SOMEONE'S ALWAYS WATCHING
Mesmerized by autumn in New England, I played too low too long one evening and looked up to find the glide from miles downwind sketchier than I’d seen before. Objects more than five miles away were creeping higher in the canopy and the airport was right there at the cusp, so any sink on the way would mean coming down short. I knew to pitch over for a flatter glide into the headwind, even light as it was, but that would scootch the airport higher, and I couldn’t make myself do it.
Halfway back, a perfect grass strip lay off to the side that I’d examined from aloft but never landed at… Should I? Our tow pilot had gone home two hours ago, so there could be no retrieve until tomorrow. Were there tie down provisions? What if the owner’s a crotchety old goat? No matter, it was time to land.
While I was ruminating on that, the strip sneaked behind somehow, soon almost as far as the airport ahead. And now both looked squeaky. Then one last cluster of clearings muddled a decision already overdue. The first pasture looked long enough even to launch from, but too rough to land in. The second smoother but sloping, and one beside it was fine except for hay bales scattered like landmines. The furthest might have been best if not for a row of poplars. No good choices, but I had to decide…
I reminded myself to look close for obscure hazards before committing on where to touch down. Any texture visible from aloft would be ragged at best. Seeing no ditches or boulders in high grass will not mean they aren’t there. WIRES, same thing. And a farm boy in camo might never hear me coming.
Got it. But which field??
I feel myself falling behind at this point… No, it’s obvious I fell behind long before. What lurks now is the temptation to fall apart. At the edge of panic, I see myself remotely, watching from the steady state, and even as time seems to pass more slowly I’m still unable to keep pace.
Now those last options also are passing behind and I still haven’t picked one. Then comes a soft swell of unanticipated lift and I slow up out of habit, hold my breath and think of turning into it. The irrational fit of optimism nets sink beyond, naturally, and now I must nose over for speed.
The glide angle to any safe outcome appears hopeless but landing is imminent, and there’s nowhere left to go. In the wrong place, even a perfect landing can have horrible results. Now less than a mile away, the airport disappears behind a knoll and naked branches make my toes curl. Following contour, I head for the hill’s low end, dropping through two hundred feet above runway elevation. Trees taper off just in time, granting a hair more vertical. I skid a hideous turn to keep the lower wingtip arm’s length above a fence, consuming the last of usable height, down off the hill and onto flats a quarter mile short. Screwed.
In Vermont, farmers grow corn for cattle feed and leave it standing after ripe to dry for winter fodder. A robust crop of such leafy sticks now stands head high between me and the runway. At the near end I’m falling through fifty feet, fearfully visualizing the wreckage soon to occur. The bird’s high wing might escape with scratches, but her fabric fuselage will be shredded and fragile tail surfaces beaten to a tangled mess.
I’ll probably survive of course. Will I wish I hadn’t? Free rental and tows were my only pay with this outfit. Now there’ll be no glider to fly, and damage to aircraft and crop will be my responsibility… Time for a miracle.
Fortunately, I’m one who happens to believe in such nonsense (miracles usually only work for those who believe, but that’s a whole ‘nother topic). What happens next is not my very first miracle in soaring, but certainly one of the more consequential. See, at the exact same place and time, this late in the day those dry cornstalks remain warmer than mossy forest, and air trapped between them continues to expand relative to the cooling all around. As if by magic, the descent quietly halts! Ground effect is a help of course, but in a ’33 at low speed, pitifully little. What I stagger so haplessly into is in fact the day’s very last thermal actually leaving its source — and the lowest possible demonstration of zero-sink!
After floating dreamily clear across half a wingspan above that cornfield, the wheel finally settles onto the grassy verge mere inches before pavement. If there were a fence around the airport in those days I’d have had to plunk down short. From there the noble vessel trundles on like a tired old mare, slowly up the runway with barely enough inertia to taxi off at the tie-downs, she and my dubious reputation saved by stupid, undeserved LUCK.
Luckier still, there appear to be no witnesses. Don’t mention this to a soul, I tell myself, at least until some moral statute of limitations has expired in your mind. While a distorted sense of time returns to normal, nagging thoughts of what almost happened I push away for later.
All the airport people had long gone, but just then a muddy pickup pulled in and a farmer leapt from it, his young son (in camo) at heel. They were the owners of that airstrip, who after watching me pass over, had jumped in their truck to follow on a dirt road. For them it was ordinary curiosity at first, but at the cornfield it became something more – and less.
Prior to that, the son had almost persuaded his dad to let him have a glider ride, but at the cornfield I presented reason number one why not.
The small traditional communities of rural New England remain close-knit as they were a hundred years ago, and within days, what those two saw had been fully circulated, no doubt embellished for dramatic effect. A year later we were still hearing about it from one or another local source. Yet several years later that same farm boy, now grown, drove his own pick-up down the same dirt road for flight lessons – usually wearing camo. Dad, then retired, never would fly with the instructor (me), but insisted on being his son’s proud first passenger. He turned out after all to be a grand old woodchuck (a slur of endearment in those parts), a traditional French Canadian even more proud of his wife’s farm cooking than that beautiful grass strip.
Before long we were having every student land there as I should have done, and fly the ensuing aeroretrieve as well. Same with standard checkouts for renters, too! On occasions when we had to wait for our retrieve, I’d warn each companion that the farmer’s “permanent invitation” to land there came with a catch. If it’s anywhere close to lunch or supper, we might not escape short of a huge country feast and way too much crabapple pie…