In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

To San Juan and Back Ah, Youth! “O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight—to me she was the endeavor, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret—as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle.” Joseph Conrad, “Youth” Who knows where they are now, those three men, well along in years then, and that more than thirty years ago—pilot and copilot and flight engineer—and living life on the very edge each time they took to the sky in planes that should long ago have been mothballed somewhere in Arizona, fit for little more than a roosting place for birds, abraded by windblown sand, and faded by the sun? I would like to believe that their bones lie bleached high on some Andes peak or in a vast African desert, picked clean by vultures, their flesh taking the air again in the bellies of birds. But not stretched out, leavings of the worms, the narrow aluminum casing surrounding them corroded and wingless and trapped beneath the earth, never meant to go any direction but down. Oh, not these men, who wanted to fly and die flying, whether in flames or writhing metal or the deep, forgetful sea. And where is she, that old crate of a plane that was such a joy to me? Scorched and shredded on some mountain slope or in a steamy jungle or slowly eroding away at the bottom of the sea? Oh, that she not be parked for the ages in the desert, those great engines forever silent, with nothing alive inside her but lizards and scorpions and birds and no sound about her but the ever-howling wind. To San Juan and Back 61 Anyone who has ever heard the thunder of the great radial engines that powered so many of our planes during WWII never forgets the sound, provided he has an ear attuned to such things, as I did and do. Whether it is a nineor twelve- or eighteen-cylinder, I know that throaty roar and will tear myself away from whatever I am doing to see what is producing it: a single-engine AT-6, a twin B-25, or a four-engine B-17 or 24. It is a sound heard so seldom these days, when what passes over is a sleek jet, leaving an indistinct roar, if you can hear it at all, or a turbine-driven prop job, whose puny whine sounds like something at a model airplane show. So it was, standing in a hangar at the Hattiesburg Airport that day back in the early seventies, that I heard a deep rumble and turned from the airplane I was admiring and ran outside and squinted into the western sky, from whence the sound came. And, oh God, it had to be big. That sound, that sound: like a pair of B-17s. In time it came into sight, just above the pines at the end of the runway, gear down, flaps set, throttles back: a DC-6, silver with green markings. No regular approach pattern for that beast—it came straight in, as if anything would dare get in its path. It dropped fast, flared, and not a dozen feet from the end of the runway the main tires squawked, a little puff of smoke trailed from each, and then the nose wheel settled and it was down. The roar of reversed props, application of brakes, and just short of the other end it halted briefly as if to gather breath, rotated, and taxied toward the terminal. “Oh, my God,” I breathed aloud. “A DC-6, a fucking DC-6! ” I have loved airplanes all my life, having learned to fly in my uncle’s Piper Cub at age thirteen and finally earning my pilot’s license. I hung out at the local airport as often as I could and flew as often as a TA stipend would allow. I watched the enormous plane taxi up and turn toward me, its engines finally shutting down, props spinning and slowing and coming to rest. Then the crew popped open a hatch beneath the cockpit, dropped a ladder, and the three exited, stretched, and looked about them, wondering, I suppose, what...

Share