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Short-Hop Notebook: Dakota Sky
- University of Missouri Press
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11 Short-Hop Notebook Dakota Sky How different North Dakota felt! I had spent a week flying in the canyons of Idaho—a mountainside off each wing tip, a wild river below—with the thought of engine failure strictly repressed, of course: no use thinking about it where you simply can’t afford one! I had flown down into North Dakota through night, a black night, with nothing visible but the beacons along the airway; and again the forced-landing idea had been switched off—there are lots of badlands on that route. Toward morning, not to get too low on gas, I had sat down on an Auxiliary Field to wait for daylight. It was deserted. (Those fields are not built to serve a town, but to serve the airway—they sit there, every hundred miles or so, their boundaries outlined by lights, just in case.) Parked there under the beacon tower , I had fallen asleep right in the airplane. I woke up and it was daylight. I started her up, and took off. Still dull in mind, I cleared the fence. There it was: Landings unlimited. You cleared the fence and you had cleared everything. As far as the eye could see, big fields—flat as a table and bigger than airports. And smoothly cultivated: where farm machinery can roll, airplane tire can also roll. It was fall, and most of them were stubble. The nice, combed-looking stubble of machine-sown wheat: a guaranteed surface , along with unlimited room. “This,” I thought, “is 100 percent O.K. This is the rose without the thorn; this is the meal that is all dessert; this goes in easy.” In fact, I swear I had a strong sensation as if I were a little boy again and had just been handed a dish of whipped cream with chocolate. 12 Prairie Sky “I think I’ll just roll my wheels on that one.” I had only flown a minute, but why not? “I’ll fly straight for exactly three minutes, and then close my throttle.” Nothing to it—just glide straight ahead. I thought it would be fun to roll up to a fence and jump it and sit right down again, so I did. Why not? “I think I’ll spiral up to 1,000 feet and cut my ignition and stop my prop.” Done. Now, I don’t claim it is a red-hot and brand-new idea that North Dakota is different from New England. I tell it to show you how a pilot reacts to the country : he does react; he can’t help it. And not as a tourist; he is not ever “just looking .” He has business with the country, and the country with him. —Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of Stick and Rudder, from his essay “American Air” in the book A Flier’s World ...