Solo (24 page)

Often, when I flew
Annabelle
into a little airfield, an old-timer sitting in the flight building would ask, “Ground-looped her yet?”

“No, sir.”

Silence. Then another would say, “Well, it ain’t a matter of ‘if.’ It’s a matter of ‘when.’”

“Yessir.” But I didn’t believe it. Ground loop? Not me, brother.

Waldo and I finished our ten hours. We had a good time flying—he would laugh as I tried to wrestle
Annabelle
in a crosswind landing—and after my ten hours were up, Waldo piloted
Annabelle
on his own a few times, just for the thrill. He didn’t get the opportunity to fly many tail draggers. And after he’d finished with my instruction, I enjoyed sitting in the flight shack, listening to him tell stories. He told me a story about insurance one day. I wrote it in my journal.

“I told my ex-wife when we got divorced and she got the
dog that I’d get rid of that dog if I were her. Saint Bernard. If you don’t breed them right, they’re vicious. They get good press as gentle dogs, but they come from breeds that were used to fight the gladiators.

“So I’m working in the pansies, right before the divorce, and the dog is tied with a logging chain to a porch railing set in bricks and cement, and this German shepherd walks by and I think, ‘Thank God, the Saint Bernard is chained,’ and the German shepherd gets about three feet in the yard, and the Saint Bernard pulls up the railing and in about one and a half minutes there’s nothing left of the German shepherd but fur, blood, and bones.

“Three years later I meet my former brother-in-law at the airport. We have breakfast. He says something about insurance. Then he says the next victim was a lady walking by and she was about to undergo her second round of corrective surgery.”

We sit for a minute. “What’s that got to do with insurance?” I ask.

“Oh. USAA has a thirty-dollar rider to homeowners that is good for a million dollars on any injury liability.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. That’s just a story about insurance. I hope she had it.”

A
NNABELLE
WAS WHITE
with red trim, as I’ve mentioned, and she had a red and black interior. She was a work of art. Her skin was smooth, painted fabric stretched tightly over wood. A special fuel-and-leather-fabric smell lingered in her interior. Her wings were long, and a wingtip
was as high as your head. You could take the wingtip in hand and rock her. You could walk to the rear and pick the rear end off the ground and turn her in a circle.

I enjoyed washing and cleaning her inside and out, polishing the red and white metal “fenders” over her main gear.

I often just walked around her, looking, admiring. Then I’d stand off at a distance and stare.

I
WAS RENTING
a fully enclosed metal hangar at Triple W Airport in South Raleigh when a pilot friend asked me to hop in
Annabelle
and follow him and his Cessna to a little hideaway airfield about thirty minutes away: there was a hangar for rent there. I followed him into Decker Field, landing on a green turf runway in the woods. I met the owner of the field, Phil Decker, a farmer, carpenter, airplane mechanic, and antique aircraft rebuilder. At the field was a large metal hangar, where Phil worked on airplanes. Across the runway stood a small wooden hangar, where an empty space rented for forty dollars a month. I took it.

The hangar was low slung, wide enough for three airplanes, the two outside airplanes facing in one direction and the middle one (mine) facing in the opposite direction. My taxi-out path, behind the hangar, was slightly downhill. So upon returning from a flight, I’d taxi around back by a vegetable garden to my entrance and do a tight turnaround with rudder, brake, and revved-up engine so that the tail of
Annabelle
faced the opening. At the rear wall of my hangar space was a hand winch—just like the
one on a boat trailer. I’d attach the winch’s long metal wire to a towing handle on the tail of the aircraft and slowly crank her into the hangar.

All this was wonderfully anti–Air Force, antimodern, antitechnological. Not only that, but Waldo had taught me to start the engine by hand in case of battery-operated starter problems. You’ve seen old black-and-white films in which one person sits in an airplane while another person, standing in front of the airplane, puts both hands on the propeller and then heaves mightily and immediately backs away. The secret is to use both hands and then get out of the way. On many cold mornings, after several failed attempts to battery-start, I’d set my hand brake, leave the ignition switch on, prime the engine with a little bit of throttle, get out, drift back in time to those old films, place my hands up on the propeller, heave down, crank her up, jump back, jump in, and fly away.

