Nothing by Chance

“BACH HAS A REMARKABLE GIFT … [HE] CONVINCE[S] AND CAPTIVATE[S] HIS LISTENERS.”—
Time

RICHARD BACH

NOTHING BY CHANCE

Is there a reason for every event that touches our lives? Richard Bach believed there was, and to find it, he set out on a great adventure. Here he tells about the magical summer when he turned time backward to become an old-fashioned barnstormer in an antique biplane … and let destiny be his copilot.

“BIOGRAPHY? FANTASY? METAPHYSICS? FICTION? NONFICTION? SELF-HELP? PHILOSOPHY? WITH BACH, THE POSSIBILITIES ARE INTENTIONALLY UNLIMITED.”

—The Salt Lake Tribune

“JUST LOOK—HE IS UP THERE.”

—Ray Bradbury

Books by Richard Bach

ONE

THE BRIDGE ACROSS FOREVER: A LOVE STORY

A GIFT OF WINGS

ILLUSIONS: THE ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT MESSIAH

BIPLANE

NOTHING BY CHANCE

STRANGER TO THE GROUND

JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL

THERE’S NO SUCH PLACE AS FAR AWAY

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1969 by Richard Bach
Copyright renewed © 1997 by Richard David Bach

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Scribner ebook edition June 2012

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ISBN: 978-1-4516-9746-9 (ebook)

“If we are alert, with minds and eyes open, we will see meaning in the commonplace; we will see very real purposes in situations which we might otherwise shrug off and call ‘chance’.”

—from a lecture by Roland Bach

So this book is for Dad

Who has, kiting around in those rattletrap aeroplanes, a son that agrees.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Photographs

NOTHING
BY CHANCE

   
CHAPTER ONE
   

THE RIVER WAS WINE beneath our wings-dark royal June Wisconsin wine. It poured deep purple from one side of the valley to the other, and back again. The highway leaped across it once, twice, twice more, a daring shuttlecock weaving a thread of hard concrete.

Along the thread, as we flew, came villages the color of new grass here in the end of spring, washing their trees in a clean wind. It was all the tapestry of summer beginning, and for us, of adventure.

Two thousand feet above the ground, the air was silver about us, sharp and cold, rising on up over our two old airplanes so deep that a stone dropped up into it would have been lost forever. Way high up in there I could just barely see the dark iron blue of space itself.

Both of these guys trusting me, I thought, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen to us. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them, they still think since the whole thing is my idea I must know what I’m doing. I should have told them to stay home.

We swam the silver air like a pair of ocean minnows, Paul Hansen’s sleek little sportplane darting ahead at a hundred
miles an hour once in a while, then circling back to stay in sight of my fire-red, flower-yellow, slow-chugging open-cockpit wind-and-wire flying machine. Like giving the horses their rein, this turning our airplanes loose over the land and letting them fly back into their own time, with us hanging on for the ride and waiting to see the golden world of gypsy pilots forty years gone. We agreed on one thing—the grand old days of the barnstormer must still be around, somewhere.

Silent and trusting, Stuart Sandy MacPherson, age nineteen, peered over the edge of the cockpit in front of my own, looking down through his amber jumping-goggles to the bottom of an ocean of crystal air. Barnstormers always had parachute jumpers, didn’t they? he had said, and parachute jumpers were always kids who worked their way and earned their keep selling tickets and putting up signs, weren’t they? I had to admit that they were, and that I wasn’t going to stand between him and his dream.

Once in a while now, looking down through the wind, he smiled to himself, ever so faintly.

We flew in a sheet of solid thunder. The clatter and roar of my Wright Whirlwind engine burst out just as loud and uncaring as it did in 1929, brand new, seven years before I was born, and it soaked us in the smell of exhaust fires and hot rocker-box grease; it shook us in the blast of propeller-torn air. Young Stu had once tried to shout a word across the space between our cockpits, but his voice was swept away in the wind and he hadn’t tried again. Those gypsy pilots, we were learning, didn’t do much talking when they flew.

The river turned sharply north, and left us. We pressed on overland into soft low meadowed hills, sun-glittering lakes, and farms everywhere.

Here it was … adventure again. The three of us and our two airplanes were the remnant of what had opened in spring as The Great American Flying Circus, Specialists in Death-Defying
Displays of Aerial Acrobatics, Authentic Great War Dogfighting, Thrilling and Dangerous Aeroplane Stunts, and the Incredible Free-Fall Parachute Leap. (Also, Safe Government-Licensed Pilots Take You Aloft to See Your Town From the Air. Three Dollars the Ride. Thousands of Flights Without a Mishap.)

But the other Great American aviators and airplanes had commitments in modern times; they had flown their planes back into the future from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and had left Paul and Stu and I flying alone in 1929.

If we were to live in this time, we had to find grass fields and cowpastures to land in, close to town. We had to fly our own aerobatics, take our own chances, find our own paying passengers. We knew that five airplanes, a full circus, could bring out crowds of weekend customers; but would anyone move on a weekday to watch just two airplanes, and those unadvertised? Our fuel and oil, our food, our search for yesterday and our way of life depended upon it. We weren’t ready to admit that adventure and the self-reliant individual had had their day.

We had thrown away our aeronautical charts, along with the time they came from, and now we were lost. There in the middle of the high cold silver roaring air, I thought we might be somewhere over Wisconsin or northern Illinois, but that was as far as I could pin it down. There was no north, no south, no east, no west. Only the wind from somewhere, and we scudded along before it, destination unknown, circling here over a town, over a meadow, over a lakeside, looking down. It was a strange afternoon without time, without distance, without direction. America spread from horizon to horizon before us, wide and big and free.