Richard Bach: A Gift of Wings

Time after time I’ve watched it happen, in my life and the lives of people I know. I’ve tried to find somebody who didn’t get what he prayed for, but to date I haven’t found him. I believe it: whatever we wrap away in thought is opened for us, one day, in experience.

There was a girl I met in New York, who lived in a tight-packed Brooklyn tenement, acred about by old concrete and cracking brick, by frustration and fear and quick wild violence in the street. I wondered aloud why she didn’t get out, move to Ohio or Wyoming country, where she could breathe free and touch the grass once in her life.

“I couldn’t do that,” she said, “I don’t know what it’s like out there.” And then she said a very honest and knowing thing. “I guess I’m more afraid of what I don’t know than I hate what I have right now…”

Better to have riots in the streets, better squalor and subways and sardine crowds, she prayed, than the unknown. As she prayed, she received; she meets nothing now that she hasn’t met before.

All at once I saw the obvious. The world is as it is because that is the way we wish it to be. Only as our wish changes does the world change. Whatever we pray for, we get.

Look about, sure enough. Every day the footsteps of answered prayer are ours to walk, we have only to lean forward and walk them, one by one. The steps to my Fokker were many. I helped a man with his magazine, years ago, and so came to know him. His prayers were in old airplanes and business deals and motion pictures, and he took his chance to buy, in a business deal with a film studio, the fleet of World War I fighters. When he mentioned this, I said I’d be ready if he ever needed a pilot to fly one; that is. I took one step that offered itself to be taken. A year later he needed two American pilots to join the group, in Ireland, flying the Fokkers. When he called, I was ready to finish the path I had begun with the first article, that first prayer about the D-7.

From time to time, when I was barnstorming the Midwest a few summers ago, a passenger or two would say, “What a great life you have, free to go wherever you want, whenever… Sure wish I could do it.” Wistful, like that.

“Come along, then,” I’d say. “You can sell tickets, keep the crowds behind the wing, strap the passengers into the front seat. We might make enough money to live on, we might go broke, but you’re invited.” I could say this, first because I could always use a ticket seller, and second because I knew what the answer would be.

Silence first, then, “Thanks, but you see, I’ve got my job. If it wasn’t for my job, I’d go…” Which was only to say that each wistful one wasn’t wistful at all, each had prayed harder for his job than for the life of a barnstormer, as the New York girl had prayed more for her tenement than for the grass of Wyoming or for any other unknown.

I consider this from time to time, flying. We always get what we pray for, like it or not, no excuses accepted. Every day our prayers turn more into fact; whom we most want to be, we are. It all sounds like justice to me; I can’t say as I mind the way this world is built, at all.

We had been flying north, low-level formation in a pair of F-100 day fighters out over the Nevada desert. I was leading, that time, and Bo Beaven’s airplane was twenty feet away at my right wingtip. It was a clean morning, I remember, and we were cruising three hundred feet above the ground. I was having some trouble with the radiocompass, leaning down in the cockpit, resetting a circuit breaker, clicking the control from ANT to LOOP to COMP, to see if the needle would show any life. Then about the time I thought that the problem was in the antenna itself, and that maybe I shouldn’t plan on having any help from the radio at all, there came Beaven’s voice filtered in my earphones. It was neither a command nor a warning… it was a simple calm question: “Do you plan on flying into this mountain?”

I jerked my head up, startled, and there angled in front of us was a rugged little mountain, all brown rock and sand and tumbleweed, tilting, flying toward us at something over three hundred nautical miles per hour. Beaven said nothing more. He didn’t loosen his formation or move to break away. He spoke in the way that he flew his airplane… if you choose to fly straight ahead, there will be not one hole in the rock, but two.

I eased the control stick back, wondering where the hill had come from, and it flicked a hundred feet beneath us and was gone, silent as a deadly dark star.

I never forgot that day, or the way Beaven’s airplane faced the mountain wing to wing with mine, not clearing the peak until we cleared it together. It was our last flight in formation. A month later our time had run out in the peacetime Air Force and we were civilians again, promising, sure, we’d meet again, because people who fly always meet again.

Back in my home town, I was sad to be gone from high-performance flying only until I found that the same tests waited in lightplane sport flying. I discovered formation aerobatics, air racing and off-airport landings, all in little planes that can take off and land five times in the distance it takes an F-100 to get off the ground once. I thought, as I flew, that Bo would be making the same discovery, that he was flying just as I was.

But he wasn’t. He was no sooner out of the Air Force than he was lost, no sooner established in business than he was dead, the agonizing death of the pilot who turns his back on flight. He suffocated slowly, the blue-suited businessman had taken over, had mortared him into an airless corner behind a wall of purchase orders and sales charts, golf bags and cocktail glasses.

Once, on a flight through Ohio, I saw him long enough to be sure that the man who controlled his body was not the same man who had flown my wing that day toward the mountain. He was polite enough to recognize my name, to wish me good day, but he heard without interest any talk of airplanes, wondered why I looked at him strangely. He insisted that he was indeed Bo Beaven and quite happy as an executive for a company that made wringer washers and plastic products. “There’s a great demand for wringer washers,” he said, “a lot more than you might think.”

Way far down in his eyes I fancied I saw a faint little signal of despair from my friend trapped within, fancied I heard the smallest cry for help. But it was gone in a second, quickly masked by the businessman at the desk, behind the nameplate Frank N. Beaven . Frank!

It used to be, when we were flying, anybody who called Bo by the name “Frank” advertised he was no friend at all. Now the clumsy business executive had made the same mistake; he had nothing in common with the man he had sealed up to die.

“Of course I’m happy,” he said. “Oh, sure, it was fun to fly around in the ’100, but that couldn’t go on forever, could it?”

So I flew away and Frank N. Beaven went back to work at his desk, and we didn’t hear from each other again. Maybe Bo had saved my life with his cool question in the desert, but when he needed me to save his, I didn’t know what to say.

It was ten years from the day we had left the Air Force, then, that I got a note from Jane Beaven. “Thought you’d be pleased to know that Bo made his move and is at last returning to number one love, the flying business. With American Aviation in Cleveland—is like a new man…”

My friend Bo, I thought, forgive me. Sealed away for ten years and now you come crashing through the wall. You’re a tough one to kill, aren’t you?