Ричард Бах: Biplane

DICK BACH couldn’t write a book about flying if he tried.

And that, son, is a compliment.

If by “flying” we mean a mere manual of technical plans and exercises, how to take off and land, repair a motor, or restring your 1917 piano-wire harp, it is obvious from the first page of this book on that that is not what we are going to get from the very young Mr. Bach.

If on the other hand we intend to ventilate our knowledge, go up with Icarus, come down with Montgolfier and re-ascend with the Wrights, thoroughly aerated and highly exhilarated, then of course we must put ourselves in Dick Bach’s farmboy Tom Swift hands. He does not “fly” just as his great-great-great grandfather Johann Sebastian Bach did not “write music”: he exhaled it.

I am an idea—not a descriptive—writer. But I cannot resist describing Dick Bach to you. He is tall and angular and kind of slopes himself through your door, like Gulliver entering the house of a Lilliputian. He might have just come in off the plowfield. That makes sense, for probably he just emergency-landed his biplane in your north quarter and on his way across to your friendly light he could be expected to have pitched in and helped with the harvest.

He is a great big lunk of an American boy, that same tinkerer and rowboat mechanic we have seen bean-sprouting up by the light of the Industrial Revolution in basements and attics across America since locomotives first dragon-scared the Red Indians and San Juan Teddy dug that Canal singlehanded.

Dick Bach is all the clichés you ever heard about fresh apple pie and the Lafayette Escadrille (lately he has grown a most unlikely blond fairly English mustache).

Look in any old war memorial and you will see his face gazing back at you with proud innocence out of a thousand faded photos. He is so common as to be uncommon. If pictures had been snapped two thousand years ago you would have seen that same fair-reckoning smile and slope-gawked attitude behind Caesar on his way into and out of Britain.

He was never Daedalus, nor was he Icarus: they were special in another way. But he was one of those who saw Daedalus try and Icarus fail, and decided to do it himself, no matter what. So his time-traveling doppelgänger has been leaping off aqueducts and startling Chinese mandarins with bamboo butterfly wings or falling off cowbarns with bumbershoots for something like thirty centuries. Some were runtier than our present Dick Bach of course, but all had that same noon-sunshine apple smile that looks at Doom and says I’ll Live Forever.

We despair of him, we weep for him, but finally we laugh with all the Richard Bachs down history who, like grand Stubb in Moby Dick knew that a laugh was the best answer to everything.

Here then is Dick Bach’s own dear book not about flying but soaring, a feat not of machines but imagination.

Great-great-great grandpa wrote the music. Now here’s an offspring to lift simple words.

Perhaps the boy does not fly as high as the old man. Perhaps. But, just look—he is up there.

IT IS LIKE OPENING NIGHT on a new way of living, only it is opening day, and instead of velvet curtains drawing majestically aside there are hangar doors of corrugated tin, rumbling and scraping in concrete tracks and being more stubborn than majestic. Inside the hangar, wet still with darkness and with two wide pools of dark underwing and evaporating as the tall doors slide, the new way of living. An antique biplane.

I have arrived to do business, to trade. As simple as that. A simple old airplane trade, done every day. No slightest need to feel unsure.

Still, a crowd of misgivings rush toward me from the hangar. This is an old airplane. No matter how you look at it, this airplane was built in 1929 and this is today and if you’re going to get the thing home to California you’ve got to fly it over twenty-seven hundred miles of America.

It is a handsome airplane, though. Dark red and dark yellow, an old barnstormer of a biplane, with great tall wheels, two open cockpits and a precise tictactoe of wires between the wings.

For shame. You have a fine airplane this moment. Have you forgotten the hours and the work and the money you poured into the rebuilding of the airplane you already own? That was only a year ago! A completely rebuilt 1946 Fairchild 24, as good as brand new! Better than brand new; you know every rib and frame and engine cylinder of the Fairchild, and you know that they’re perfect. Can you say as much for this biplane? How do you know that ribs aren’t broken beneath that fabric, or wingspars cracked?

How many thousand miles have you flown the Fairchild? Thousands over the Northeast, from that day you rolled her out of the hangar in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. Then from Colt’s Neck more thousands to Los Angeles, wife and children seeing the country at first hand as we moved to a new home. Have you forgotten that flight and the airplane that brought your country alive in rivers coursing and great craggy mountains and wheat tassels in the sun? You built this airplane so no weather could stop it, with full flight instruments and dual radios for communication and navigation and a closed cabin to keep out the wind and rain. And now this airplane has flown you across more thousands of miles, from Los Angeles to this little land of Lumberton, North Carolina.

This is good biplane country. March in Lumberton is like June is like August. But the way home is a different land. Remember the frozen lakes in Arizona, three days ago? The snow in Albuquerque? That’s no place for an open-cockpit biplane! The biplane is in her proper place this moment. In Lumberton, with tobacco fields green about her airport, with other antique airplanes sheltered nearby, with her gentle owner taking time from his law practice to tend to her needs.

This biplane is not your airplane, your kind of airplane, even. She belongs and she should belong to Evander M. Britt, of Britt and Britt, attorneys at law. A man who loves old airplanes, with the time to come down and take care of their needs. He has no wild schemes, he hasn’t the faintest desire to fly this airplane across the country. He knows his airplane and what it can do and what it can’t do. Come to your senses. Just fly home in the Fairchild and forget this folly. His advertisement for a trade should find him his coveted lowwing Aeronca, and from someplace just down the road, not a brand new Fairchild 24 from Los Angeles, California. The biplane doesn’t even have a radio!

It is true. If I make this trade, I will be trading the known for the unknown. On the other side stands only one argument, the biplane itself. Without logic, without knowledge, without certainty. I haven’t the right to take it from Mr. Britt. Secretary to the local chapter of the Antique Airplane Association, he should have a biplane. He needs a biplane. He is out of his mind to trade this way. This machine is his mark of belonging to an honored few.