On the Wing (3 page)

“It's a Prysock Electro-Flyer.”

“I don't think I've ever seen—”

“It's the only one of its kind. And there will never be another.”

“Is it a dream car? A concept car? A show car?”

“It was built as a prototype. The designer-builder hoped to put it into production, but he has since abandoned the plan and moved on to other things.”

“Mm.”

“It's a sleek little thing with a top speed of 140 miles per hour.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“Especially for an electric car.”

“An electric car? Wow.”

“And the Electro-Flyer is, as I'm sure you'll agree in a moment, when I show you some pictures, a thing of beauty.”

“Can't wait. Somehow ‘Prysock' does sound vaguely familiar—”

“In the spirit of full and frank disclosure, I have to point out that the Prysock Electro-Flyer is—how shall I put this—derivative.”

“Oh?” I said, puzzled.

“The design was heavily influenced by the 1960 Nu-Klea Disco Volante Runabout.”

“Disco Volante? As in—”

“As in ‘Flying Saucer.'”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “We'd be buying a replica.”

“Not exactly. The mechanicals are original with the designer-builder.”

“But still—”

“I know how you feel about replicas,” she said quickly, “but this is different. It's the work of a madman obsessed with detail and accuracy.”

“Oh!” I said, brightening.

“Here's his ad.”

I looked at the picture. I read the copy.

“You mean Norton Prysock built this thing?” I asked.

“Built this beautiful car. Yes.”

“I seem to recall that you had a low opinion of Nort and his skills when you examined the photographs of the Pinch-a-Penny on his Web site.”

“I still think that as an aeronautical engineer he's not much use.”

“But you think he could build a good car?”

“I'll want to examine it carefully, of course, take it for a spin, and have a mechanic go over it thoroughly, but I suspect that this car is the one good thing Norton Prysock ever made—and remember, too, that in the case of the Pinch-a-Penny he was asking me to believe that he could get me into the air and keep me there, while in the case of the Electro-Flyer he is making no such claim.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I see a dangerous parallel between Nort's situation and my own when I began building the aerocycle: I had drawings of a finished plane, but no plans for building it, so I had to improvise. Nort had nothing but pictures of the Disco Volante, which were the equivalent of the drawings I had, invaluable as inspiration but useless in terms of engineering—so he must have had to do a lot of improvising—and the result—”

“Oh, Peter.”

“I'm trying to be realistic.”

“Don't.”

I looked at her, looked into her eyes, saw the longing there, and said, “Okay.”

*   *   *

DESPITE WHAT HIS AD CLAIMED, Norton Prysock was not willing to let the world's only Electro-Flyer go for what we considered a reasonable offer. Even after a long negotiation he wanted much, much more than I thought Albertine would be willing to pay.

“He is asking us to pay for a car more than twney-six point three percent of the cost of the average studio apartment in Manhattan,” I said as Albertine and I huddled at the end of Nort's driveway, conferring.

“Where did you get that bit of information?”

“I'm basing it on a survey reported in this morning's
Times,
” I said, unfolding the paper to the story.

Albertine skimmed it quickly and announced, “But he's asking less than one percent of the average price of a Manhattan property with four bedrooms or more.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, pointing to the relevant figure. “Peter—”

“Yes?”

“If we sold our apartment—a two-bedroom apartment, I remind you—we could buy this car—and have lots and lots of change left over.”

“Shouldn't we save that for our golden years?”

“Yes, we should. That would be wise. It would be prudent. We try to be wise. We try to be prudent. Well, I try to be prudent. However, after my fall I find that I am feeling the cold breath of mortality on the back of my neck, and it's making me impulsive and foolish.”

“Are you sure it's not the hot breath of the great god Urge that you feel?”

“Could be,” she said coquettishly.

“Urge couldn't be appeased with some shoes, could he?”

“Not this time,” she said.

I was about to speak again, but she put a finger over my mouth, shushed me, and said, “Listen.” I listened. I expected her to speak; I thought she wanted me to listen to her, but after a minute, she said, “Sometimes, more and more often, especially at night, I can hear them, out beyond us, ranged in rings and rings around rings, the angry, murderous, rapacious numbers of our species, growling and cursing and gnashing their teeth, brandishing their weapons, blowing one another to smithereens, feeding their hatred with hatred, stoking their anger with anger, fueling their selfishness with arrogance. There's no getting away from them, but we could do as your pal B. W. Beath advised and, for a while at least, just pass through the squabbling world without being a part of it, like a breeze.”

“In an Electro-Flyer?” I asked.

“In
the
Electro-Flyer,” she said.

We paid Nort's price.

Peter Leroy

New York City

February 15, 2007

Chapter 1

Without a Map

Traveling ought [ … ] to teach [the traveler] distrust; but at the same time he will discover how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance.

Charles Darwin,
The Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle

LO! THE BIRDBOY WAS ON THE WING, figuratively speaking. I was on my way, taxiing westward, urging
Spirit of Babbington
up, up, and away, but not managing to get the thing off the ground. Had I been my present age, I might have blamed the flightlessness of
Spirit
on its weighty freight of metaphorical implications, its heavy burden—in the old sense of “meaning.” It stood for the contrast of lofty goals with leaden deeds, of grand urges with petty talents, of soaring ambitions with earthbound achievements, but at the time I wasn't thinking of the weight of
Spirit
's significance, or even of the reason that it wouldn't fly; I was simply frustrated and annoyed and embarrassed. I believed that the well-wishers along the roadside were beginning to consider me a hoax or, what seemed worse, a failure. Actually—as I learned from their testimony years later—they thought that I was being generous to them, staying on the ground as I passed to allow them a good look at me and my machine, to allow them to hoist their babies onto their shoulders and afford them the inspiration of a good view of the bold Birdboy. In a letter to the
Babbington Reporter
on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my flight, one of them recalled the experience:

I'll never forget that day. I watched him as he passed by, and you could just see the determination in his face, the keen gaze in his eyes, the way he looked straight ahead, toward the west, and you said to yourself, “This is a boy who knows where he's going.” It was inspiring, I tell you. It was inspiring, and it was a little daunting, too. Seeing him go by, on his way, made you ask yourself, “Do
I
know where
I'm
going?” It is no exaggeration, no exaggeration at all, to say that his example, and the introspection it inspired, made me what I am today.

