Death in

the afternoon

a story of soaring

He didn't say anything till the afternoon of that first day.
Then, as we lowered ourselves into the team sailplane,
strapped ourselves tightly about with webs of parachute and
shoulder harness and seat belt, tested the flight controls and
spoilers and towline release, he said, "Ifs like getting ready
to be born. A baby feels this way, strapping into its new
body."

I warn you. He's wont to say things like that.

"This is no body," I said, firm but not harsh. "See? Manu-
facturer's data plate, right here. Schweizer 1-26, single-
seat sailplane. And all these others on the runway are 1-26
sailplanes, too, and this is Harris Hill and this is competi-
tion and we're out to win and don't you forget that, OK?
Let's stick with the business at hand, if you don't mind."

He didn't answer. Just tugged against the straps, tight-
ened them down, moved the flight controls light and quick,
the way a pianist moved his fingers, quickly, in the last mo-
ment before the concert begins.

A Super Cub towplane taxied out in front of us, and a
couple hundred feet of nylon stretched to join us for the
launch. We were ready for take off.

"Helpless. Nothing as helpless as a sailplane on the
ground."

"Yeah," I said. "You ready?"

"Let's go."

I fanned the rudder to signal the tow pilot. The Cub
crept ahead, the line snaked out, tightened, our awkward
beautiful Schweizer eased forward. The towplane pressed

full throttle and we were on our way ... in seconds we
had aileron control, then rudder, and at last, elevators. I
touched the stick back and the glider lifted clear of the run-
way, just a few feet clear, to make the takeoff easier for the
Cub. We were flying, with the hard rush of wind about us,
with the controls alive in our hand.

"We're born," he said calmly. "This is what it means to
be born."

He took the controls without asking, flying clumsy at first
with those great long wings, porpoising a bit behind the
towplane till he got used to flying high-tow formation again.
He did a fair job of itnot excellent, but not too bad. He
was an average pilot, I'd say. Average low-time pilot.

Harris Hill fell away behind us. The Cub turned to fol-
low the ridge, climbing, and though we felt some lift and
perhaps could have released a minute after takeoff, we
stayed meekly on tow, considering it wise to use the extra
help while we had it.

"You ever noticed," he said, "how much being on tow is
like growing up, like a kid growing up? While you get used
to the feel of living, the towplane-mother is out ahead of
you, protecting you from sinking air, getting you up to alti-
tude. Soaring's a lot like living, don't you think?"

I sighed. He talked this way, and he ignored the fine little
tricks of competition. We could turn the towplane toward
our course by tugging left on the tail of the Cub, with the
towrope. We could keep him from climbing too fast by tug-
ging up on it. Tricks like that can give you a free ride an-
other few hundred yards on course, and that can make a
difference, in a meet. But he ignored everything I knew, he
went on about what he knew.

"A kid can take it easy, not much pressure, not many de-
cisions, taking his tow into the air of life. Doesn't have to
worry about sink, or about finding lift for himself. Being on
tow is what you call security".

"If you'd turn a little left ..." I said.

"But as long as he's on tow, he's not free, there's that to
consider."

I was restless to get a word in. I wanted to urge him to
nudge the towplane to give us that extra push in the right
direction. It's not cheating. Any pilot can do it.

"I'd just as soon be free," he said.

Before I could stop him, he pulled the towline release


VAM!and we were loose in the sky. The high-speed nois-
es of tow fell off to the gentle hush of a glider at cruise.

"That wasn't too smart," I said. "You could have worked
another two hundred feet out of that tow, and herded him
around . . ."

"I wanted to be free," he said, as if that was some kind
of an answer.

To his credit, though, he did turn directly on course,
pointing the nose into the wind toward the goal, forty miles
distant. It was not an easy task, an upwind goal in a 1-26.
To make it worse, there was a great blue hole of dead air
between us and the first cumulus across the valley.

It was going to be a long tough glide to reach them, and
by then we might well be too low, we might glide in be-
neath their rising air. "He kept the nose on course, and in-
creased airspeed to best penetration through the sinking air.
Most of the other sailplanes, I noticed, stayed around the
hill after release, working the ridge lift; and waiting for a
thermal to give them safe altitude for a leap across the val-
ley. A lovely sight, they were, wheeling and soaring in the
quiet of the sun. Yet all the while they circled, I knew, they
were watching us, to see if our try to penetrate at once
would pay off. If it did, they'd follow.

I wasn't sure what I would have done, if I were flying. It
is all very romantic and daring to go blasting off on course
directly after release, but if you don't make it, if the sink
presses you right down to the ground, you're dead, you're
out of the game. Of course, you're dead if you spend all
day in the ridge lift on Harris Hill, too. The game is to
reach the goal, and that takes just the right blend of brav-
ery and caution. The others had opened with caution; my
friend had chosen bravery. We flew directly away from the
hill, sinking three hundred feet per minute.

"You're right," he said, reading my doubt. "Another
minute in this sink and we won't be able to glide back to
the hill at all. But don't you agree? Sooner or later, doesn't
a man have to turn his back on the safety of towplanes and
ridge lift and set off on his own, no matter what?"

"I guess."

