My father found the airplane nose-down and half buried in sand after a violent windstorm at an airfield near Winslow, Arizona. He was there as a contract welder, but he is a motor-head who carries poetry in his lunchbox. I am sure he thought, at first, he would have fun rebuilding and selling the plane’s engine, but then he was overcome by the optimism and vision with which he had been afflicted all his life. He saw possibility in the rotting fuselage and worn tires. He read potential in the fogged instrument panel. The sagging but undamaged wings were, to him, an unbroken promise.
He hauled the old Stinson Voyager, in pieces, to our garage at home, and began what he called his first aviation rescue rebuild. Weeks later, when he finally fired up the engine, and it coughed into a rumbling authority that turned the chipped and sand-cut propellers, he heard and felt something he was utterly unable to resist: flight. And I was immediately infected with his vision and optimism. He raised his welding hood and looked up at me with a smile that conveyed a confidence I never had on my own.
“Mary, honey,” he said. “I think you could fly this thing.”
Mom is quiet at breakfast—highly unusual for the woman who assails us with a steady stream of instructions the moment her alarm clock rings. She does not want me going “up there,” as she calls it. She would never say “flying” or “flight” or “airplane.” She disapproves of the whole enterprise, has a grudge against my dad for encouraging me to fly and then leaving her to make it happen.
And Mom has reason to be skeptical, to be tired. The airplane is only another episode in a never-ending series of crazy “found” projects: the broken-down school bus Dad gutted and repaired to transport our family and everything we owned from Alaska to New Mexico in the dead of winter; the old upright piano he found on the roadside and brought home so we could learn to play Bach and Chopin and Hank Williams, mostly by ear and despite the missing bass strings; and the worn-out thoroughbred mare, whose owners had given up on her, along with her crazy-eyed, green-broke colt that everyone feared.
I have said almost every time I head out to the garage to watch Dad and his friend Neal reassemble and restore the old Stinson Voyager, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Mom.” Usually, she doesn’t have a response for that, but last night, she said, “Oh, yeah? Whose life?” And then I was the one with nothing to say.
The closest Mom draws to acknowledging my desire to fly, or even the flying itself, is to ask, “Are you really going up there today, Mary?”
“Yes,” I say. “Do you want to come? Lots of times, people’s families come and watch.”
“I’ll wait right here,” she says, seated at the kitchen table not yet cleared of half-eaten bowls of oatmeal. My younger siblings have rushed to catch the school bus.
She refuses to drive me to the airfield. That is to say, she does not offer and I do not ask. And I think Mom withholding a ride is not in deference to my still sleeping baby brother. She could be persuaded to pull a baby from a crib on a moment’s notice for a trip to the library or to deliver milk to someone who called with a last-minute order, or, once, to get a better view of a weird rainbow that hovered over the bluffs east of town when there had been no rain for weeks. I interpret her refusal to drive me to the airfield as a last-ditch effort to stop me.
I cram dry toast into my pocket, leave through the front door, and pedal my bike up the hill from our house to the airfield beyond the fairgrounds, about a three-mile ride during which I shrug off the notion that I need my Mom—or anyone other than my instructor Keith—to see me leave the earth in the airplane Dad rebuilt piece by piece in his garage.
On this bright, windless morning, the Yellow Pages of three surrounding counties are stacked in my seat. Without the added height they lend me in the cockpit, I can’t see over the instrument panel or below the nose of this resurrected taildragger. Mag-netos, on. Fuel mix, rich. It’s a cold day, but my grip is sweaty on the throttle. I flip the starter switch. The engine coughs and sputters, then roars to life. The props catch, and their rotations, slow at first, are soon a blur.
I release the brakes and slowly taxi to the runway. It is never a smooth ride on the ground in a taildragger. I feel every turn of the props, and the sensation is much like being in the front car of an old wooden roller coaster. Every component—the struts, the wheels, every rivet and bolt, even the wings—rattles and rocks, as though at any moment they could each decide to take a separate journey of their own.
The plane rolls into position at the end of the runway, and I take up the mic. Frequencies whine and crackle as I radio the “Tower,” the dilapidated old trailer that serves as the airport’s office and communications center as well as pilot’s lounge. “Tower, come in.”
“I’m here, darlin’,” says Sherry, the air traffic controller and airport bookkeeper. She’s the only woman I know who can make an endearment sound stern or scary.
“Tower, this is Mary, I mean, Stin-son Nine-Seven-Five-Nine-Two, re-questing permission for takeoff on Runway One and a Half.” Our little joke, because there are only two runways, and one of them is mostly dirt.
But Sherry is in no mood for humor. She says it’s reckless for Keith, my flight instructor and her lanky younger brother, to teach me in that “old flying Jeep.” And she has told me many times she doesn’t believe “kids” or “girls” should fly, which is just too bad, as I’m both. But Sherry is cautiously optimistic, softer than she seems; beside her Las Vegas coffee mug, there’s a ceramic ashtray etched with gold lettering: “Believe there is no limit but the sky.”
“Stinson, you are cleared for takeoff. Runway One is yours,” Sherry says, and she exhales into her mic, probably the last long drag on her sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning. I hear her rings clinking against the ceramic ashtray beside the radio. I imagine Marlboro smoke coming through my radio speaker when she says, softer now, “Good luck, hon. See you soon.”
I run up the engine, giving all 165 horses their chance to pull. And then I release the brakes. My hand on the throttle feeds the engine enough fuel to build speed, while my feet work the rudder pedals to keep the plane in the center of the runway. It is a series of slight corrections, driving this old thing until it is airborne.
