the playful Spiritual being
that is your real self.
Don't turn away
from possible futures
before you're certain you don't have
anything to learn from them.
You're always free
to change your mind and
choose a different future, or
a different
past.
Choose a different past? Literally or figuratively or how did it mean . . . ? "I think my mind just boggled, Don. I don't know how I could possibly learn this stuff."
"Practice. A little theory and a lot of practice," he said. "Take you about a week and a half."
"A week and a half."
"Yeah. Believe you know all answers, and you know all answers. Believe you're a master, and you are."
"I never said I wanted to be any master."
"That's right," he said. "You didn't."
But I kept the handbook, and he never asked for it back.
5
Farmers in the Midwest need good land for their work to prosper, so do gypsy fliers. They have to be close to their customers. They must find fields a block from town, fields planted in grass,
or hay or oats or wheat cut grass-short; no cows nearby to eat the fabric from their planes; alongside a road for cars; a gate in the fence for people; fields lined so that an airplane doesn't have to fly low over any house any here; smooth enough their machines aren't jolted to pieces rolling 50 mph over the ground; long enough to get in and out safely in the hot calm days of summer; and permission from the owner to fly there for a day.
I thought of this as we flew north through Saturday morning, the messiah and me, the green and gold of the land pulling softly by, a thousand feet below. Donald Shimoda's Travel Air floated noisily off my right wing , bouncing sunlight all directions off its mirror paints. A lovely airplane, I thought, but too big for real hard-time barnstorming. It does carry two passengers at a time, but it also weighs twice as much as a Fleet, and so needs much more field to get off the ground and back on. I owned a Travel Air once, but traded it finally for the Fleet, which can get into tiny fields, fields the size you're a lot more likely to find close to town. I could work a 500-foot field with the Fleet, where the Travel Air took 1000, 1300 feet. You tie yourself to this guy, I thought, and you tie yourself to the limits of his airplane.
And sure enough, the moment I thought that, I spotted a neat little cow pasture by the town going past below. It was a standard 1320-foot-farm-field cut in half, the other half sold to the town for a baseball diamond.
Knowing Shimoda's plane couldn't land there, I kicked my little flying machine up on her left wing, nose up, power to idle, and sank like a safe toward the ball park. We touched in the grass just beyond the left-field fence and rolled to a stop with room to spare. I just wanted to show off a little, show him what a Fleet can do, properly flown. A burst of throttle swung me around for take off again, but when I turned to go, there was the Travel Air all set up on final approach to land. Tail down, right wing up, it looked like some glorious graceful condor turning to land on a broom-straw.
He was low and slow, so that the hair on my neck prickled. I was about to see a crash. A Travel Air, you want to hold at least 60 mph over the fence to land, slower than that with an airplane that stalls at 50 and you are going to wrap it up in a ball. But what I saw was this gold and snow biplane stop in the air, instead. Well, I don't mean stop, but it was flying no more than 30 mph, an airplane that stalls at 50, mind you, stop in the air and sort of sigh three-point onto the grass. He used half, maybe three-quarters the space I had used to land the Fleet.
I just sat in the cockpit and looked, while he taxied alongside and shut down. When I turned off my engine, still staring at him dumbly, he called "Nice field, you found! Close enough to town, hey?"
Our first customers, two boys on a Honda motorcycle, were already turning in to see what was going on.
"What do you mean, close to town?" I shouted over the engine noise still in my ears.
"Well, it's half a block away!"
"No, not that! WHAT WAS THAT LANDING ? In the Travel Air! How did you land here?"
He winked at me. "Magic!"
"No, Don. .. really! I saw the way you landed!"
He could see that I was shocked and more than a bit frightened.
"Richard, do you want to know the answer to floating wrenches in the air and healing all sickness and turning water into wine and walking on the waves and landing Travel Airs on a hundred feet of grass ? Do you want to know the answer to all these miracles ?"
I felt as though he had turned a laser on me. "I want to know how you landed here . . ."
"Listen!" he called across the gulf between us. "This world? And everything in it ? Illusions, Richard! Ever bit of it illusions! Do you understand that ?" There was no wink, no smile; as though he was suddenly furious with me for not knowing long ago.
The motorcycle stopped by the tail of his airplane; the boys looked eager to fly.
"Yeah," was all I could think to say. "Roger on the illusions." Then they were on him for a ride and it was up to me to find the owner of the field before he found us and ask permission to fly out of his cow pasture.
The only way to describe the take offs and landings the Travel Air made that day is to tell you that it looked like a fake Travel Air. As if the plane were really an E-2 Cub, or a helicopter dressed in a Travel Air costume. Somehow it was a lot easier for me to accept a nine-sixteenths end-wrench floating weightless than to be calm watching that airplane of his lift off the ground with passengers aboard at 30 mph. It is one thing to believe in levitation when you see it, it is another thing entirely to believe in miracles.
I kept thinking about what he had said so fiercely. Illusions. Someone had said that before. . . when I was a kid, learning magic-magicians say that! They carefully tell us, "Look, this is not a miracle you are about to see; this is not really magic. What it is, is an effect, it is the illusion of magic." Then they pull a chandelier from a walnut and change an elephant into a tennis racket. .
