On the Wing (4 page)

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.)

On our trips to West Burke, whether we were on our way to Vermont or New Hampshire, my grandmother did the navigating, and I remember well how she struggled to control a huge, ungainly map, on which the routes were laid out in a code of width and weight and color that indicated their place in the hierarchy of roadways. That, I thought, was the kind of map I needed.

In those days, one could have maps for free from local gas stations (which were not yet billed as service stations, though that appellation and the diminishing level of service that it was meant to mask were just around the corner). Since my father worked at a gas station, I could get maps there, of course, but the station stocked only maps of New York and contiguous states. Those would not be enough. I wrote to the company that owned my father's station and supplied him with gas, and I received maps of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. I stapled them to the walls of my room, along with my maps of New York and New Jersey.

While I was studying them, the thought occurred to me that wind and weather might drive me off course, make me drift. I would need maps of the states north and south of my route. I wrote for those, and when they came I added them to the walls of my room, and when I had filled the walls I tried taping some to the ceiling. The ones on the ceiling sagged and billowed, and their corners came unstuck and curled downward. After struggling to keep them flat and fixed, I persuaded myself that I liked the billowing and curling, and I allowed them to billow and curl as they would.

Studying these maps as I did, whether standing at the wall and leaning in at them or regarding them from my bed with my hands clasped behind my head, I made my trip to New Mexico many times before I ever left the family driveway. I felt in imagination the surge and lift of my winged mount beneath me. I saw my flightless coevals, the nation's little groundlings, below me, watching and waving, wishing that they could be me. I saw America's yards and farms laid out like patches in a quilt. I saw it all as others said they had seen it. I was seeing it at second hand, but still something of it came from me—all the pretty girls, to name just one example, sunbathing in their yards, waving at me, beckoning to me, blowing kisses. After a while, I began to fear, as I suppose all armchair travelers do, that the actual journey would be a disappointment, and, little by little, the thought occurred to me that the maps might not be accurate.

“I got these maps from the company that owns my father's gas station,” I said to my friend Spike, “but I'm worried about them.”

“You're afraid that they'll fall on you while you're asleep and smother you?” she suggested.

“No,” I said. “It's not that. It's—look at the way the mapmakers vary the thickness of the lines that represent roads and highways, and the way they use different colors.”

“Very nice,” she said.

“But—suppose they make these maps in such a way that they tend to lead the traveler astray?”

“Astray?”

“I mean, what if they lead people to their gas stations?”

“What?” she asked.

“All the gas companies make maps like these and give them out at their stations, right?”

“Right.”

“Suppose they make the roads going past their stations look more attractive or more interesting, so that people will choose those routes and won't choose other routes, where the gas stations that sell other kinds of gas are located.”

“You're nuts,” she told me.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

To test my theory—and Spike's, I suppose—I wrote to other gas companies. I compared their maps' depictions of the roads along the route that I intended to follow with the version offered by the company that owned the station where my father worked. I imagined traveling the routes that the maps depicted, and tried to decide whether I was being steered toward each company's gas stations. After many long hours of thought experimentation, I came to the conclusion that the maps could not be trusted—and, simultaneously, I discovered that the trip so often taken in my imagination had grown stale.

So I refreshed the trip that had grown stale by deciding to travel without a map. Why travel with a map that you've decided you can't trust anyway? I took all the maps down from my walls and ceiling, folded them up, and put them away in my closet.

Having no map forced me to ask directions of strangers, and along the way I learned that doing so leads to fascinating exchanges, exchanges that are, more often than not, useless, but fascinating nonetheless. If I had it to do over again (in actuality, not in memory, as I am doing it now), I think I might travel with a map. I've decided that they're more trustworthy than I thought—and they are much more trustworthy than the advice of strangers.

Chapter 2

Our Little Secret

I AM SOMETIMES asked to explain the secret of the happiness that Albertine and I have found in each other's company over all the years that we have been together, through thick and thin and through thin and thinner, and when asked I admit quite frankly that the secret is our nearly perfect balance of induced and dynamic lift.

