Taking Off (6 page)

We studied the passage in silence, making our individual decisions about what was missing.

“Oh,” said Spike after a while. “So that's it.”

“Just what I thought,” said Marvin.

The rest of us made similar assertions to the effect that our suspicions were now affirmed, but I, because I have never known when to keep my mouth shut, said, in a tone that hid none of the disappointment I felt, “I was hoping there would be diagrams.” The others burst out laughing, the librarian shushed us in the time-honored manner, and my reputation as a humorist grew considerably.

*   *   *

I HAD EXPECTED DIAGRAMS because I knew that if the tale of Dædalus's abetting Pasiphaë's love for the bull had appeared in
Impractical Craftsman,
there would have been diagrams. Many a reader would have attempted to build a replica of the false cow that Dædalus built, the essential equipment for abetting the love of a queen for a bull. I have no doubt about that at all. My grandfathers probably would have made the attempt. If I'd thought I had the skill, I probably would have tried it myself. Of course I would have.

… some of the essential words had been hidden under thick black ink …

Chapter 10

A Source of Motivation

STRETCHED OUT along the bulkhead beside the estuarial reach of the Bolotomy River one morning, Raskol and I were daydreaming in tandem, trading ideas about the things we might be doing if the day were not the sort of lazy summer day that invites a boy to do nothing but loaf and daydream, when the subject of flying arose.

“The subject of flying arose.” That isn't accurate. I realize, upon reflection, that it suggests a chance provocation, the possibility that a light plane buzzed overhead, introducing the subject, or perhaps some other provocation no less apt but less direct, like a bumblebee buzzing by, or a provocative something even less obvious, like the leisurely ascension of the morning mist from the slack surface of the river. To be truthful, as I am struggling to be in this full and frank disclosure, the subject did not simply arise: I injected it into the meandering conversation by recalling my ride in a floatplane.

On a day several summers earlier, I had flown in what was then called a “seaplane” and is now called a “floatplane” while on vacation with my parents and maternal grandparents in the mountains of New Hampshire. After I had made the flight, my first in a plane of any kind, I couldn't stop talking about it.

Allow me a moment here to explore my motives for wanting to talk about it, for wanting to tell others about the experience I had had, because I think I see in those motives the prototypes of my motives for writing my memoirs. In part I was trying to re-create the experience for myself in the telling; in part I was trying to “share the experience,” to allow my listener the vicarious experience of it; in part I was trying to preserve the experience, enclose it in a protective layer of words, within which it would not fade or dim; and in part I was just bragging. None of my friends had flown, and I was, I understood, displaying my distinction every time I brought the subject up, every time I tried to describe for them the sensation of sitting in a light plane (actually, squatting, in a tight space without a seat behind the two seats where the pilot and my father sat), skimming across the water, and then rising slowly into the air.

I injected the subject of flying with this preamble: “It would be neat if we could see Babbington from the air, the way I saw Osopuco Lake and the town of West Burke when I—”

“When you rode in that seaplane,” said Raskol with a stage yawn and a tone that indicated more than clearly that he had heard the seaplane story more often than he had wanted to hear it.

“Yeah,” I said. I wasn't going to force the story on him. He and I were friends. I might have forced the story on a stranger, or on an acquaintance whose goodwill I would have been willing to risk for the satisfaction of reliving the adventure in the telling, but I wouldn't force it on a friend. I fell silent, waiting. Maybe a stranger or an expendable acquaintance would come by.

After a while, Raskol said, with the generosity of friendship, “That must have been a great ride.”

“Yeah,” I said, but without much enthusiasm, since I evidently wasn't going to get to tell him about it all over again.

He put his hands behind his head, with his fingers interlaced, closed his eyes, and said the kindest words a friend can say: “Tell me all about it.”

*   *   *

I BEGAN SLOWLY, as if I were struggling to recover the memory for his benefit. “There weren't many planes up there,” I said. “It's pretty far away from things, and it's not on the way to anywhere, so you don't see many planes in the sky, but a couple of times a day I'd hear a buzzing above me and I'd look up and find it there, turning in a wide arc before coming in for a landing. Or sometimes I'd happen to be looking out across the lake, just enjoying the view, and I'd see it taking off. Of course, I wanted to be in it. I wanted to take off in it, fly around in it, land in it. Some people said that the pilot took hunters deep into the woods. Others said that he flew sick people to hospitals miles away. When I heard them say those things, I'd smile to myself, because they were the things that adults would say, and even think. They would think that a person had to have a reason for owning and flying a plane with pontoons.”

I had flown in what was then called a “seaplane” …

“Fun would be enough of a reason, wouldn't it?”

“That's what I thought. Exactly what I thought.”

“I guess that's where I got it. I must have heard you say it sometime.”

“There was a tavern of some kind in the little town. I never saw it, but my parents and grandparents used to go there in the evenings to have a beer. I think the parents who were vacationing used it as a way of getting away from their kids.”

“In a way, you could say that the kids used it as a way of getting the parents out of their hair,” he interrupted.

“What?” I said, rattled by the interruption.

“Nothing. Sorry. Go on.”

“Where was I?”

“In the tavern, where your parents met the pilot and persuaded him to take you for a ride in the seaplane.”