In a burst of insight, I pulled the Messiah's Handbook from my pocket and opened it. Two sentences stood alone on the page.
There is
no such thing as a problem
without a gift for you
in its hands.
You seek problems
because you need
their gifts..
I didn't quite know why, but reading that eased my confusions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed.
The name of the town was Troy and the pasture there promised to be as good to us as the hayfield in Ferris had been. But in Ferris I had felt a certain calm, and here was a tension in the air that I didn't like at all.
The flying that was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to our passengers was for me routine, overshadowed by that strange uneasiness. My adventure was this character I was flying with . . . the impossible way he made his airplane go and the odd things that he had said to explain it.
The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the Travel Air's flight than I would have been had some town bell rung at noon that hadn't rung for sixty years . . . they didn't know that it was impossible for what was happening to happen.
"Thanks for the ride!" they said, and, "Is this all you do for a living . . . don't you work somewhere?" and, "Why'd you pick a little place like Troy?" and "Jerry your farm's no bigger than a shoebox!"
We had a busy afternoon. There were lots of people coming out to fly and we were going to make a lot of money. Still, part of me began to say get out get out, get away from this place. I have ignored that before and always been sorry for it.
About three o'clock I had shut down my engine for gas, walked twice back and forth from the Skelly station with two five gallon cans of car gas, when it struck me that not once had I seen the Travel Air refuel. Shimoda hadn't put gas in his plane since sometime before Ferris, and I had watched him fly tha
t machine for seven hours now, going on eight, without another drop of gas or oil. And though I knew that he was a good man, and wouldn't hurt me, I was frightened again. If you really stretch it, throttle back to minimum revolutions and mixture dead lean in cruise, you can make a Travel Air run five hours at the outside. But not eight hours of take offs and landings.
He flew steadily on, ride after ride, while I poured the Regular into my center section tank and added a quart of oil to the engine. There was a line of people waiting to fly . . . it was as if he didn't want- to disappoint them. I caught his, though, as he helped a man and wife into the front cockpit of his plane. I tried to sound just as calm and casual as I could.
"Don, how you doin' on fuel? Need any gas ?" I stood at his wing tip with an empty five-gallon can in my hand.
He looked straight into my eyes and he frowned, puzzled, as though I had asked if he needed any air to breathe.
"No," he said, and I felt like a slow first-grader at the back of the classroom. "No, Richard, I don't need any gas."
It annoyed me. I know a little bit about airplane engines and fuel. "Well then," I flared at him, "how about some uranium ?"
He laughed and melted me at once. "No thanks. I filled it last year." And then he was in his cockpit and gone with his passengers in that supernatural slow motion take off.
I wished first that the people would go home, then that we would get out of here fast, people or not, then that I would have the sense to get out of there alone, at once. All I wanted was to take off and find a big empty field far away from any town and just sit and think and write what was happening in my journal, make some sense out of it.
I stayed out of the Fleet, resting till Shimoda landed again. I walked to his cockpit there in the propeller-blast of the big engine.
"I've flown about enough, Don, Gonna be on my way, land out from towns and be a little less busy for a while. It's been fun flying with you. See you again some time, OK?"
He didn't blink. "One more flight and I'll be with you. Guy's been waiting."
"All right."
The guy was waiting in a battered wheelchair rolled down the block to the field. He was kind of smashed down and twisted into the seat as if by some high gravity force, but he was here because he wanted to go flying. There were other people around, forty or fifty, some in, some out of their cars, watching curiously how Don would get the man from the chair into the plane.
He didn't think about it at all. "Do you want to fly?" The man in the wheelchair smiled a twisted smile and nodded sideways.
"Let's go, let's do it!" Don said quietly, as though he was talking to someone who had waited on the sidelines a long while, whose time had come to go into the game again. If there was anything strange about that moment, looking back on it, it was the intensity with which he spoke. It was casual, yes, but it was a command, too, that expected the man to get up and get into the plane, no excuses. What happened then, it was as if the man had been acting, and finished the last scene of his crippled-invalid part. It looked staged. The high-gravity broke away from him as though it was never there; he launched off the chair at a half-run, amazed at himself, toward the Travel Air.
I was standing close, and heard him. "What did you do:" he said. "What did you do to me ?" .
"Are you going to fly or not going to fly?" Don said. "The price is three dollars. Pay me before take off, please."
"I'm flying!" he said. Shimoda didn't help him into the front cockpit, the way he usually helped his passengers.
The people in the cars were out of the cars--there was an odd murmur from the watchers and then shocked silence. The man hadn't walked since his truck went off a bridge eleven years before.
Like a kid putting on bed sheet wings, he hopped to the cockpit and slid down into the seat, moving his arms a lot as though he had just been given arms to play with.
Before anybody could talk, Don Pressed the throttle and the Travel Air rolled up into the air, steep-turning around the trees and climbing like fury.
