Airplane Too

You see the bird fly, do you not? But you do not see the wings move. This is the meaning, the essence, of the thing, the action of the bird; its purpose in life to fly, to soar, to turn, to bank, to flutter, all the things you see it do. Notseeing the wings, that is to miss what it is that the bird is for, and to look only at the action not the motion.

The second time I saw the airplane I was ten. It had been a year since I walked into the field and saw it waiting there for me, and I had for some reason not seen it since. It was a cold day in February the second time I saw the airplane, and it hadn't moved. It had not changed.

There was ice on its wings.

I walked around it once again, looking for signs of time that might have etched their way onto the permanent tabula of the aircraft, but none had nested there. I could see only the shape I had seen before. The doors were closed as I had left them. I opened one with an effort and got in.

The instruments stared at me blankly.

I reached out a hand to touch the yoke and pulled back and touched it anyway. Cautiously, oh so carefully, I turned it to the left. There was a creaking crackling sound, and I felt it tug against my hand. Looking out of the clouding window I could see the ailerons moving under my fingers.

They were stiff and resisted.

I pulled back on the control wheel to see what would happen. The elevators did not move, and the wheel moved quickly, easily. I imagined the frayed ends of the broken cables sliding uselessly in their plastic sheathing, and moved the wheel back. It did not protest.

The altimeter was crazed.

The glass was cracked in a myriad of small lines across the face of the instrument, and the moisture that had gotten in had furthered the job until the glass face of the dial was dirty brown and white where fungus had grown. I could still see the needle sitting hard against the zero mark if I looked carefully through the microlife on the glass.

Looking outside of the airplane, I could see only sky.

Through the front windshield of the airplane, looking up over the instrument panel, pale blue sky glided. I was unable to see the ground, and I couldn't see the shed to the side unless I ducked down slightly and turned completely to the left.

Slowly, I reached down and scraped my finger across the floor, coming up with a smear of brown dirt, almost soil, from the bottom of the airplane. Looking up again, I slid my finger carefully over the surface of the altimeter, watching as the needle vanished from sight in stages behind a brown curtain. As the needle vanished completely I raised my eyes to the windscreen, and looking out at the clouds that drifted slowly past my eyes, I truly flew.

The ground was gone, erased from my frame of reference unless I made an incautious movement of my eyes, at which time I knew it would leap up in my direction and firmly dash itself against my feet, and the airplane would come to rest once more on the earth next to shed in the field. I stared ahead fixedly for several minutes before experimenting and finding that I could look around slightly without stepping over the line into snow and ice.

I spent hours in the airplane, staring out at the world around me, a world devoid of solidity, knowing only an occasional bird and cloud in its sleepy void. I moved the controls, and ignored the sounds the old machinery might make, feeling the airplane move under me, as the winds of a hundred knots played over the shining airframe, and control surfaces fought to bend the path of the airplane to my wishes.

It was all a race.

It was a test to see how long I could remain in the air, for sooner or later, I would inevitably glance sideways without thinking, or twist my head to find the bird I had just passed, and the earth would jump into vision. With a dizzying swoop, the airplane would be sitting quietly on the grassy surface, waiting as it always had. That first time I stayed aloft for over two hours, before suddenly grounding myself in an effort to see the tip of the wing.

I dropped my hands to my lap.

Slowly, with the force of gravity pressing my shoulders down around my body, I opened the door, and with an old man's hesitant motions, lowered myself ten thousand feet to the waiting earth.

Walking out of the field that first time I flew, I looked back at the airplane. I learned not to, later, but that first time I had to; some unknown compulsion pulled my head.

The airplane sat quietly, the open door swinging slightly in the breeze.

Suddenly, it looked not like an airplane but an empty house, waiting silently and still, for someone to enter it and light the windows amber with candles and brush the cobwebs from the stairs and paint the odd corner in order to make it whole.

It hadn't flown. Neither had I.

 I don't know how I feel about this one compared to its predecessor...but it's here for completeness' sake.

-The Custodian