Taking Off (25 page)

As I approached the intersection, I suddenly found myself surrounded by motorcycle cops. I thought I was being arrested.

“Do you have a license to fly that thing?” asked one of the cops.

“Heck,” I said with all the bravado I could manage, “I don't even have a license to
drive
this thing!”

They roared at that. At least I think they did. They seemed to be laughing, and their motorcycles roared.

One of the cops pointed in the direction of the platform, and I understood then that I was expected to stop there and allow the mayor to give me a send-off. That was fine with me, because standing beside the mayor was Miss Clam Fest, a young beauty just a couple of years out of high school but already more woman than girl, wearing a white bathing suit with her Miss Clam Fest banner draped across her alluring figure. I headed straight for her.

The mayor intercepted me, putting a firm hand on my shoulder, turning me toward the crowd, and announcing, “Citizens of Babbington, here is your Birdboy, Peter—ah—Lee-roy.”

The applause was friendly, but light.

“Citizens of Babbington, fellow Babbingtonians, denizens of our cozy bayside community, friends and neighbors,” said the mayor, to the best of my recollection, “we are about to witness something truly extraordinary. We are about to witness the fulfillment of a dream. This boy, our own Peter Lee-roy, had a dream, the dream of flight. Who among us has not had that dream? Peter, however, has done something that most of us will never do. He has had the—dare I say it?—gumption to put wings on his dream. To put wings on it, wheels under it, and an engine on the front of it. In other words, he has taken that dream and made it a blueprint for reality. Now, many people criticize our public schools.”

A critical murmur spread through the crowd.

“Hardly a day goes by without some crank letter arriving in my office filled with groundless complaints about the collapse of standards in the schools. Well, let me tell you something: this plucky lad is a product of those schools. And I think we can be proud of him.”

A smattering of applause.

“His teachers tell me—and he may be surprised to find that I've been doing a little checking up on him—that he's an imaginative boy, inclined to dream, often distracted, and prone to digression, but they are convinced that he's got a head on his shoulders. Perhaps that is why they recommended him wholeheartedly for a summer session at the prestigious Faustroll Institute in distant New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.”

The mayor paused, turned slightly toward me, and applauded me in a formal, rather than enthusiastic, way. The crowd took the cue and applauded as well, and Miss Clam Fest blew me a kiss. I wondered if she would fit on the seat behind me and whether she had ever been to New Mexico.

“And so,” said the mayor, “one of our own leaves today to prepare himself for the great struggle that we as a nation are engaged in, the struggle to make the world safe for democracy. Young Peter and those other bright-eyed young men—and young women—like him—including—ah—”

He consulted a sheet of paper.

“—Matthew Barber—”

He shaded his eyes and looked out at the crowd. Matthew, a couple of rows back, raised his hand, and memory—injecting a recollection from the third grade—made me think for a moment that he was going to ask to go to the bathroom.

“—who will be attending a summer institute for future pharmacists, coincidentally also in New Mexico, although Matthew will be traveling by regularly scheduled commercial airliner—they are the bright hope of a nation facing a foe with incomprehensible animosities and aims, a foe purely and simply evil. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Peter has received a communication from the federal government in Washington—which his mother kindly brought to my attention—wishing him, and I quote, ‘the best of luck in your … endeavors.'”

He paused. He gripped my shoulder more tightly. He set his jaw.

“Our hopes ride with him,” he said.

The hopes of the nation should have felt like too great a burden for a kid to bear, too heavy a weight of responsibility for the
Spirit of Babbington
to get off the ground, but I relished the burden, since it made Miss Clam Fest smile and sigh and flutter her lashes.

In something of a daze, I made my way through a phalanx of cops to the aerocycle. The applause now was really something, loud and genuine. I had become the teenage hero of my cozy bayside community. I felt admired, and I felt that I deserved admiration. I felt capable and strong and daring.

I mounted the aerocycle, came down hard on the kick-starter, and rode off into the sunset, or into the direction of the place where sunset would occur later that evening, with the Kap'n Klam banner clattering behind me.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

Will Peter fly the aerocycle all the way to the Land of Enchantment?

