Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“Good girl,” I said, and turned to Jim. “Ten cents adds up. And anyway, I’m teaching them resourcefulness.”

BY THEN I WASclosing in on my thirty-ninth birthday, and there was still one thing I’d never done and had always wanted to do. One summer day Jim and the kids and I had driven the Flivver over to Mohave County to look at a breeding bull Jim was interested in buying when we passed a ranch with a small plane parked near the gate. A hand-painted sign in the windshield read: FLYING LESSONS: $5.

“That’s for me,” I said.

I had Jim pull into the driveway, and we stopped to look at the plane. It was a two-seater, one behind the other, with an open cockpit, a faded green paint job, rust rings around the rivets, and a rudder that creaked in the wind.

I remembered the first time I’d seen an airplane, when I was riding Patches through the desert back from Red Lake. I loved Patches, but that had been one long, rump-numbing journey. On an airplane, it wouldn’t have been much more than a little hop.

A fellow came out of a shack behind the plane and sauntered up to the Flivver. He had a windburned face, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a pair of aviator goggles pushed up on his forehead. He rested his elbows on Jim’s open window and said, “Looking to learn her?”

I leaned across the gearbox. “Not him,” I said. “Me.”

“Whoa,” Goggles said. “Ain’t never taught a woman before.” He looked at Jim. “Think the little lady’s up to it?”

“Don’t you ’little lady’ me,” I said. “I break horses. I brand steers. I run a ranch with a couple dozen crazy cowboys on it, and I can beat them all in poker. I’ll be damned if some nincompoop is going to stand there and tell me that I don’t have what it takes to fly that dinky heap of tin.”

Goggles stared at me for a moment, then Jim patted him on the arm. “No one’s ever won betting against her,” Jim said.

“That don’t surprise me,” Goggles said. He pulled out a fresh cigarette and lit it with the old one. “Ma’am, I like your spirit. Let’s take ’er up.”

Goggles brought out a flight suit for me, along with a leather aviation helmet and a set of goggles. As I pulled them on, he walked me around the plane, checking the struts, pointing out the ailerons, explaining basics such as lift and tailwind, and showing me how to operate the copilot’s stick. But Goggles wasn’t much for theory, and soon he was climbing aboard and having me climb in behind him. As I did, I realized that the fuselage wasn’t made of metal after all, but canvas. That airplane was a right spindly contraption.

Then we were taxiing down the driveway, bumping along, gathering speed. The bumping stopped, but at first I wasn’t even aware that we were airborne-it was that smooth-then I saw the ground falling away beneath us and I knew I was flying.

We circled around. The kids were running back and forth waving like mad, and even Jim was enthusiastically flapping his hat. I leaned out and waved. The sky was a royal blue, and as we gained altitude, I saw the Arizona range rolling away in all directions, the Mogollon Rim to the east, and in the distant west, beyond a serpentine river, the Rockies, with some thin high clouds hovering above them. Route 66 threaded its way like a ribbon through the desert, a few tiny cars moving along it. Living in Arizona, I was used to long views, but still, the sight of the earth spread out far below made me feel huge and aloof, like I was beholding the entire world, seeing it all for the first time, the way I figured angels did.

Goggles operated the controls for most of the lesson, but by keeping my hand on my stick, I was able to follow the way he banked, climbed, and dived. Toward the end, he let me take over, and after a few heart-stopping jerks, I was able to put the plane into a long, steady turn that brought us right into the sun.

Afterward, I thanked Goggles, paid him, and told him he’d be seeing me again. As we walked back to the car, Rosemary said, “I thought we were supposed to save money.”

“Even more important than saving money is making it,” I said, “and sometimes, to make money, you have to spend it.” I told her if I got a pilot’s license, I could bring in cash dusting crops and delivering mail and flying rich people around. “This lesson was an investment,” I said. “In me.”

WORKING AS A FREELANCEbush pilot struck me as one glorious way of earning a living, but I knew it would take a while to get my pilot license, and we needed money now. I finally decided that the smartest way for me to bring in the bucks was to put my most marketable skill-teaching-back into use. I wrote Grady Gammage, who had helped me get the job at Red Lake, to ask if he knew of any opportunities.

He replied that there was a town called Main Street with an opening. It was up in the Arizona Strip, and I’d be welcome there, he said, because Main Street was so remote and, quite frankly, so peculiar that no teacher with a college degree wanted the job. Truth be known, he went on, the people in the area were almost all Mormon polygamists who’d moved all the way out there to escape government harassment.

Neither remoteness nor peculiarity troubled me, and as for Mormons, I’d married one, so I figured I could handle a few polygamists. I wrote back telling Grady Gammage to sign me up.

What made most sense was to take Rosemary and Little Jim with me, so one day late in the summer, we packed the Flivver, which was still running but on its last legs, and headed for the Arizona Strip. Jim followed in the Chevy to help us get settled.

The Arizona Strip was in the northwest corner of Mohave County, cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. To get there, we had to drive into Nevada, then Utah, then turn back south to Arizona.

I wanted my children to see the awesomeness of modern technology, so we stopped off at the Boulder Dam, where four enormous turbines generated electricity that was sent all the way to California. It was Jim’s idea to also visit one of the ruined cities of the Hohokams, an ancient and extinct tribe that had built elaborate four-story houses and a complex irrigation system. We stood there for a while, looking at those collapsed sandstone buildings and the troughs that had carried water directly to the Hohokams’ houses.

“What happened to the Hohokams, Daddy?” Rosemary asked.

“They thought they could civilize the desert,” Jim said, “and it was their undoing. The only way to survive in the desert is to recognize that it is a desert.”

The Arizona Strip was desolate but beautiful country. There were grassland plateaus where distant mountains sparkled with mica, and sandstone hills and gullies that had been carved into wondrous shapes- hourglasses and spinning tops and teardrops-by wind and water. The sight of all that time-worn stone, shaped grain by grain over thousands and thousands of years, made it seem like the place had been created by a very patient God.

The town of Main Street was so small that it didn’t appear on most maps. In fact, the main street of Main Street was the only street, lined with a few ramshackle houses, one general store, and the school, which had a teacherage. It was nothing fancy, one tiny room with two box windows and a single bed that Little Jim, Rosemary, and I would share. The water barrel outside the kitchen was swimming with pollywogs. “At least we know it’s not poison,” Jim said. “Just drink with your teeth closed.”

Many of the people in the area herded sheep, but the land had been overgrazed, and it was startling how threadbare the local folks were. None of them had cars. Instead, they drove wagons or, too poor to afford saddles, rode horses with just blankets on their backs. Some lived in chicken coops. The women wore bonnets, and the children came to school barefoot and in overalls or dresses stitched from feed sacks. Their underwear-if they had any-was also made of feed sacks. Some Mormons were sewed into ceremonial undergarments during a special church ritual, and since the garments were supposed to protect them from harm, snide folks referred to them as Mormon wonder underwear.