I’m guessing my Dad owned between 1,500 to 2,000 books. Books of all kinds: Biographies, novels, history, reference, and more. The vast majority were donated to our local library. A few dozen ended up on my bookshelf.
I just finished reading A Gift of Wings by Richard Bach. I’m not certain Dad ever read it because there were no telltale creases along the spine. Try as I might to keep it intact, the book is now in multiple disconnected sections as the hardened binding glue snapped when I opened the book too far.
I’ve read a few Bach books, but this was a first read of this book for me. The Editor’s note proved helpful: “There is a lot about flying in this book, but much more about Richard Bach and his last 15 years of seeking answers and finding some. For anyone who cares to know who he is, it is all here.”
As I read the book, the following passages stuck out to me for a variety of reasons.
Chapter: “Prayers”
“All at once I saw the obvious. The world is as it is because that is the way we wish it to be. Only as our wish changes does the world change. Whatever we pray for, we get.”
This was preceded by Bach’s memory of “a girl I met in New York, who lived in a tight-packed Brooklyn tenement…” He wondered aloud why she didn’t move to wide open spaces.
“I could never do that,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s like out there. I guess I’m more afraid of what I don’t know than I hate what I have right now.”
I recently had a conversation with a friend’s mother, on Mother’s Day of all days. As the conversation steered to her health, she mentioned her trepidation at walking the neighborhood as exercise.
“I can’t walk the sidewalks, I’m terrified of all the bad things happening,” she said.
From Bach’s memory, the “girl” thinks she knows what it’s like “out there,” but in reality, not so much. We don’t know what we don’t know and until we experience the world, we remain in the dark.
For me, taking a walk down the sidewalk is worth the risk. For my friend’s Mom, not so much.
Chapter: “Steel, aluminum, nuts, and bolts”
“An ‘airframe’ is a sort of cage built of steel tubing and sheet aluminum. It is tin and fabric and wire. It is nuts and bolts. An airframe is made to the calculations of the aircraft designer, who is a very wise and practical man who makes his living at this sort of thing and does not mess around with esoteric mumbo-jumbo.”
Esoteric mumbo-jumbo made me laugh out loud. I imagine a salesperson being brushed aside by the designer for having the gall to ask for a cup holder for passengers.
Chapter: “A light in the toolbox”
“That was how the rarest event in life came to me… I changed the way I thought. I learned the mechanics of airplanes.”
The first word in that sentence refers to when Bach “came to own a crazy old biplane, with an old-fashioned round engine on its nose.” That very same airplane “was not about to tolerate a pilot who didn’t know something of the personality in a 175-horsepower Wright Whirlwind, something about the repair of wooden ribs and doped fabric.”
Philosophically, as the chapter opens, Bach states, “That which a man believes is that which becomes his reality.”
Followed by, “I’m no mechanic.”
Well, until he became one. And he became one because he changed his beliefs.
Chapter: “Journey to a perfect place”
“No beers cans and empty cigarette packs strewn around a cloud, no street signs or stoplights, no bulldozers changing air to concrete. No room for anxiety, because it is always the same. No room for boredom because it was always different.”
“What do you know about that! I thought. Our one perfect place is the sky itself! And I looked across at the Aeronca and I laughed.”
Bach spent a fair amount of time, it would seem, flying from place to place. Barnstorming in one era. Simply exploring in another. Always looking for that “perfect place.” And if he found it, would he ever need to again fly, he wondered?
I’m not typically a fan of poetry, but this chapter — to me — is poetry.
Chapter: “The $71,000 sleeping bag”
“This airplane was different. It was sheet metal instead of cloth and dope, radios and omni and ADF and DME and marker beacon and EGT and autopilot and trim and flaps and prop control and mixture instead of nothing. But the stars were the same stars.”