Will the flyguys return Albertine as promised?

Will Peter matriculate at the prestigious Faustroll Institute?

Or will he

FALL

to his

DEATH?

Don't miss the thrilling continuation of Peter and Albertine's exploits in

FLYING BOOK 2
:

ON THE WING

 

Read on for an excerpt.

 

 

 

Copyright © 2007 by Eric Kraft.

Chapter 1

Without a Map

Traveling ought [ … ] to teach [the traveler] distrust; but at the same time he will discover how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance.

Charles Darwin,
The Voyage of the Beagle

LO! THE BIRDBOY WAS ON THE WING, figuratively speaking. I was on my way, taxiing westward, urging
Spirit of Babbington
up, up, and away, but not managing to get the thing off the ground. Had I been my present age, I might have blamed the flightlessness of
Spirit
on its weighty freight of metaphorical implications, its heavy burden—in the old sense of “meaning.” It stood for the contrast of lofty goals with leaden deeds, of grand urges with petty talents, of soaring ambitions with earth-bound achievements, but at the time I wasn't thinking of the weight of
Spirit
's significance, or even of the reason that it wouldn't fly; I was simply frustrated and annoyed and embarrassed. I believed that the well-wishers along the roadside were beginning to consider me a hoax or, what seemed worse, a failure. Actually—as I learned from their testimony years later—they thought that I was being generous to them, staying on the ground as I passed to allow them a good look at me and my machine, to allow them to hoist their babies onto their shoulders and afford them the inspiration of a good view of the bold Birdboy. In a letter to the
Babbington Reporter
on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my flight, one of them recalled the experience:

I'll never forget that day. I watched him as he passed by, and you could just see the determination in his face, the keen gaze in his eyes, the way he looked straight ahead, toward the west, and you said to yourself, “This is a boy who knows where he's going.” It was inspiring, I tell you. It was inspiring, and it was a little daunting, too. Seeing him go by, on his way, made you ask yourself, “Do
I
know where
I'm
going?” It is no exaggeration, no exaggeration at all, to say that his example, and the introspection it inspired, made me what I am today.

Anonymous Witness

*   *   *

I HAD PLANNED MY TRIP to New Mexico as a series of short hops, because when I was in the fourth grade my teacher used to begin every school day by writing on the chalkboard a few of what she called Pearls of Wisdom, requiring us to copy them into notebooks with black-and-white mottled covers, and among her pearls was Lao-Tzu's famous statement of the obvious, that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and also because I had been required, in fourth-grade arithmetic, to calculate how many steps my fourth-grade self would have to take to complete that journey of a thousand miles. (I've forgotten the answer; but my adult self has just measured his ambling stride and calculated that it would take him 1,649,831 steps.) In advance of the journey to New Mexico, I tried to calculate the number of hops that would be required. At first, I imagined that I might cover 300 miles per hop, 300 miles per day. At that rate, the trip out, which I estimated at 1,800 miles, would require just six hops, six days. However, when I daydreamed that trip, it felt rushed. I didn't seem to have enough time to look around, explore the exotic sights, sample the local cuisine, meet the people, talk to them, fall in love with their daughters, get gas, or check the oil. So I decided to cover only 100 miles per daily hop. At that rate, the trip would require eighteen hops, eighteen days. (That was my calculation. It would have worked for a crow; it didn't work for me, as you will see.) My friend Matthew Barber would be making the trip to New Mexico by commercial airliner, in a single hop, which seemed to me pathetically hasty.

When I had decided on eighteen hops, I phoned my French teacher, Angus MacPherson, who was one of the sponsors of my trip, and said, as casually as I could. “I figure I can do it in eighteen hops.”

“Do what?”

“Get to New Mexico.”

“‘Eighteen hops'? Why do you say ‘hops'?”

“That's the way I see it,” I said. “I take off, fly a hundred miles, and land. It's just a short hop.”

“I wouldn't call it a hop.”

“Why?”

