Taking Off (4 page)

I flew part of the way. That's true. As I carefully said later in the press conference, I also taxied part of the way, before taking off and upon landing. I would say now, years beyond the influence of Miss Clam Fest's strapless gown, based on the sober calculations of an essentially honest man, that I flew a total of about 180 to 200 feet on the way out to New Mexico. My longest sustained period of flight might have covered six feet. For the rest of the outbound trip, I was on the ground, “taxiing.” On the way back, I flew nearly 1,800 miles, but I was a passenger in a Lockheed Constellation, and
Spirit of Babbington
was in the luggage compartment, disassembled, in crates. There. The record is straight.

Chapter 5

Oh, the Squalor

THE TRAIN ROLLED ON, carrying Albertine and me from Babbington to Manhattan, away from my past and toward our future. I noticed with a mixture of surprise and sadness how squalid the buildings beside the tracks were. All the businesses that the commercial buildings housed seemed to be involved in some sort of salvage, and the dwellings looked as if the passage of the trains so near had weakened them, made them list and tilt. Human life and all of its impedimenta began to seem senseless, fragile and impermanent, poorly made, like my life, like the story of my life, my rickety story.

“You're being quiet,” said Albertine. “Is something bothering you?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Nothing.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“You always know, don't you?”

“Always.”

“I've been watching the scenery roll by, thinking about the squalor of it all, the way people mar the landscape, littering it with their junk, and I've been drawing the inevitable analogy between this landscape that we're passing through and the history of Babbington, the way I passed through that history, and the way I've littered it with my junk—”

“What junk would that be, exactly?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Come on, Birdboy, speak your mind.”

“The story of my solo flight to Corosso—”

“Are you calling that junk?”

“It's like one of those shacks along the tracks: rickety, jerry-built, cobbled together out of bits and pieces, not at all sturdy enough to—”

I didn't want to say it.

“Stand up under close scrutiny?” she suggested.

“Right,” I said with a sigh.

“I see,” she said. “And with the controversy that's developing over the redefinition of the town, some bright young reporter is going to start investigating the central and essential legend—”

“—the Legend of the Birdboy of Babbington—”

“—and discover that the legendary birdboy has wings of clay.”

“That's it.”

“Then you'd better get to work.”

“On a cover-up?”

“A full and frank disclosure, I think.”

Chapter 6

Dreams of Flying

I HAD DREAMS in which I flew, of course. I still do. The manner of my flying in those dreams, and the style of my flying, has not changed with the passage of time. In my dreams, as a man, I fly as I flew as a boy. Essentially, I drift. Most often I jump from a height—a cliff, a balcony, a bridge—and I drift slowly toward the ground. I am able to will myself forward, but I remain upright, or nearly upright, in the position I would expect to land in, prepared to plant my feet on the ground. I seem always about to land, to come to earth, though I may keep drifting forward, or gliding forward, for a long time, covering quite a bit of distance. I never seem to begin a flight with the intention of going forward, or going in any horizontal direction at all. I seem to intend only to let myself drop slowly, safely, gifted as I am with the power of flight, from a high place to a lower place. Traveling, getting somewhere in some direction, seems to come along as an afterthought, almost as if, once dropping slowly in my controlled fashion, I let myself be carried by a breeze, or by an inclination. Part of the pleasure of these dreams seems to come from this accidental aspect of flight, the notion that it seems to free me not only from the weight imposed by gravity but from the purposefulness imposed by a destination. I do not fly to get anywhere, but only to be a flier, or—simpler still—I fly because I am a flier.

I also had
daydreams
of flying, waking dreams, wishes and fantasies, but they were quite different from my sleeping dreams of flying. My daydreams were about getting somewhere, or about getting away from where I was and flying to somewhere else. They were about escape and exploration, and they were deliberate. I launched my daydreams as I might have launched a flying machine. I got into the dream and took off. Often I launched one of these daydreams on a Sunday, when I was in the back seat of the family car, and my family was out for a Sunday drive.

There were parkways on Long Island, highways built to resemble country roads, with bridges faced with rustic-cut stone, wooden railings and wooden dividers between the opposite lanes, light poles of wood, and landscaping that was designed to look as if the hand of man had not been involved in it. Parkways were ideal for a Sunday drive, the next best thing to a country road. These parkways still exist, but the density of the traffic has made them less attractive for a Sunday drive. The density of traffic has made the whole concept of the Sunday drive less attractive.

On either side of the parkway's roadway, running alongside it, there was a pathway. I think that I am right in saying that I never saw anyone walking along one of those pathways, and it occurs to me now that the paths may have been provided more as an element of landscaping than as a way that was intended for actual use by hikers or bicyclists. They were, perhaps, intended to heighten or strengthen the impression of driving along a country road by evoking the notion of a footpath that one might walk or hike with rucksack and alpenstock, or to provide the expectation that one might while driving see someone else doing the hiking, a generous someone who thus completed the country-road impression while allowing the driver and passengers to remain comfortably seated in the family car.

For the boy sitting in the back seat of
my
family's car, the pathway was more interesting than the roadway. It wandered a bit, for one thing. The road may have been made to resemble a country road, but its route had been laid out to eliminate as far as possible anything that stood in the driver's way, including the hills and turns that make a country road a pleasant meander. The land beside the roadway had not been flattened as the roadway had. In fact, I think that if I were to take the trouble to do the research, I would find that it had been deliberately contoured to give the illusion of land in a natural state, uneven, untamed, and that when the little pathway had been built the landscapers had made it meander, within limits, like a miniature of the country road that the parkway was intended to suggest. The path had its ups and downs, its meanders and rambles and digressions. It had stretches that seemed a bit off course. Now and then it would disappear from view behind a clump of trees, becoming all the more attractive for having disappeared.

