Taking Off Read Online Free PDF

stutter step of a Long Island Rail Road commuter train, making all the stops. I sat beside the window, looking out, daydreaming. There was no rambling path beside us, but my daydreams no longer need the stimulus of a rambling path. These days, I ramble most of the time, though I rarely go anywhere.
    â€œI wish we could go somewhere now,” I said to Al suddenly. “Right now, this minute.”
    â€œWhere do you want to go?” she asked lazily. She was curled on her side with her head on my shoulder, trying to doze.
    â€œNowhere,” I said truthfully, “or anywhere. I am convinced that the best travel is travel undertaken without a destination, just wandering. I am not the first to say that the slower the traveler goes, the more he sees. If I could, I would set out now and walk, hither and yon, following a course like that of the river Mæander.”
    â€œWhy don’t we?”
    â€œBecause we’re tethered here.”
    â€œCan’t we loose the surly bonds?”
    â€œNot until we’ve paid our debts and put enough aside to finance a ramble and the time that it would take.”
    â€œBut we’ll have that goal?”
    â€œYes. The goal of traveling without a goal.”
    â€œIt’s our intention. Shall we put this in writing and ink the pact?”
    â€œLet’s just say it out loud and shake on it. Or make love on it.”
    â€œIt is our intention to work very, very hard to pay off our debts and put some money aside and then to walk out our door on the way to nowhere.”
    â€œWithout a map, without a destination.”
    â€œBut every night we’ll stop somewhere to have a hot shower, a fabulous meal, and a dreamy sleep in a comfy bed.”
    â€œIf possible.”
    â€œI’m going to insist on that.”
    â€œBut that means that we would have a destination—actually, a series of destinations—a destination for every night.”
    â€œEven the river Mæander winds somewhere safe to sea.”

Chapter 8
    One in a Line of Impractical Craftsmen
    THE LOW-FLYING VEHICLE of my daydreams, strong, swift, and silent, was derived from an article in Impractical Craftsman magazine. I was a faithful reader of this magazine. So was my father. Both of my grandfathers were subscribers, and they had made many projects from plans published in its pages or ordered from its Projects Department. I had made a couple of things from Impractical Craftsman plans myself. They gave me satisfaction, not only the satisfaction of having completed a job, made a thing, but also the satisfaction of taking my place in the family line of impractical craftsmen. Dædalus was the household god of Impractical Craftsman. The masthead of each issue included a small drawing of him (with his disobedient son beside him), and the best of the projects in the magazine were truly daedal: ingenious, cleverly intricate, and diversified.
    My father had also made things from plans in IC, as its devotees called it, but he tended to prefer the plans in other, less visionary, magazines for backyard builders, and he would usually build useful, boring things like bedside tables and chests of drawers rather than the marginally useful but intriguingly complicated mechanical, electromechanical, and electronic gadgets that my grandfathers and I favored.
    I am wronging my father somewhat by suggesting that some shortcoming made him the sort of person who lacked the daring to venture beyond making simple pine tables and chests. Certainly he fell short of my grandfathers, and even of me, in his willingness to undertake a project that promised long periods of baffling, exacting work and little chance of success, but he wasn’t entirely immune to the desire to stretch himself out into the realm of the unbuildable. I recall that he became excited about an IC project that, if it had been completed successfully, would have resulted in an early form of wireless television remote control. He never