This week is the annual EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This brings back memories of a good time we shared over 35 years ago.
Our Piper Cherokee could hold enough fuel to fly well past what our bladders would tolerate, but we didn’t fly that way. We planned every stop — fuel first, restrooms too — and let the country reveal itself in the increments a small plane gives you: Rock Springs WY for the first night, Alliance NE next for gas and bathroom, Yankton SD to make a phone call, and then, finally, circling over a farm outside Alcester, South Dakota, that I hadn’t seen from the air before.
It was 1989. I was forty-two. My Dad was sixty-eight, sitting in the right seat of my 1974 Piper Pathfinder, painted red, white, and blue — an honest airplane that never asked for much and never gave us trouble. We were headed to Oshkosh, to the fly-in, the way pilots go to Mecca — except this time the pilgrimage ran straight through his childhood.
His people were Norwegian. His grandfather had crossed an ocean and then a good part of a continent to end up farming eastern South Dakota, and the family had stayed put the way families did then, generation folding into generation until my grandfather had more children than the land could easily absorb. Some of them farmed anyway. My father did not. He went into printing — Linotype machines, hot lead, the smell of a shop instead of the smell of a barn. But I remember the soil anyway. I’d visited that farm as a boy of ten or so, and what stayed with me wasn’t a story anyone told but a set of smells: hay and diesel and animal warmth inside the barn, the particular rattle of a tractor under me, dust rising gold in a shaft of light through a barn door left open. Did I want to help milk the cows?
We landed at Yankton for fuel and my father called his sister. I don’t remember what either of them said — it was a short call, the kind you make when you’re about to do something better shown than explained. Something like: we’ll be overhead in twenty minutes. Go outside. Look up.
And then we were. Alcester from a thousand feet is not much — a scatter of buildings, a windbreak of trees, fields squared off in the pattern only farmland makes — but down there was a farmhouse, and out in the yard were two people who’d stopped whatever they were doing to come out and watch the sky. We circled twice. My father waved — big, unmistakable — from a thousand feet up at his sister and her husband in the yard below. They waved back, two small shapes going back and forth, back and forth. Then we leveled the wings and kept going east, toward Wisconsin, and neither of us said much of anything, because there wasn’t really anything to say. It was just good.
Oshkosh itself is its own kind of pilgrimage, and if you’ve never been, the thing that’s hard to explain is not the airplanes — though there are more in one place than you will ever otherwise see — it’s the people.
And the crowd starts in the skies as you line up for the Fisk arrival into Oshkosh. The air traffic controllers are out in a field somewhere below and they’re talking continuously. “The red white and blue Cherokee rock your wings! Land on the yellow dot midfield…” Before you know it you’re turning off into the grass and being waved to your parking spot next to so many other airplanes.
Most pilots who fly in tent-camp right under their own wings, sleeping on the grass next to the machine that brought them. Dad and I opted for relative luxury: a dorm room at a local university, actual beds, actual plumbing. I don’t remember the room. Or how we got back and forth to the airport.
What I do remember is the grounds. Tens of thousands of people for a solid week, and no litter. None. If you saw a gum wrapper, you picked it up, the way you’d pick up a dropped tool in someone else’s shop. The shared bathrooms stayed clean not because anyone was assigned to clean them, but because everyone behaved as if they were company in someone else’s house.
It sounds like a small thing to remember thirty-some years later. It isn’t. I’ve described it as renewing my faith in humanity. Each afternoon we gathered along the flight line for the daily air show which was usually punctuated by the contrast between an old biplane and the sound of the latest American fighter aircraft. Amazing sights.
I had been once before, driven in with pilots who’d rented an RV, and learned mostly that I didn’t want to do that again — too many people, too close together, none of the ease of arriving on your own wings. That trip didn’t have the thing this one had. I couldn’t have told you what the thing was, exactly, except that being there with my Dad restored some baseline faith in how people can behave toward each other when they all care about the same unlikely thing.
The flight home took us back through Spearfish, where another of our relatives put us up for the night, and then on to Logan, Utah, for fuel and that bio break.
It was the leg after that — the crossing of the state of Nevada — that I still think about on rough days. The sky was clear. Not a cloud anywhere. And the air was some of the worst turbulence I’ve flown through, before or since. I tried up high, I tried down low, but there was no altitude in that whole stretch of sky that gave us any peace. No smooth air anywhere. Just wind. Dad didn’t get sick. Neither did I. We just held on and let the airplane buck and waited it out, the way you do.
After a time then we crossed low over the Sierras, and somewhere on the descent into the central valley of California the air went calm again, smooth as the farm pond back in Alcester must have been that morning, and the trip was, in every way that mattered, already over.