“‘Hop' makes it sound too easy, Peter. It makes it sound as if any boy could do it, as if not even a boy were required. A rabbit, for example, might make the journey in a certain number of hops, given enough time and carrots.”

“Oh.”

“Say ‘stages,'” he said, suddenly inspired, “like pieces of the incremental journey of a stagecoach. That has some dignity, given the weight of its historical association with western movies, settler sagas, and the lonely yodeling of cowpokes on the vast prairies. As a traveler by stages, you will be putting yourself in the long line of westward voyagers, making yourself a part of America's restless yearning for what I think we might call westness. And
stage
has a nice ring to it.
Hop
does not ring at all. It sounds like a dull thud on a wet drum. Take it from me: go by stages, not by hops.”

So I went by stages, though I had planned to go by hops. I think that I would have reported here that I had gone by hops, despite Mr. MacPherson's counsel, if it were not for the fact that
hops
suggests too much time spent in the air. Because being in the air is what makes a hop a hop,
hop
suggests, it seems to me, that the hopper is in the air for the entire length of each hop. “The entire length of each hop” would be more time in the air than I actually did spend in the air, and I am firmly committed to total honesty in this account. I went by stages, on the ground, along roads, with a great deal of divagation and an occasional hop when I was for a moment a few inches, sometimes a foot, in the air.

Making the trip in stages confirmed in me a tendency that had been growing for some time: the preference for working in small steps, for making life's journey little by little. I think that this tendency may have been born on the earliest clamming trips I made with my grandfather, when I watched him clamming, treading for clams by feeling for them with his toes, and I learned, without giving it any thought, that a clammer acquires a peck of clams one clam at a time, that the filling of a peck basket is a kind of journey. Whether Lao-Tzu had anything to say about the connection between clamming and life's journey, I do not know, but I do know that there came a time, sometime after my youth, when I turned my step-by-small-step tendency into a guiding principle, and I began deliberately to live one small step at a time. Living according to this principle has meant that many of life's jobs have taken me longer than they might have been expected to take. Many of them are still in the process of completion, and I know people who would count “growing up” among these, but I swear to you that I do work at them all, a little bit at a time. So, for example, I write my memoirs as I've lived my life, a little bit each day, hop by hop.

*   *   *

I TRAVELED WITHOUT A MAP, though that was not my original intention. I had intended to travel with a map, because I had thought that I needed a map, and I was convinced that I needed a special map, a superior map, that “just any map” would never do. I already had maps of the United States, of course—several in an atlas, more in an encyclopedia, and others in a gazetteer that showed the typical products of various regions—but I felt that none of those would do. They were maps, but they weren't aviators' maps. I supposed that I needed maps like—but superior to—those that automobile navigators used, the sort of map that my grandmother wrestled with every summer when my parents and I traveled with my grandparents to West Burke, Vermont—and, later, West Burke, New Hampshire—my grandfather at the wheel of their Studebaker, as pilot, and my grandmother beside him, as navigator.

I should explain the two West Burkes. In 1854, fugitive transcendentalists from Burke, Vermont, established West Burke, Vermont, as a utopian community. When, in time, some of West Burke's residents came to feel that the town had, like Burke before it, fallen toward an earthbound state, that commerce and government had become the preoccupations of the majority of their fellow citizens, that the community's increasing materialism was no longer hospitable to their pursuit of spiritual truth, no longer conducive to their everyday effort to see the world globed in a drop of dew, they left the town, headed in an easterly direction (rejecting, resisting, or reversing that restless American yearning for westness), passed through the town of Burke, and moved to New Hampshire, just a short eastward hike away. There they established a new settlement of their own. Logically, this new town might have been named East Burke; defiantly, however, the erstwhile residents of West Burke, Vermont, named this new town West Burke, as an assertion that it was the true West Burke, and that the Vermont version had become a travesty of everything that it ought to have been. (Later still, New Hampshirites disturbed by the presence of a West Burke in their state where one did not logically belong, incorporated their own town of Burke, just east of West Burke, thereby legitimizing the name geographically.)