Anonymous Witness

*   *   *

I HAD PLANNED MY TRIP to New Mexico as a series of short hops, because when I was in the fourth grade my teacher used to begin every school day by writing on the chalkboard a few of what she called Pearls of Wisdom, requiring us to copy them into notebooks with black-and-white mottled covers, and among her pearls was Lao-Tzu's famous statement of the obvious, that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and also because I had been required, in fourth-grade arithmetic, to calculate how many steps my fourth-grade self would have to take to complete that journey of a thousand miles. (I've forgotten the answer; but my adult self has just measured his ambling stride and calculated that it would take him 1,649,831 steps.) In advance of the journey to New Mexico, I tried to calculate the number of hops that would be required. At first, I imagined that I might cover 300 miles per hop, 300 miles per day. At that rate, the trip out, which I estimated at 1,800 miles, would require just six hops, six days. However, when I daydreamed that trip, it felt rushed. I didn't seem to have enough time to look around, explore the exotic sights, sample the local cuisine, meet the people, talk to them, fall in love with their daughters, get gas, or check the oil. So I decided to cover only 100 miles per daily hop. At that rate, the trip would require eighteen hops, eighteen days. (That was my calculation. It would have worked for a crow; it didn't work for me, as you will see.) My friend Matthew Barber would be making the trip to New Mexico by commercial airliner, in a single hop, which seemed to me pathetically hasty.

When I had decided on eighteen hops, I phoned my French teacher, Angus MacPherson, who was one of the sponsors of my trip, and said, as casually as I could. “I figure I can do it in eighteen hops.”

“Do what?”

“Get to New Mexico.”

“‘Eighteen hops'? Why do you say ‘hops'?”

“That's the way I see it,” I said. “I take off, fly a hundred miles, and land. It's just a short hop.”

“I wouldn't call it a hop.”

“Why?”

“‘Hop' makes it sound too easy, Peter. It makes it sound as if any boy could do it, as if not even a boy were required. A rabbit, for example, might make the journey in a certain number of hops, given enough time and carrots.”

“Oh.”

“Say ‘stages,'” he said, suddenly inspired, “like pieces of the incremental journey of a stagecoach. That has some dignity, given the weight of its historical association with western movies, settler sagas, and the lonely yodeling of cowpokes on the vast prairies. As a traveler by stages, you will be putting yourself in the long line of westward voyagers, making yourself a part of America's restless yearning for what I think we might call westness. And
stage
has a nice ring to it.
Hop
does not ring at all. It sounds like a dull thud on a wet drum. Take it from me: go by stages, not by hops.”

So I went by stages, though I had planned to go by hops. I think that I would have reported here that I had gone by hops, despite Mr. MacPherson's counsel, if it were not for the fact that
hops
suggests too much time spent in the air. Because being in the air is what makes a hop a hop,
hop
suggests, it seems to me, that the hopper is in the air for the entire length of each hop. “The entire length of each hop” would be more time in the air than I actually did spend in the air, and I am firmly committed to total honesty in this account. I went by stages, on the ground, along roads, with a great deal of divagation and an occasional hop when I was for a moment a few inches, sometimes a foot, in the air.

Making the trip in stages confirmed in me a tendency that had been growing for some time: the preference for working in small steps, for making life's journey little by little. I think that this tendency may have been born on the earliest clamming trips I made with my grandfather, when I watched him clamming, treading for clams by feeling for them with his toes, and I learned, without giving it any thought, that a clammer acquires a peck of clams one clam at a time, that the filling of a peck basket is a kind of journey. Whether Lao-Tzu had anything to say about the connection between clamming and life's journey, I do not know, but I do know that there came a time, sometime after my youth, when I turned my step-by-small-step tendency into a guiding principle, and I began deliberately to live one small step at a time. Living according to this principle has meant that many of life's jobs have taken me longer than they might have been expected to take. Many of them are still in the process of completion, and I know people who would count “growing up” among those, but I swear to you that I do work at them all, a little bit at a time. So, for example, I write my memoirs as I've lived my life, a little bit each day, hop by hop.

*   *   *

I TRAVELED WITHOUT A MAP, though that was not my original intention. I had intended to travel with a map, because I had thought that I needed a map, and I was convinced that I needed a special map, a superior map, that “just any map” would never do. I already had maps of the United States, of course—several in an atlas, more in an encyclopedia, and others in a gazetteer that showed the typical products of various regions—but I felt that none of those would do. They were maps, but they weren't aviators' maps. I supposed that I needed maps like—but superior to—those that automobile navigators used, the sort of map that my grandmother wrestled with every summer when my parents and I traveled with my grandparents to West Burke, Vermont—and, later, West Burke, New Hampshire—my grandfather at the wheel of their Studebaker, as pilot, and my grandmother beside him, as navigator.