Richard Bach: Nothing by Chance

THE RIVER WAS WINE beneath our wings-dark royal June Wisconsin wine. It poured deep purple from one side of the valley to the other, and back again. The highway leaped across it once, twice, twice more, a daring shuttlecock weaving a thread of hard concrete.

Along the thread, as we flew, came villages the color of new grass here in the end of spring, washing their trees in a clean wind. It was all the tapestry of summer beginning, and for us, of adventure.

Two thousand feet above the ground, the air was silver about us, sharp and cold, rising on up over our two old airplanes so deep that a stone dropped up into it would have been lost forever. Way high up in there I could just barely see the dark iron blue of space itself.

Both of these guys trusting me, I thought, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen to us. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them, they still think since the whole thing is my idea I must know what I’m doing. I should have told them to stay home.

We swam the silver air like a pair of ocean minnows, Paul Hansen’s sleek little sportplane darting ahead at a hundred miles an hour once in a while, then circling back to stay in sight of my fire-red, flower-yellow, slow-chugging open-cockpit wind-and-wire flying machine. Like giving the horses their rein, this turning our airplanes loose over the land and letting them fly back into their own time, with us hanging on for the ride and waiting to see the golden world of gypsy pilots forty years gone. We agreed on one thing—the grand old days of the barnstormer must still be around, somewhere.

Silent and trusting, Stuart Sandy MacPherson, age nineteen, peered over the edge of the cockpit in front of my own, looking down through his amber jumping-goggles to the bottom of an ocean of crystal air. Barnstormers always had parachute jumpers, didn’t they? he had said, and parachute jumpers were always kids who worked their way and earned their keep selling tickets and putting up signs, weren’t they? I had to admit that they were, and that I wasn’t going to stand between him and his dream.

Once in a while now, looking down through the wind, he smiled to himself, ever so faintly.

We flew in a sheet of solid thunder. The clatter and roar of my Wright Whirlwind engine burst out just as loud and uncaring as it did in 1929, brand new, seven years before I was born, and it soaked us in the smell of exhaust fires and hot rocker-box grease; it shook us in the blast of propeller-torn air. Young Stu had once tried to shout a word across the space between our cockpits, but his voice was swept away in the wind and he hadn’t tried again. Those gypsy pilots, we were learning, didn’t do much talking when they flew.

The river turned sharply north, and left us. We pressed on overland into soft low meadowed hills, sun-glittering lakes, and farms everywhere.

Here it was… adventure again. The three of us and our two airplanes were the remnant of what had opened in spring as The Great American Flying Circus, Specialists in Death-Defying Displays of Aerial Acrobatics, Authentic Great War Dogfighting, Thrilling and Dangerous Aeroplane Stunts, and the Incredible Free-Fall Parachute Leap. (Also, Safe Government-Licensed Pilots Take You Aloft to See Your Town From the Air. Three Dollars the Ride. Thousands of Flights Without a Mishap.)

But the other Great American aviators and airplanes had commitments in modern times; they had flown their planes back into the future from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and had left Paul and Stu and I flying alone in 1929.

If we were to live in this time, we had to find grass fields and cowpastures to land in, close to town. We had to fly our own aerobatics, take our own chances, find our own paying passengers. We knew that five airplanes, a full circus, could bring out crowds of weekend customers; but would anyone move on a weekday to watch just two airplanes, and those unadvertised? Our fuel and oil, our food, our search for yesterday and our way of life depended upon it. We weren’t ready to admit that adventure and the self-reliant individual had had their day.

We had thrown away our aeronautical charts, along with the time they came from, and now we were lost. There in the middle of the high cold silver roaring air, I thought we might be somewhere over Wisconsin or northern Illinois, but that was as far as I could pin it down. There was no north, no south, no east, no west. Only the wind from somewhere, and we scudded along before it, destination unknown, circling here over a town, over a meadow, over a lakeside, looking down. It was a strange afternoon without time, without distance, without direction. America spread from horizon to horizon before us, wide and big and free.

But at last, low on fuel, we circled a town with a little grass runway near at hand, and a gas pump and a hangar, and we got set to land. I had hoped for a hayfield, because old barnstormers always landed in hayfields, but the village sparkled with a certain magic lostness. RIO, it said, black letters on a silver water tower.

Rio was a hill of trees rising out of the low hills of earth, with rooftops down beneath the green and church spires like holy missiles poised pure white in the sun.

Main Street stretched two blocks long, then fell back into trees and houses and farmland.

A baseball game raged at the school field.

Hansen’s trim Luscombe monoplane was already circling the airstrip, down to its last few gallons of gas. He waited for us, though, to make sure that we didn’t change our mind and fly off somewhere else—for had we separated in that unknown land, we never would have seen each other again.

The strip was built on the edge of a sudden hill, and the first quarter of it lay at a fierce angle that must have made fine skiing, in winter.

I turned and landed, watching the green grass cartwheel up in slow motion to touch our wheels. We taxied to the deserted gas pump and shut down as Paul swished in overhead to land. His plane disappeared over the hillcrest as he touched down, but in a minute it reappeared, engine chugging softly, and rolled down the slope to us. With both engines silent at last, there was not a sound in the air.

“I thought you were never going to see this place,” Paul said, unfolding from the Luscombe. “What took you so long? Some barnstormer you are. Why didn’t you find a field two hours ago?”

He was a wide powerful man, a professional photographer, concerned because the world’s image wasn’t quite as beautiful as it should be. Under a carefully combed shock of black hair he had the look of a gangster trying hard to go straight.

“If it was me only, be no problem,” I said, taking the bags that Stu handed down from the biplane. “But pickin’ a place where your ground-hog airplane could fly from… yes sir, that was the problem.”

“What do you think,” Paul said, letting the slur about his airplane go by, “should we try a jump today, late as it is? If we want to eat, we’d better find some paying passengers.”