A typical takeoff at Decker Field went like this: I’d crank my engine and taxi to the north end of the runway. Takeoff was always in the same direction—south—because the relatively short turf runway was
downhill
to the south. No advantage could be gained by taking off uphill—regardless of wind direction. As I taxied along the edge of the field toward the north end of the runway, I’d come to a dogleg to the right. I’d taxi around the corner there, continue ten or fifteen yards to the end of the runway at the edge of the woods, turn 180 degrees, stop, and complete my before-takeoff checklist, which included applying brakes, opening the throttle to see if I was getting full rpm, and checking all instruments.

Then I would release the brakes with the power wide open and start a slow roll. Immediately I’d round the corner of the dogleg to the left—just getting rolling good—and see the entire runway, sloping downhill, in front of me. I could reduce power and apply brakes if something was in the way. But if the runway was clear and no one was coming in to land (landing was always
uphill
at Decker Field—to the north), I would continue my takeoff roll.

Before liftoff I would cross the gravel driveway to Phil’s house—a little bump—and then after a few seconds I’d be airborne. If I was making a short-field takeoff, then the whole time I was rolling along I’d hold the stick as far back between my legs as it would go so that as soon as flying speed was reached, the airplane lifted into the air. Then I’d immediately move the stick forward to a position for a comfortable climb-out.

This slow, low-flying tail dragger made little sense to most civilian pilots I knew. Their airplanes with tricycle landing gear were faster and always much easier to maneuver on the ground. They liked to go places. They liked technology. But I liked to linger above green fields, to find turf landing strips, to fly a traffic pattern over and over and over, practicing touch-and-go landings. I liked the simplicity of the PA-12. I liked being forced to navigate by time and distance, with a map in my lap, rather than by instruments that (with modern satellite technology) give location and route directions. I was proud to taxi into an airport, get out, walk into the lounge, and have somebody ask, “What kind of airplane is that? Where’d you get it? Is it fun?”

Just after buying
Annabelle
in 1989, I moved books, a couch, and a desk into a small, windowless office in a building on Ninth Street in Durham, North Carolina, my hometown. The office was a quiet place to write fiction, my full-time job back then—which explains in part why I had time to fly. After moving into the office, I needed a sign on the door. I came upon the idea of a kind of informal air taxi service. I could make it a nonprofit. If someone wanted to go somewhere, I’d fly them for cost. I tried out several names: Happy’s Air Taxi, Billy’s Air Taxi, Orville’s Air Taxi. Nothing quite worked. Finally, I settled on Dusty’s Air Taxi. I liked the irony: a “Dusty” would be earthy, uneasy in the sky.

At that time, 1989, I’d just finished writing
The Floatplane Notebooks.
In that book a character keeps notebooks about a floatplane he’s building.

O
NE SUMMER DAY BACK
in 1984, five years before I bought
Annabelle,
I was standing in the upper parking lot at Lake Wheeler, a popular lake near my house. Down the hill toward the lake, in a lower parking lot, I saw a parked pickup truck with a boat trailer attached. On the trailer rested something that looked like a small boat with long, folded back wings. Up front, attached to the frame, were two propellers. I could see somebody moving around in the cab of the pickup. I walked down to take a closer look. Yes, it was, by golly, some kind of aircraft.

In the small open cockpit was a flight stick up from the floor, rudder pedals, throttles to the left, and an airspeed indicator on the tiny instrument panel. And there, in glory, sat the pilot’s seat: a bolted-to-the-floor, yellow and green
aluminum lawn chair.

I walked to the open driver’s door of the pickup truck. Inside was a small man with thin, wispy red hair. He wore fishing waders and was pulling a blue football helmet onto
his head. That’s right: he was wearing fishing waders and was pulling a blue football helmet onto his head. I introduced myself, reached into the cab, and shook his hand.

“Tom Purcell,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Are you going to try to fly that thing?”

“I sure am.” He got out of the truck and looked up at me. He was intense and had a twinkle in his eye. He looked obsessed somehow, slightly worried, busy, preoccupied.