Can a moment be happy and at the same time terrifying? There followed a lot of moments like that. It was a wonder at what could only be called a miraculous healing to a man who looked like he deserved it, and at the same time, something uncomfortable was going to happen when those two came down again. The crowd was a tight knot waiting, and a tight knot of people is a mob and that is not good at all. Minutes ticked, eyes bored into that little biplane flying so carefree in the sun, and some violent thing was set to go off.
The Travel Air flew some steep lazy eights, a tight spiral, and then it was floating over the fence like a slow noisy flying saucer to land. If he had any sense at all, he would let his passenger off at the far side of the field, take off fast and disappear There were more people coming; another wheelchair, pushed by a lady running.
He taxied toward the crowd, spun the plane about to keep the propeller pointing away, shut down the engine. The people ran to the cockpit, and for a minute I thought they were going to tear fabric from the fuselage, to get at the two.
Was it cowardly? I don't know. I walked to my airplane, pumped the throttle and primer, pulled the propeller to start the engine. Then I got into the cockpit and turned the Fleet into the wind and took off. The last I saw of Donald Shimoda, he was sitting on the rim of his cockpit, and the mob had him surrounded. I turned east, then southeast, and after a while the first big field I found with trees for shade and a stream to drink from, I landed for the night. It was a long way from any town.
6
To this day I can't say what it was came over me. It was just that doom feeling, and it drove me out, away even from the strange curious fellow that was Donald Shimoda. If I have to fraternize with doom, even the Messiah Himself is not powerful enough to make me hang around.
I was quiet in the field, a silent huge meadow open to the sky . . . the only sound a little stream I had to listen pretty hard to hear. Lonely again. A person gets used to being alone, but break it just for a day and you have to get used to it again, all over from the beginning.
"OK, so it was fun for a while," I said aloud to the meadow. It was fun and maybe I had a lot to learn from the guy But I get enough of crowds even when they're happy... if they're scared they're either going to crucify somebody or worship him. I'm sorry, that's too much!"
Saying that caught me short. The words I had said could have been Shimoda's exactly. Why did he stay there? I had the sense to leave, and I was no messiah at all.
Illusions. What did he mean about illusions? That mattered more than anything he had said or done fierce, he was, when he said, "It's all illusions!" as though he could blast the idea into my head with sheer force. It was a problem, all right, and I needed its gift, but I still didn't know what it meant.
I got a fire going after a while, cooked me up a kind of leftover goulash of bits and pieces of soybean meat and dry noodles and two hot dogs from three days ago that boiling should have been good for. The toolbag was crushed alongside the grocery box, and for no reason I fetched out the nine-sixteenths and looked at it, wiped it clean and stirred the goulash with it.
I was alone, mind you no one to watch so for fun I tried floating it in the air the way he had done it. If I tossed it right straight up and blinked my eye when it stopped going up and started coming down, I got a
half-second feeling that it was floating. But then it thunked back down on the grass or on my knee and the effect was shattered fast. But this very same wrench... How did he do it?
If that's all illusion, Mister Shimoda, then what is it that is real? And if this life is illusion, why do we live it at all? I gave up at last, tossed the wrench a couple more times and quit. And quitting, was suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew what I knew even though it wasn't the answer to all existence or even a few illusions.
When I'm alone sometimes I sing. "Oh, me and ol' PAINT! . . ." I sang, patting the wing of the Fleet in true love for the thing (remember there was nobody to hear), "We'll wander
the sky... Hoppin' 'round hayfields till one of us gives in..." Music and words both I compose as I go along. "An' it won't be me givin' in, Paint . . . Unless you break a SPAR . . . and then I'll just tie yon up with baling WIRE ... and we'll go flying on... WE'LL GO FLYIN' ON"
The verses are endless when I get going and happy, since the rhyming isn't that critical. I had stopped thinking about the problems of the messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that's what made me happy.
Long about ten o'clock the fire ran down and so did my song.
"Wherever you are, Donald Shimoda," I said, unrolling my blanket under the wing, "I wish you happy flying and no crowds. If that is what you want. No, I take that back. I wish, dear lonely messiah, that you find whatever it is that you want to find."
His handbook fell out of the pocket as I took off my shirt, and I read it where it opened.
The bond
that links your true family
is not one of blood, but
of respect and joy in
each other's life.
Rarely do members
of one family grow
under the same
roof.
I didn't see how that applied to me and reminded myself never to let a book replace my own thinking. I rustled down under the blanket, and then I was out like a bulb turned off warm and dreamless under the sky and under several thousand stars that were illusions, maybe, but pretty ones, for sure.
When I came conscious again it was just sunrise, rose light and gold shadows. I woke not because of the light but because something was touching my head, ever so gently. I took it for a hay stem, floating there. Second time I knew it was a bug, swatted wildly and nearly broke my hand... a nine-sixteenths end-wrench is a hard chunk of iron to swat full speed, and I woke up fast. The wrench bounced off the aileron hinge, buried itself for a moment in the grass, then floated grandly to hover in the air again. Then as I watched, coming wide awake, it sank softly back down to the ground and was still. By the time I thought to pick it up, it was the same old nine-sixteenths I knew and loved, just as heavy, just as eager to get at all those pesky nuts an bolts.