Richard Bach - Nothing by Chance

I crunched back through the grass to the biplane and unrolled the sleeping bag. The moon went in and out of the clouds while the evening melted into night. I ate a lemon-drop, and listened to the sound of the engine still roaring in my ears. Solitude, I decided, is barnstorming all by yourself.

At nine a.m. on aday I didn’t know, we circled Milan, Missouri, trailing sound and color, and landed in a hayfield a half-mile away. Before I had the sign on the gatepost, the first townsfolk arrived. Two pickup trucks clattered down onto the furrows and the drivers stepped out looking.

“Have a little motor trouble, did y’?” He was an old fellow, in coveralls.

“Aw, no,” I said. “Flyin’ around, givin’ airplane rides.”

“What d’y know. She’s an old one, all right, too.”

“Feel like a ride today? Nice and cool up there.”

“Oh, no. Not me,” he said. “I’m scared.”

“Scared! This airplane been fly in’ since 1929! Don’t you think she might make one more flight without crashin’ all to flinders? I don’t believe you’re scared.”

“She’d go down sure enough if I got in there.”

I pulled my sleeping bag from the front cockpit and turned to the other watcher.

“Ready to fly today? Three dollars, and Milan from the air. Pretty town it is.”

“I’d go, if I could keep one foot on the ground.”

“Can’t see much from that height.” It was clear that I wasn’t going to be deluged with customers. My only hope had been that the biplane would be a strange enough thing in an airportless town to bring out the curious. Something had to happen soon. The fuel stick showed that we were down to 24 gallons of fuel. We’d need more gasoline before long, and we’d need passengers first, to pay for it. We had come from poor to rich to poor again.

A bright red late-model Ford sedan drove through the gate, purring in its mufflers. Instead of a license plate on its front bumper, it said CHEVY EATER. From the little crossed flags in chrome-on the fender, I thought it might have some kind of huge engine under the hood.

The driver was an open-faced young man, a sort of enlightened hot-rodder, and he walked over to look in the cockpit.

“Feel like flyin’ today?” I said.

“Me? Oh, no. I’m a coward.”

“Hey, what is with all this coward stuff? Everybody in Milan scared of airplanes? I just better pack up and move out.”

“No… there’ll be lots of folks out to fly with y’. They just don’t know you’re here yet. You want to ride in town, get somethin’ to eat?”

“No thanks. Might ride over to that place over there, though. What is it, a Buick place? Think they’d have a Coke machine?”

“Sure, they got one there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride over. I’m not doin’ anythin’ anyway.”

The pickup trucks had left and no one else appeared on the road. It seemed as good a time as any for breakfast.

The big engine was there in the Ford, and tires screeched all the way down the road.

“You flyin’ that airplane came in a while ago?” the Buick dealer asked when I walked into his shop.

“Sure am.”

“Not havin’ any trouble, are you?”

“Nope. Just flyin’ around givin’ rides.”

“Rides? How much do you get for a ride?”

“Three dollars. Trip over town. About ten minutes. You got a Coke machine?”

“Right over ’gainst the corner. Hey, Elmer! Stan! Go take an airplane ride with this guy. I’ll pay your way.”

I dropped a dime in the machine while the owner insisted that he was serious, and that his boys were to go out and fly.

Elmer put down his socket wrench at once. “Let’s go.” Stan wouldn’t budge. “No, thanks,” he said. “Don’t quite feel like it today.”

“You’re scared, Stan,” my Ford driver said. “You’re scared to go up with him.”

“I don’t see you flyin’, Ray Scott.”

“I told him. I’m scared. Maybe I’ll go up later.”

“Well, I’m not scared of any old airplane,” Elmer said.

I finished my Coke and we piled into the red Ford. “I was a special jumper in Korea,” Elmer said as we drove. “Used to go up in a Gooney Bird and jump out from three thousand feet, with a ten-foot chute. Ten foot eight inches. I’m not scared of no airplane ride.”

“A ten-foot chute?” I said. Elmer would have been hitting the ground at about forty miles an hour.

“Yeah. Ten foot eight inches. You know that I’m not afraid of no airplane ride.”

The Ford stopped at the wing of the biplane and my passenger climbed aboard. In a minute we were airborne, engine and air thundering about us, the land piled in hills of crushed emerald below. We turned over town, trying to herd some passengers out to the hayfield. People on the ground stopped and looked up at us, and some boys on bicycles began wheeling out, and I had hope.

Elmer was not enjoying the flight. He braced himself hard against the side of the cockpit, and he didn’t look down. Why, the man was frightened! There must be quite a story behind the guy, I thought. We glided down to land and he got out before the engine had windmilled to a stop. “See? Nothing about an airplane ride can scare me!”

Wow, I thought, and wondered about that story.

“Ready to go for a ride now, Ray?” he said.

“Maybe this afternoon. I’m scared.”

“Ray, darn it,” I said, “why is everybody in this town so scared of airplanes?”

“I don’t know. Well, we had a couple pretty bad airplane crashes here this year, right around here. Guy got lost around Green City and went into a cloud and then crashed onto a hill. Then a little ways north a two-engine plane, brand new one, had the motors stop and hit a lot of trees and rocks. Killed everybody. People still worried, I guess. But you’ll get some out after work, today.”

So that was it. With airplanes falling like silly moths out of the air, no wonder the people were frightened.

When they left, in a screech of blue tire smoke, it was time for decision. I had $6.91 in my pocket, and 22 gallons of gasoline. If I waited there with no passengers, I’d be wasting time and getting hungrier. I couldn’t spend money for lunch, or there would be nothing for gas. Later on, there might be passengers. And there might not. I wished Paul was there, or Stu or Dick or Spence, to be Leader for the Day, but I was stuck with Leader, and at last I decided to spend my money on gas, now. Maybe there would be a good town on the way north.

Centerville was 40 miles away, and there was an airport there. I loaded the front cockpit, started the engine with the crank, running back to the starter engage handle before the big whining wheel ground down, and took off north. It wasn’t until we had been in the air for ten minutes that I thought $6.91 wasn’t going to buy much aviation gasoline. Thirteen, fourteen gallons, maybe. I should have stayed to fly more passengers. But there was nothing to be done about it then, midway between Milan and Centerville. The best plan was just to pull the throttle back and use as little fuel as possible.

Car gas, I thought. The old engines were built for low-octane fuel. I knew antique-airplane pilots who used nothing but Regular auto gas in their engines. Someday I’ll try car gas, when I don’t have passengers to fly—see how it works.

Centerville swept serenely under the wing, and five minutes later we rolled to the 80-octane pump.

“What’ll it be?” the attendant said. “Want some gas?”

“Take some 80-octane from you.”

He pushed a lever that started the pump humming, and handed up the nozzle to where I stood in struts and wires over the gas tank. I rechecked my cash supply and said, “Tell me when I’ve got… six dollars and eighty-one cents’ worth.” I held back a dime for emergencies.