Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

Dayton, Terre Haute, St. Louis, Muskogee followed in uneventful succession. Then came the towns that were small and displayed no signs on barns or roofs to tell her where she was. Not recognizing any of the landmarks and flying by at 100 miles an hour, AE noted that one small town seemed like any other. She checked her map, then scrutinized the terrain under her wing. It was no use. Each town was just another checkerboard of streets and roofs, trees and fields, railroads and highways. Frankly, she admitted to herself, she did not know where she was.

Her confusion mounted as she flew west, but at last she found an airport which, she was happy to discover, was in Fort Worth. She now decided to stay on course. Once off the ground, however, the light plane hit bumpy weather. It lurched and climbed and dived; and to Amelia’s constant annoyance, her map kept slipping from her lap. Flying the plane with one hand, she found with the other a safety pin in her handbag. She picked the map up from the floor and clumsily pinned it to her dress.

AE fought her plane through the updrafts and downdrafts. She scanned the instrument panel, then noticed that the gas-gauge needle was leaning toward empty. She reached up to pump fuel from the reserve tank to the gravity tank. During the refueling the pin loosened from her dress, a gust of wind swept into the cockpit, and the map started to blow against the side of the fuselage. Amelia let go of the stick and grabbed for the map. The plane angled into a sharp dive. Quickly taking the stick again, she pulled back too hard; the Avian went into a steep climb. The map, flapping against and over the side, whipped out of the cockpit. Amelia grumbled. Now she could not possibly determine where she was. She held her last known course, south of west, and kept on flying. She hoped that something would turn up.

Finally, to the north, she noticed a highway. It was busy with cars crawling into the slanting sun. Amelia turned the plane and followed the road, her only guide across the state; when it ended, abruptly and with disheartening finality, she was completely without bearings. The sun sank behind the mountains in the west, leaving a swath of purple haze along the length of the horizon. It began to get dark too fast for her to establish any orientation with the ground. Amelia decided that she would have to find a place to land—soon.

Ahead in the dusk she noticed some houses grouped about a solitary oil derrick. She hoped that they would yield to a small town nearby. She throttled back and eased the plane down into a shallow dive, then circled low, looking for possible places to land. There were none, and her heart sank as she thought of running out of fuel and having to make a forced landing. Then, flying over the town, her spirits revived as she considered an alternative, at once brilliant and desperate. The main street, which was blessedly empty of traffic, was long enough and wide enough to accommodate her plane. With decision born of necessity, she swung the Avian into a low, wide turn and came around, nose down, over the trees that marked the end of Main Street. Because of the high altitude of the land, the plane came in fast, but Amelia dropped the tail smartly, held the nose up straight, and stalled expertly onto the dirt road. A grin creased wide across her face as she rolled through the center of the town. She was, she soon discovered, in Hobbs, New Mexico.

The people of the town turned out in force to see who the sudden and unconventional visitor was. They were not only surprised to see a plane parked in the middle of Main Street, but aghast to find a woman seated at the controls. And when the woman flier took off her helmet and goggles, they were shocked at her appearance. The sun had burned a red outline on her face, and when Amelia looked out to greet her welcoming committee, she looked exactly like a wide-eyed owl.

Amelia climbed out of the plane and asked some of the men to help her fold the wings and park the Avian off to the side of the street. Then, as if in ironic commentary on the way she looked, she walked to the Owl Café for something to eat. She made a dinner of breakfast—fried eggs, bread and butter, and milk.

After a night of cool and refreshing sleep in the high altitude, Amelia rose early the next morning in the hope of getting off at dawn. Again she planned to negotiate reliable Main Street. Down she rolled over the dirt road for the take-off. Then the left tire blew out. AE chopped the throttle and cut the switch. She shook her head, then grinned. It seemed that her troubles would never stop. The nosing over in Pittsburgh, the loss of the map, the emergency landing in town, and now a flat tire. She laughed at her new predicament.

While the tire was being patched, Amelia went back to the Owl Café and had the same breakfast of the night before. When she climbed back into the cockpit, she felt that the repaired tire was getting soft. The men who had done the job assured her that she was in error. Convinced but still suspicious, she took off once more down the street and happily into the air.

She had been told in Hobbs that if she flew to the southeast, she would find in about a hundred miles either a river to the right or a railroad with a highway to the left. Or was it a railroad to the left and a highway to the right? Which one, they had carefully explained to her in town, depended on whether she was more west than east or more east than west. As it had often happened when she became lost in her car and had asked for the way to a certain highway or town, she didn’t pay close attention to the directions. Now she wasn’t sure which was which and what was what. She looked down for guidance from the rivers that coursed through the land, but they snaked such a confusion of meanderings that she did not know which one to follow.