“Can I help you out in any way?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, you can. Once I get it in the water and get in it, you can hold me at the dock there until I get her cranked and running.”

“Do you . . . just . . . fold those wings out?”

“Yep. They snap right into place.”

Then he gave me a walk-around tour of his creation, and as we walked I got happier and happier. This was magic.

Mr. Purcell backed his boat-trailered aircraft down into the water. I was standing on a dock, holding on to a rope attached to a lanyard hoop on the nose of the aircraft as it floated out into the water. Mr. Purcell parked his truck, came back, walked into the water, and carefully unfolded and locked the flimsy-looking aluminum and canvas wings into place. From the dock, he climbed down onto the aircraft nose, then into his aluminum lawn chair, and after I turned the aircraft around to face out toward the lake, he asked me to hold it by its tail.

“Don’t turn her loose until I give you the signal,” he said.

Down on my knees on the dock, I held on to the tail section while he produced from somewhere a short lawn mower starting cord with a handle at one end and a knot in the other. Even 1984 was a late date to be using such a cord.

I wondered if he had a paddle, but I didn’t ask.

He wrapped the starter rope on the circular cranker of the left chain saw engine and pulled. Nothing. He pulled again. Nothing. I was holding on. Again. And again. He tried the right engine.
Wee-aaang. Wang-wang-wang-wang.
He looked at me and smiled.

I thought to myself, He’s happy
about getting one engine started.

He tried again and started the other engine. Both propellers were spinning. I felt only a slight tug away from the dock. He looked at me again. He was obviously pleased.

He fastened his seat belt and surveyed the cockpit, almost as if to say good-bye to it. He raised both hands and pointed his index fingers seaward. I turned the little flying boat loose and stood back. Throttles forward, it started moving away, out onto the lake, slowly picking up speed.
Weeeennnnggg.
Out across the water it continued. Would it suddenly lift and fly? Would it suddenly lift and not fly?

Weeeeennngg.
Soon it was leaving a wake, bouncing, throwing up splats of water from each side. Far across the lake, nearing land, it slowed, and then I heard the engines wind down. It turned and began to pick up speed . . . headed not directly back at me, but at an angle to my right. Full steam ahead, again. The sudden high whine of the engines reached me across the water. Several times,
it crossed a boat wake and seemed to bounce into the air, but only for a split second.

Back and forth, back and forth, but it never flew. Returning to the dock with his hand lifted in greeting, Mr. Purcell seemed no less pleased with himself and his creation.

A
T HOME THAT NIGHT
, I made notes. I was a treasure-hunting fiction writer who’d just found a sunken, gold-laden ship—or rather, a nonflying, lawn-chair-laden floatplane.

After several attempts at short stories about a homemade floatplane, I realized that the strange homebuilt craft could fit into my novel-in-progress, then called
Natural Suspension.

Seeing that homebuilt floatplane was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It provided vivid and significant fodder for a novel in need of vivid and significant fodder. The floatplane would belong to the likable yet clumsy head of the Copeland family household, Albert. So I wrote a floatplane into my novel, but I soon deserted that novel to write another,
Walking Across Egypt.

When I returned to the floatplane book, I decided to track down Mr. Purcell, although several years had passed since my floatplane sighting and I’d forgotten his name.

I called the main gate at Lake Wheeler. No, the gatekeeper didn’t remember anybody flying a homebuilt aircraft off the lake, but somebody in the Aeronautical Department at North Carolina State University would probably know. I called a chaplain friend at State and
asked for the phone number of the Aeronautical Department. He looked. No such department, he said, but there was a Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Department. He gave me the number, and I spoke to the department chair. He told me he didn’t know anything about a homebuilt aircraft at Lake Wheeler, but there was a member of his department who might. He gave me a name and number, and I called. No, sorry—but there was another member of the department who might be able to help me. Several days had passed by this time.

“No, I don’t know of a homebuilt airplane flying off Lake Wheeler, but there’s a man at the Department of Transportation here in Raleigh who I’ll bet could help you: Marshall Sanderson. Here’s his phone number.”