Lift, on a wing, on an airplane, is a matter of relative pressure: less pressure above, pressing down; more pressure below, pushing up. When the pressure's off above and on below, we rise. I am a great believer in lift, unlike Wolfgang Langewiesche, who, in his
Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying,
disparaged lift. It might be fair to say that Langewiesche pooh-poohed the whole idea of lift, coming very close to calling it an illusion, as close as Kurt Gödel came to calling time an illusion in “A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy,” his contribution to the 1949 Festschrift volume,
Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist.
For Langewiesche, the upward mobility of a forward-moving airplane is the result of the reaction of the undersurface of the wing to the force of the air below the wing when the airplane's engine pushes the wing against the air below it at a sufficient angle of attack—that is, with a sufficient upward slant. The air pushes the wing up, in Langewiesche's view, and the wing needn't be an airfoil; it might as well be a sheet of plywood; it could be any plane surface at all. Hence, Langewiesche points out, the name of the vehicle itself, an air(borne) plane. So, which is it: the lowered pressure on the upside of an airfoil or the greater pressure on the underside of a plane at the proper angle of attack? (In certain circles, this is still the subject of lively debate.) For the answer, I turn to Pope and Otis, my quondam mentors Frank and Art:

When an airfoil is presented to the wind at a positive angle of attack, the impact of the air on the under surface of the airfoil produces lift. This kind of lift is called
dynamic lift.
[The] lift which comes from the reduced pressure of the air above an airfoil is called
induced lift.
The total lift is the sum of these values, which is merely the difference between the increased pressure below and the diminished pressure above the airfoil.

F
RANCIS
P
OPE AND
A
RTHUR
S. O
TIS
,
E
LEMENTS OF
A
ERONAUTICS

For Frank and Art, it's not a case of either-or. Both the dynamic and induced forms of lift play their parts.

As it is in flight, so it is in life—my life with Albertine, at any rate.

When Albertine commences an undertaking, she assumes a positive angle of attack and thrusts herself forward, attacking that undertaking head-on, with power and purpose and a plan. The undertaking could be something as simple as a cross-country drive or as complex as “taking Peter out for an airing so that his outlook on life will be refreshed.” The result is the same: the woman produces lift. Her kind of lift is called
dynamic lift.

When I commence an undertaking, I begin conducting thought experiments at once, and in a remarkably short time my head is in the clouds. My kind of lift is called
induced lift.

Through the combined effects of dynamic and induced lift, Albertine and I manage to transport each other over many of life's little obstacles. Ordinarily, she provides the dynamic lift, and I'm the simple airfoil, providing the induced lift. Together, we are a complex airfoil like the one described by Frank and Art.

So it has been for many years, but something happened to Albertine during her recovery from her crash and fracture. She underwent a Baudelairean turn toward childhood, and to my great surprise began to exhibit an inclination and talent for producing induced lift, culminating in her selection of the Electro-Flyer as a vehicle suitable for a cross-country trip. I found this a little alarming. What would such a trip be like with two agents of induced lift and none of dynamic lift? I was relieved to find, while we were packing the Electro-Flyer, that she had reverted to form.

“You know,” I said, squeezing a small bag into a small nook in a corner of the trunk, “in recent years, my favorite journeys, my best journeys, have been the ones I've made in my mind. They have required no shopping, no tickets, no luggage, no packing, and no maps.”

“Mmm,” she said, thereby displaying her practical dynamic-lift side by disparaging my impractical induced-lift side.

“Armchair travel is surely one of the greatest benefits of the human imagination,” I asserted.

“One of its virtues,” she admitted, “is that you get to sleep in your own bed.” She frowned at the pile of things we hadn't been able to find nooks for. “I'm beginning to think that we should have bought a car with a bigger trunk.”

“The tiny trunk makes it more like my aerocycle—which hardly had room for a change of socks.”

“Oh, I do hope we're not going to find it difficult to get our laundry done,” she fretted. “We have only a week's worth of underwear each.”

“We could stuff some more into the pockets in the doors if we got rid of all those maps and turn-by-turn directions and just trusted to hunch, whim, and serendipity.”

“If you're going to travel with me, Peter, you're going to be in a car driven by a woman who knows where she's going.”

“Yeah. I know. I just thought I'd give it one last try.”

“I'm sorry. That's just the way I am.”

“But did we really have to make all our hotel and motel reservations in advance?” I asked. “Couldn't we maybe just wing it, trusting to chance that we'll find a cozy place for the night when night comes on?”

“I used to run a place like the ones we'd be likely to find if we trusted to chance,” she reminded me. “That's why I made reservations at places where I think we can remain dry on rainy nights.”

We took our places in the car. Albertine switched it on, put it into gear, pulled out of the spot in front of our building where we'd parked it for packing, and headed for the corner.

“Well,” I said hopefully, “there's always the chance that we'll get lost.”

Chapter 3

West Bayborough

It is often necessary while flying to determine where one is, or was, or will be, at a given time.

Francis Pope and Arthur S. Otis,
Elements of Aeronautics

I HAD BEEN ON THE ROAD for a couple of hours, enjoying myself quite a bit despite the fact that I couldn't get
Spirit
off the ground, when I began talking to my mount. At first I was just urging her to get up and go, but then, little by little, I began conversing with her as I would have with a traveling companion.