the way when the problems seem too hard to solve alone.
True for me, true for my country America.
We turned gently about a cloud, and flashed sunlight, a mile in the air, setting course for the towns of Nebraska.
Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.
The Luscombe and the biplane in earlier days, as we were practicing landings in fields, wondering if it just might be possible to survive as modern-day barnstormers.
Sometimes it is devilish hard to pick up a handkerchief.
And sometimes it’s easy.
How it looks after you hit the thing, and climb away in triumph. That’s a smoke flare tied to the horizontal stick, which I could fire by pressing a button in the cockpit.
When you smash a wheel into a dike of earth at 110 miles per hour, you expect some inconvenience.
The beauty of friends, Part 1. Stu MacPherson and Johnny Colin, having welded the broken landing gear, begin on the wing. I’ve gone to Iowa after a spare propeller.
Part 2. Johnny, Dick Willetts, Stu and Paul Hansen worked through the rain to fix the biplane while I was gone. Paul took this picture (and all the others, too).
The last bits of repair, and Johnny is all set, drift streamer in hand, for his afternoon jump with Stu. By the time the jump was finished, the propeller I’m holding was installed, and the engine run.
One time all summer Paul Hansen was the first one awake. He took this picture. Then he went back to sleep under the wing.
Aerobatics and dogfights over the fields brought people to watch the sky-gypsies, and to fly with them, $3 the ride.
Anybody who likes to get down from the sky the way Stu does is not only out of his mind, but a valuable member of any flying circus.
After supper, we carried lots of passengers. But during the day …