“By sunup, I was convinced that the Cessna Super Skymaster, although it is a great twin-engine plane that can never kill a pilot with the terrible yaw of engine loss in the weather at full gross, is a lousy sleeping bag. For $71,000, I thought they should at least make the airplane a little easier to spend the night in.”
None of that “esoteric mumbo-jumbo,” replied the designer.
Chapter: “Adventures aboard a flying summerhouse”
“Don’t think of a Seabee as an airplane that can land on water,” Don Kyte had told me years before. “Think of it as a boat that can fly. A boat that can fly, if you don’t care if it’s not as fast as, say, a cross-country minie-ball.”
I rather like Don Kyte’s explanation of what a Seabee is — and isn’t. I had to look up minie-ball though. (It’s a hollow-based bullet used in muskets during the Civil War.)
Thank you Mr. Bach. I enjoyed flying alongside you.
As a kid I had to unusual luck to find/read a library copy of Richard Bach’s ‘Stranger to The Ground’. Although dated, it has incredible prose! It was written about a single F-84 mission, but brought in many of the stray thoughts and experiences he had [we all have] while living life and especially military flying [1960s].
There are a few lines from this book that cause me to choke-up and revere flight… and the people who fly. Here is one section that I transcribed from the book… forgive me Richard…
————
Excerpt from STRANGER TO THE GROUND – Richard Bach
“Tonight I, who love my airplane with all its moods and hardships and joys, am looking upon the stars. And tonight, 20-minutes to the east, there is another pilot, another man who loves his airplane, looking out at these same stars. These symbols.
My airplane is painted with a white star, his with a red star. It is dark, and paint is hard to see. In his cockpit is the same family of flight instruments and engine instruments and radio control panels that is in my cockpit. In his airplane as in mine, when the stick is pressed to the left, the airplane banks to the left.
I know unquestioningly, that I would like the man in that cockpit. We could talk through the long night of the airplanes that we have known and the times we were afraid and the places that we have been. We would laugh over the half-witted things that we did when we were new in the air. We have shared many things, he and I, too many things to be ordered into our airplanes to kill each other.
I went through flying training at a base near Dallas, he went through it at a base near Stalingrad. My flight instructor shouted at me in English, his at him in Russian. But the blue fire trickles once in a while across his windscreen as it does mine and ice builds and breaks over his wing as it does mine. And somewhere in his cockpit is a control panel or circuit breaker panel or a single switch that he has almost to stands on his head to reach.
Perhaps at this moment his daughter is considering whether, or not, to accept a pair of Siamese kittens. Look out for Your curtains, friend. I wish I could warn him about the kittens.”
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…Wow that still get to me…
Ben,
Thank you for that wonderful look into an aviation classic! I have a hardbound first edition, dated 1974, that cost $8.95 when new. Bought it when I was in college, and deep into flying and aviation writers. The book is on my library “top shelf,” up there with Ernie Gann’s works and a few other choice authors. Any true aviation book by Bach is pure gold. He cleaned up on the seagull, but I prefer his classics.
Another of my favorite authors is Gill Robb Wilson (1892 – 1966). Look him up….a very impressive life indeed. I recently bought a signed copy of his seminal poetry collection, “Leaves From an Old Log.” I never get tired of reading those works, all wonderful pieces about flying and the flying life. Though published in 1938, the words and wisdom are timeless.
That is a good one. Read it as a teenager. We know Bach here in the Carolinas simply as “Dick”, from the days when he hung out with Korean War jet ace and vintage aircraft collector Dolph Overton from Georgetown, South Carolina. The long, gone, “Wings and Wheels” museum in Santee, SC, was one of Dolph’s greatest creations, in addition to his successful tobacco equipment business. Dick bought one of those old biplanes, which became the subject of this book. Others who came out of this ragtag bunch of ragwing taildragger enthusiasts were Jack and Golda Cox (led EAA Publications for many years) and Jim Zazas, USAF/Airline/Warbird/Acro/Sailplane pilot and successful writer.