“I told you that already?”

“Many times, but please tell it again. I keep forgetting the details.”

“Well, they were having a beer at the tavern one night, and the bartender said something to the guy sitting next to them that made them think that he must be the guy who flew the seaplane, so they asked him if he was, and he said yes.”

“Oh, yeah. That's it.”

“They got to talking, and my father bought him a beer and told him that his son watched the plane with obvious longing whenever it flew overhead.”

“Is that what your father said, ‘obvious longing'?”

“That's what he said he said.”

“He's smarter than he looks, your father.”

“Maybe.”

“No offense intended.”

“None taken.”

Chapter 11

In Search of Some Bits of Memory

I PAUSED in my reading, because I had come to the point in my account of the flight in the floatplane beyond which I was going to begin making things up. Albertine, because she is as much friend as lover, said, “Don't stop. Tell me all about it.”

“I hardly remember it,” I said truthfully.

“I hear the sadness in that.”

“And I feel it. These memories fade, no matter how much we wish to hang on to them.”

“Can't you poke and probe and bring it back?”

“I can poke and probe and bring something back, and then I can add to that whatever else comes drifting in on the wind, and out of what I actually remember and what comes drifting in I can make something that resembles a memory.”

“Go ahead. I'd like to hear it.”

“I don't think that it would belong in a full and frank disclosure.”

“Excluding what comes drifting in would be hiding something, wouldn't it?”

“Are we going to chop a little logic here for my sake?”

“I think I'm going to argue that for you a remembered experience now consists not only of the memory but of the associations that cling to the memory—”

“Like the bits of cat fur that clung to my zwieback when I dropped it on my grandmother's kitchen floor.”

“When you were an itty-bitty baby boy.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly what I mean, I think.”

“I can't recall zwieback now without recalling the bits of cat fur stuck to it, and the cat, and the way the cat curled up beside my grandmother on her scratchy scarlet sofa, and the sofa itself, and on and on.”

“‘The memories of childhood have no order, and no end.'”

“Yes, and I've come to think that the reason they have no end is that the man recalling the boy has a boundless capacity for invention.”

“Try to curb that tendency, climb into that floatplane, and tell me what went on.”

“Let's see. I remember a lot of aluminum, aluminum sheets, the panels of the doors, the floor. I remember being squeezed into the plane, behind the seats, but I don't really remember my squeezing in, the act of getting into the plane, or getting into place behind the seats. That memory is already confused with others, and with an image of a floatplane bobbing beside a dock from some movie or other. I think it's a movie called
Day of the Painter.
I do remember being behind the seats, in a tight space—”

“It wasn't a four-seater?”

“What?”

“It sounds as if you were squeezed in behind the pilot and your father.”

“I was—I think.”

“If the pilot flew hunters into the woods, I would think he'd have a plane with three seats available for passengers rather than just one.”

“You're right! I was behind the second row of seats.”

“Who was sitting in the second row?”

“My grandfather was on the left.”

“And?”

“My grandmother was on the right.”

“And your mother?”

“She didn't come along. She didn't want to. I'd forgotten that.”

Chapter 12

I Seek a Little Help from My Friends

IN ONE OF MY GRANDFATHER'S old, yellowing issues of
Impractical Craftsman,
I came upon an article titled “Motorcycles of the Air.” I read it with mounting excitement. This was no visionary, might-be, could-be, someday-in-the-distant-future article. The flying motorcycle, or aerocycle, that it described was built entirely out of things that I knew existed. All I needed was a motorcycle, fabric, tubing, and a few other things that an enterprising guy like me could find almost anywhere. This little airplane could be built. According to the article, it could be built in the family garage in a few weekends. “Could be built in the family garage in a few weekends”: I still use that claim as a joke in my internal running commentary on the world. At that time, to me, a few weekends seemed a reasonable time for building a small plane. I calculated how many hours that might be. “A few,” I reasoned, might mean four or five, six at the most. The amateur handyman couldn't be expected to put in more than eight hours a day on a weekend, after a week full of work or school, so the entire project ought to take less than a hundred hours to complete. If I got a friend to help me, we could do the job in fifty hours—not much more than one working week—and I had several friends who would be willing to help me with a project like this, not just one. With so many cooks in the family garage, I might be flying in a couple of days!

Impractical Craftsman
offered a complete set of plans, full-scale. “Just roll them out on the garage floor, and you can assemble the aerocycle right on top of the drawings, ensuring that everything fits as it should—and ensuring that you don't leave anything out!” I could understand that working in that way was a good idea, but our garage didn't have a floor at that time, just a layer of sand, and the cost of the plans was not only more than I had to spend but more than I would have been willing to spend if I'd had it. Frankly, I scoffed at the idea that it was necessary to have the full-scale plans in order to complete the project successfully. They might be necessary for the plodding, literal-minded sort of builder who had to be told which way to turn each screw, but not for a clever kid with a good imagination. The pictures in the article ought to be enough for a start, and when in the course of building the aerocycle I got down to a detail that wasn't visible in the pictures, I could pause, think about it, and make a few drawings of my own to work it out before building it. The technique had worked for Leonardo. It ought to work for me.