The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

stabilizer.
    There the ignition switches on the outside of the airplane, sure enough, and if it were a faithful restoration . . . yes, on the floor of the cockpit, a monster British military compass! I could hardly keep my hands behind my back, it was so handsome a machine. Now the rudder pedals should be fitted with . . .
    "You like that airplane, do you?"
    I nearly cried out, he startled me so. The man had been standing there half a minute, wiping oil from his hands on a shop towel and watching me inspect his Moth.
    "Like it?" I said, "It's beautiful!"
    "Thank you. She's been finished a year now, rebuilt her from the wheels up."
    I looked closely at the fabric . . . there was a haze of texture, showing through the paint.
    "Looks like Ceconite," I said. "Nice job." That would be all the introduction we'd need; one doesn't learn in a day how to tell the difference between Grade-A cotton and Ceconite dacron cloth on old airplanes. "And where did you find the compass?"
    He smiled, happy I'd noticed. "Would you believe that I found that in a second-hand store in Dothan, Alabama?
    Genuine Royal Air Force compass, 1942. Seven dollars and fifty cents. You tell me how it got there, but I'll tell you I got it out!"
    We walked around the Moth, me listening while he talked, and as we did I knew I was clinging to my past, to the known and therefore simple life of flight. Had I been too impulsive, selling the Fleet and chopping the ropes of my yesterdays to go searching for an unknown love? There in the hangar, it was as if my world had become a museum, or an old photograph; a raft cut adrift and floating softly away, slowly into history. . . .
    I shook my head, frowned, interrupted the mechanic.
    "Is the Moth for sale, Chet?"
    He didn't take me seriously. "Every airplane's for sale. Like they say, it's a matter of price. I'm more a builder than a flyer, but I'd want an awful lot of money to sell the Moth, I tell you."
    I squatted down and looked beneath the airplane. There was not a trace of oil on the cowling.
    Rebuilt a year ago by an aircraft mechanic, I thought, hangared ever since. The Moth was a special find, indeed. I had never for a minute intended to stop flying. I could fly clear across the country, in the Moth. I could fly this airplane to the television interviews, and along the way, I might find my soulmate!
    I set my bedroll on the floor for a cushion. It crackled when I sat on it. "How much money is a lot of money if it's cash?"
    Chet Davidson went to lunch an hour and a half late. I took the Moth logbooks and manuals with me to the oflice.
    "Excuse me, ma'am. You have a telephone, don't you?"
    "Sure. Local call?"
    •"No."
    "Pay phone's just outside the door, sir." "Thank you. You sure have a sweet smile." "Thank you, sir!" A nice custom, wedding-rings. I called Eleanor in New York and told her I'd do the television.
    SIX
    . HERE'S LEARNINGFUL serenity, comes from sleeping under airplane-wings in country fields: stars and rain and wind color dreams real. Hotels, I found neither educating nor serene.
    There's proper balanced nourishment, mixing panbread-flour and streamwater in the civilized wilderness of farmland America. Wolfing peanuts in taxicabs careening toward television studios is not so well-balanced.
    There's a proud hurray, when passengers step unharmed from an old two-winger back on the ground again, fear of heights turned to victory. TV-talk forced between paid commercials and the tick of a second-hand, it lacks the same breath of triumph shared.
    But she's worth hotels and peanuts and eye-on-the-time interviews, my elusive soulmate, and meet her I would, if I
    kept moving, watching, searching through studios in many downtowns.
    It did not occur to me to doubt her existing, because I saw almost-hers all about me. I knew from barnstorming that America was pioneered by remarkably attractive women, for their daughters number millions today. A gypsy passing through, I knew them only as lovely customers, sweetly