As the speedometer reads 30 mph, I pass the Tower. Sherry and Keith stand outside, smiling so big and waving so hard it’s unsettling. At 50 mph, I pass the gate between the airport and the county fairgrounds. I know I have reached top groundspeed, 85 mph, when I feel the engine’s reverberations in my feet and hands and chest. The tail wheel rises, quietly and effortlessly, the only elegant motion about this plane until lift-off, and there is no instrument or gauge to report it. Then the nose drops level with the horizon, and I am no longer in a reclining position, craning to see where I’m going. Speed affords visibility; the runway is in full view before me.
I pull back ever so slightly on the yoke. The front wheels, too, leave the ground. There is a rush of air, barely audible, as the wings cease their graceless bouncing and begin the work they’re meant for. This moment seizes all my senses, even over the noise of the engine that propels me skyward.
The runway falls away, then the rest of the airfield. I’ve been up here before, with Keith. But at 650 feet per minute, with me alone in the cockpit for this climb into the sky, everything seems new. I have been so focused on the altimeter and airspeed I haven’t taken in this moment as I anticipated. I had imagined that, during my first solo takeoff, I might yell and sing and even radio Tower to say something clever. But I do none of those things now. I am intently monitoring the instrument panel and, most importantly, watching my angle of ascent.
From my cruising altitude of 6,500 feet, the pit from which Dad has rescued good lumber, a carburetor, a screen door, and roofing shingles is a sore on the earth’s hard and craggy face. The edges of the pit grow taller and wider with castoff households; the sludge and muck of living poorly or well all ends up looking and smelling the same. And what doesn’t make it directly into the slow-burning fire at the bottom of the pit is left for feral cats and dogs and vultures and coyotes and desert rats to walk about on and paw or peck through. I feel a little guilty orienting myself in the sky against the steady thick plume of black smoke that rises from the pit.
Most people haul their own trash in the backs of their pickups to the dump. But a growing number of townspeople rely on Pearl Grainger, who picks up garbage in the sanitation truck he’s so proud of. He swings the cans onto his good shoulder and heaves the contents into the compactor. Then he weaves and bobs back to the cab of the truck. What polio didn’t steal from his stature and gait, his older brothers took from him when they tied him up for days on end. He was only a little boy then, out on the ranch where he and his brothers lived alone after their parents were killed in a gasoline storage tank explosion.
Pearl eats supper at our house as often as Mom can persuade him, and always on Thanksgiving and Christmas, occasions for which he sheds his coveralls in favor of crisp Levis and combs his hair with gel that smells like cinnamon. He lost his teeth when he was thirty years old, something he told us that first time he came to supper; Mom asked me to mash up the vegetables on his plate for him as if it was just something we did for our guests at every meal.
Last Thanksgiving, Pearl told us the fire at the dump will someday be the only thing left of this place. The power plant will implode, he said, and the river will dry up, and the wind will take the trees and hayfields, and the corn will burn up or rot right on the stalk. The roads will buckle eventually, he said, and there’ll be nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there.
More unsettling than Pearl’s apocalyptic prophecies was his gaze fixed on the horizon. My little brothers then stared out the window, too, trying to align their sight with Pearl’s, to spot the calamity heading our way.
“And all that’ll be left is that pit,” he said. “And that ever-burning, fucking fire,” he said.
“You mean ‘trucking,’ right, Pearl? That ‘trucking’ fire?” Mom said. Her polite fix was somehow more vulgar than the expletive it attempted to adapt.
Pearl only looked at her, didn’t argue. But didn’t concede. My brothers squirmed in their chairs and tried to stifle their laughter.
“There’s better ways,” Pearl said. “There’s recycling going on in other counties. And I keep asking the town council, whyn’t we do that here? But nobody listens to me.”
“Well, we’re listening,” Mom said.
But Pearl turned back to the window, and all heads at the table turned with him.
And then he said, “I bet you can see that goddamn smoke from outer space.”
I think about those words every time I am “up here.” And today is no exception. I angle east again, leaving the pit behind me. I climb into as bright a sky as I have ever seen. And I know Pearl was right.
My third takeoff is complete. Keith calls over the radio, “Walk around up there a bit, if you want to. I’ll wait right here.”
I fly over the city park, and then slip west over the bluffs at the New Mex-ico line, in view of the steam and smoke from the power plant stacks, then loop back along the Little Colorado toward the dam at Lyman Lake. Tacking south and east, then, I pass over the high school and skirt along Concho highway.
When I decide to buzz my house, I realize that was my plan all along. I want Mom to hear the plane pass overhead. She’ll know it’s me, even from inside the kitchen or the baby’s room. I bank west and north again, dropping altitude, maintaining my course and rolling just enough so I can see out the window.
And there she is, my Mom, standing out on the patchy grass she fights the wind for every spring and summer, a few yards from the fruit trees she coaxes and prays and worries out of the stubborn ground. She shades her face with one arm and waves hard at me with the other. The draft catches her long black hair, which is usually tied up by this time of day, and her apron flutters before her. She is yelling, apparently, and laughing. And she seems as surprised and delighted at the sight of me flying up here as I am by the laughter that owns her body.
I tip my wings at her, and let the plane climb a little and slip east over Isaacsons’ hayfields. I approach for another pass over the house. Mom stands on the hood of her station wagon, blowing me kisses, still laughing. She cups her hands around her mouth and yells again, but all I hear is that big Franklin engine pulling me through the sky. Each flyover lasts no more than a few seconds, but it seems we are finally engaged in a conversation, above the roar of the engine and well beyond our fears. And I know I will remember all my life the words I did not hear her say.
Mary Winsor lives in the American Southwest, the setting for a majority of her stories as well as a novel in progress. Her writing can be found in Northwest Review, Blue Mesa Review, Atticus Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
