I just talked to my Grandma a couple days ago, but it was out of necessity because when was relaying me info about my stepmom who was in the hospital. I need to do this regularly. My dad just sent me the greatest story about my grandfather (who passed away years ago), and my Grandma. My dad is a writer and a storyteller at heart and although I know he is brilliant and hilarious, the combination I got this morning of an old story that I had never hear (which is rare), was such a nice surprise to wake up to. I want to post the story here so that I don’t forget to talk to my Grandma about it the next time I talk to her.
Here is what he wrote me…
“This must have been around, I’m guessing, March or April of 1947. My parents had just been married for a year and a half, my father was the manager of the Baton Rouge, La. airport, and so they lived there. My mother is from a very small town 50 miles south of Kansas City called LaCygne, Kansas (pop. 800) but my grandfather, a simple farmer, my mother’s farmer, had told my father quite accurately that there was a very small little regional airport there in LaCygne, Kansas (but I trust the Guntersville International Airport would put it to shame.) Okay, so my father, a former WWII Spitfire pilot, veteran of the Battle of Britain when he was 21, and now a young man of about 29 or 30 and manager of an airport and had a love of flying that rivals your own, but the point is, I can’t even imagine the cockiness he must have had about himself as a pilot and while still very young and full of both testosterone and flying hour. So he borrows a small plane (you’d know better than I what a “small plane” would be in 1946, but I suspect it was only too heavy to fly due to all the instrumentation and computers on board, that’s just a guess on my part, but anyway, for my mother, who was then only about 24 and 7 months pregnant WITH ME – I was along on this family anecdote thank you very much, even though I was sloshing around inside my mother, not yet born, so I was what conservatives call a baby with a soul and what liberals call just easily expendable fetal tissue. Now I normally hang with any Volvo full of whacked-o tree-huggers politically but in this case, since it was me, let’s just say for purposes of this story, that is was a BABY, okay?
Okay, so enough pre-flight checklist, let’s tell this simple tale of woe.
We pick up our story after my father has been flying with his young pregnant wife in some small plane from Baton Rouge, La. to the tiny airport at LaCygne, Kansas and my father said it was late afternoon and then evening and then as night fell, he still can’t find this tiny airport. (Come to find out much later, the airport existed, but there was no damn reason to leave those lights on all night, or pay good money to have people there running it all the time, so my father had gambled the lives of himself, my mother, and most importantly, me, on a simple rural farmer’s sense of airports and flying, a farmer whose total flying time in life were the two seconds he once fell off the ladder in the barn, ok?)
So you and I both can only image the growing panic as it gets dark, my father cannot find this airport, he told me he dropped down to treetop level, trying to figure out which highways and roads to orient himself near this hidden-in-the-dark airport, and of course, he’s running low on fuel. Very low. Sputter time. He is able to figure out which highway and could even spot the right farmhouse that my mother grew up in and where her parents were now sittin’ down to supper, passing the gravy, oblivious to the fact that distant airplane noise held their daughter and great peril was imminent in that night Kansas sky, or do I go on a bit? Darker than ever, sputter sputter, I can only imagine what my mother was saying about then, actually, i could write the dialogue of what my mother was saying, and it wasn’t a bit helpful, on that you can bet the house, or my father’s increasing sense of oh-Lord-I-think-I-fucked-upness and no one, then or for the rest of my father’s life, ever asked me my opinion, and you can fill in the blanks about his sweaty hands and clenched fists on the controls…gas gauge empty…he later told me he didn’t want to to land on a highway, even though it was rural, due to unseen telephone lines or traffic…but he could see the farm below…and took a big gamble, sputter, sputter, on trying to land in a field and seemed empty and clear so down they went. That was his decision. Because sputter, sputter, oh, there, it stopped, a decision of some kind was needed…
And he brought that plane in for a landing in a dark field at night with his pregnant wife, having no idea what was he flying down into.
He later told me that in his life, he had flown Spitfires in dog fights, and went on to go to Africa in 1957 on a real safari and he stood his ground, firing at a big Cape Buffalo who was charging him and my Dad kept firing and hitting the big Cape Buffalo charging him, he knew he was hitting him because he could see the dust bursts in his hide as the bullets hit, one, two, three, four…the other guys on the safari and the White Hunter and his native gun-bearer had all turned and run, which they never do, but my father kept firing and on the fifth shot it dropped 20 yards from him, and later, he was in some trees with them going after an elephant with this same group and they reallzed the elephant herd was surrounding them, elephants are very smart, and the black stuff between their toes are slow natives, and my Dad and the other men on this safari then all ran like hell out the one opening just before they’d get stomped to death by the herd but he said in his whole life he’d never been more scared than he was in that landing on that field that night. So being a pilot, Milan, you’d know so much better than me what that landing was like, plowed dark earth at night in a field, and my father landing there in the dark, with my mother, who may remain cool in certain emergencies but I’ve never seen or heard about it, probably screaming in his ear and me happily floating in a warm hot tub of amniotic fluid, a location I’ve been trying to get back into all my life, but at the time, I remember being quite confident in my father’s abilities as a pilot, unconcerned, that’s my Dad, he’ll get us down safe, and my father said that the noise of the engine sputtering as it ran out of gas finally died and it was quiet from any engine noise as he landed so he could hear my mother’s screams better but he may have been the pilot he thought he was because he said that somehow, sputter, sputter having been replaced with a silent bump-bump-bump…and they somehow coasted to a very bumpy bouncy stop and all was still and they had landed safely. And they sat there and listened to the night wind and the crickets and my mother still screaming.
My father said as he took his hands off the controls there in that quiet Kansas dark field except for my mother screaming, his hands were shaking like they’ve never shook in his whole life and they just sat there. Lord knows how shaken up they each were and for how long but I was fine, that’s my Dad. So they notice they that the airplane noise must have alerted my grandfather the simple rural farmer so from the distant farmhouse comes the headlights of his old pickup truck as it bounced-bumped its way out to the plane, and my grandfather the farmer gets out with an old-fashioned kerosene lantern and walks up to my ashen-faced, still shaken father, still seated in the plane, and holds up the lantern and says, “Why didn’t you all land a little closer to the house?”
True family story. I wonder why I thought of it. Maybe I need to remember that against all odds, sometimes things work out okay.”