As we rolled along the parkway, I followed the pathway with my eyes, and in my daydreams I imagined moving along the pathway in a kind of hovercraft. It rose no more than a couple of feet above the surface, but it flew, though I have no idea how. As it flew, it was utterly silent, since it was powered by wishful thinking, by my powerfully propulsive wish to be out of the back seat of the family car.

Chapter 7

On Intention and Travel

ALBERTINE AND I ROLLED ON, in the stutter step of a Long Island Rail Road commuter train, making all the stops. I sat beside the window, looking out, daydreaming. There was no rambling path beside us, but my daydreams no longer need the stimulus of a rambling path. These days, I ramble most of the time, though I rarely go anywhere.

“I wish we could go somewhere now,” I said to Al suddenly. “Right now, this minute.”

“Where do you want to go?” she asked lazily. She was curled on her side with her head on my shoulder, trying to doze.

“Nowhere,” I said truthfully, “or anywhere. I am convinced that the best travel is travel undertaken without a destination, just wandering. I am not the first to say that the slower the traveler goes, the more he sees. If I could, I would set out now and walk, hither and yon, following a course like that of the river Mæander.”

“Why don't we?”

“Because we're tethered here.”

“Can't we loose the surly bonds?”

“Not until we've paid our debts and put enough aside to finance a ramble and the time that it would take.”

“But we'll have that goal?”

“Yes. The goal of traveling without a goal.”

“It's our intention. Shall we put this in writing and ink the pact?”

“Let's just say it out loud and shake on it. Or make love on it.”

“It is our intention to work very, very hard to pay off our debts and put some money aside and then to walk out our door on the way to nowhere.”

“Without a map, without a destination.”

“But every night we'll stop somewhere to have a hot shower, a fabulous meal, and a dreamy sleep in a comfy bed.”

“If possible.”

“I'm going to insist on that.”

“But that means that we would have a destination—actually, a series of destinations—a destination for every night.”

“Even the river Mæander winds somewhere safe to sea.”

Chapter 8

One in a Line of Impractical Craftsmen

THE LOW-FLYING VEHICLE of my daydreams, strong, swift, and silent, was derived from an article in
Impractical Craftsman
magazine. I was a faithful reader of this magazine. So was my father. Both of my grandfathers were subscribers, and they had made many projects from plans published in its pages or ordered from its Projects Department. I had made a couple of things from
Impractical Craftsman
plans myself. They gave me satisfaction, not only the satisfaction of having completed a job, made a thing, but also the satisfaction of taking my place in the family line of impractical craftsmen. Dædalus was the household god of
Impractical Craftsman.
The masthead of each issue included a small drawing of him (with his disobedient son beside him), and the best of the projects in the magazine were truly daedal: ingenious, cleverly intricate, and diversified.

My father had also made things from plans in
IC,
as its devotees called it, but he tended to prefer the plans in other, less visionary, magazines for backyard builders, and he would usually build useful, boring things like bedside tables and chests of drawers rather than the marginally useful but intriguingly complicated mechanical, electromechanical, and electronic gadgets that my grandfathers and I favored.

I am wronging my father somewhat by suggesting that some shortcoming made him the sort of person who lacked the daring to venture beyond making simple pine tables and chests. Certainly he fell short of my grandfathers, and even of me, in his willingness to undertake a project that promised long periods of baffling, exacting work and little chance of success, but he wasn't entirely immune to the desire to stretch himself out into the realm of the unbuildable. I recall that he became excited about an
IC
project that, if it had been completed successfully, would have resulted in an early form of wireless television remote control. He never succeeded in getting the device to work, and it “plagued” him, as my mother moaned when he sank into a blue funk over his failure. As I recall the gadget, it wasn't going to do anything more than turn the television set on and off and raise or lower the volume. Before my father began this project, I had already built, from a kit advertised in the back pages of
IC,
an “electric eye” that would have done the job of turning the set on and off and could have been triggered by a flashlight from my father's chair, which would have qualified it as a wireless remote control, so it seemed to me that I could have solved half of his problem without really trying, and I felt a brief superiority until I began to try to figure out how the electric eye could be modified to control the volume and saw how much more difficult that was. My father dismantled the device that he had built and reassembled it several times, checking off the steps in the article systematically each time, but never could make it work. He banished it to a spot on the bottom shelf of his huge, cluttered workbench in the basement, but the anticipation of reaching a goal, a destination, had infected him with determination, and now he could not stop thinking about the idea of remote control for the television set. He would sit in his favorite chair, watching television, dreaming of a way to control it from where he sat, chewing the bitter cud of failure.

My father must have been one of the country's greatest television enthusiasts in those early days. His chair sagged nearly to the floor from the thousands of hours he had spent in it, pursuing his hobby. If the industry had known about his devotion to the medium, its captains would probably have rewarded him somehow. They might have given him a dinner. They might have given him a remote control, if they had one that worked.

One evening, while he sat there watching and brooding, the thought dawned on my father that he could achieve remote control if he simply removed the essential controls from the cabinet that held the television set, extended the wires that connected them to the rest of the circuitry, and placed them beside his favorite chair, where he could twiddle the dials at a distance from the set itself, remotely. Making the modifications was a tedious task, but not a difficult one, and he accomplished it in a few evenings. He drilled a hole in the floor under the place where the set was positioned and ran the wires through that hole. In the basement, he ran them along the rafters to another hole under the position of his chair and up through that hole to the living room, where he connected them to the controls. To house the controls, he built a handsome pine box that he kept at his side on the table between his chair and my mother's. He was a contented man.