But maybe if we had waited, some thermals would have
cooked off in the valley. As it was, we could stay in the air
for another five minutes, and then we'd be forced to pick a
field and land. I started looking for fields, a little sullen,

maybe, thinking more that we should have waited, like the
others. I like soaring. I don't like to throw away what might
have been a two- or three-hour flight in some seven-minute
speed dash for the ground, just because this guy feels dar-
ing. Four hundred feet per minute down.

"A man's got to do his best," he said.

"Your best is different from my best. Next time, let me
fly the sailplane, OK?"

"No." He meant it, too. He flew every flight we made to-
gether, except for a minute or two, now and then. He has
made some terrible mistakes, in his time, but there have
been some beautiful good flights, too, I have to admit. Mis-
takes or not, beauty or not, he never lets me fly.

Three hundred feet per minute down, nine hundred feet
over the ground.

"This is it," I said. "Get your harness tight as it will go."

He didn't answer, turning toward a paved parking lot in
the sunlight. "Maybe not."

The game was over. I knew it. We were dead. Set up for
the parking lot, which was too short to land in, and he'll
scatter sailplane all over the place. No other place to
land . . . wires, trees, roads. Two hundred feet per min-
ute, sliding through seven hundred feet.

"You did it this time, buddy, you really did it!" It was all
over but the crash. He wasn't a good enough pilot to land a
1-26 in that space without bending it. A.J. Smith could
bring it off, maybe, but this guy, with just a few hours in a

1-26, not a chance. I pulled my harness tighter. Blast, I
thought. If I was flying, we would have been safe now in the
ridge lift at the hill. But he's flying, with all that romantic
bravado, and now we're one minute from disaster.

"Well. How about that," he said. "Lift at last! Two-fifty,
three hundred feet per minute up!"                      v

He banked the Schweizer hard to the left, circling in a
tight narrow thermal over the parking lot. It was quiet for a
long while, as he worked the lift.

"Notice," he said at last, "six hundred feet per minute
climb, and we're through twenty-five hundred feet!"

"Yeah. Sometimes you have the most fantastic luck."

"Think it's luck? Maybe so. Maybe not. Believe in lift,
never give up the search for it, and I bet you turn out luck-
ier than the man who gives up at a thousand feet. And a
fellow hasn't a prayer of reaching his goal unless he some-
how learns to find lift for himself, don't you think?"

We rode the lift to four thousand five hundred feet and
he set off again on course.

"That little thermal saved your neck," I said, "and you
leave it, turn your back on it without so much as a fare-
thee-well." I was mostly joking, making a little fun of his
dreamer's ways.

"Right. No farewell. Does us no good to stay around af-
ter we've gone as high as we can go. Clinging to old lift is
for the nonbelievers. Happens over and again. The only
real security for a glider is knowing that the sky has other

thermals, invisible, waiting. It's just a matter of learning
how to find what's already there."

"Hm," I said. It sounded logical enough with four thou-
sand five hundred feet in our bank, but the philosophy was
no comfort back there when I thought we had bought us a
parking lot.

We pressed along in zero sink for a while, then even that
faded and we started down again. We reached the cumulus,
all right, but there was no lift there at all. There should
have been lift, but there wasn't. I felt hot, suddenly. Below
us was the edge of a vast pine forest, hard mountain coun-
trywe needed that lift.

'Two-hundred-foot sink," I said. "What do you plan to
do now?"

"Guess I'll stay on course. I think that's the right thing to
do, sink or not."

The right thing. It's always hard to do the right thing,
soaring cross-country. In rising air, for instance, you're sup-
posed to slow down, just when you feel like pushing along
on course with the nose down for speed. In falling air,
when you feel like holding the nose up, that's when you
have it put down, to increase speed and get through the
sink as fast as you can. To his credit, then, he set the nose
down and penetrated, though we were well out over those
hills all spiny with trees, dropping through twenty-five
hundred feet with no place to land. He flew as if he had
studied textbooks on soaring. Further, he flew as though he
trusted that the textbooks were true.

"There's a time," he had told me once, "when you have
to believe the people who have already done what you want
to do. You have to believe what they tell you, act on it until
you're out there proving it for yourself,"

I didn't have to ask; that was just what he was doing this
momentbelieving the diagrams of lift over hills cross-
wind.

We lost altitude.

"Looks like that cloud might have some lift, off the right
wing, couple of miles," I said.

"It might."

There was quiet, for a time.

"Then why don't we cut over there while we still have
the altitude to reach it?" I felt like a first-grade teacher with
a slow pupil.

"Yes. Well. Look off to the left, too. There's great lift,  .

ten miles off in that cu. But it's not on course. If we made it
over there we could climb, all right, but we'd be ten miles
off course, and use all our altitude getting back on. So why
make the detour? All we'd do is waste time, go nowhere.
That's happened to a lot of good pilots. Won't happen to
me, if I can help it."

"Get high and stay high," I quoted at him. He didn't
even blink.

What a lousy day! We were down to fifteen hundred feet,
in the middle of a bunch of sink, and no place to land but
trees. The air was stagnant heavy stuff, like clear granite
rock. This was worse than ever. In the parking lot, at least,
there would have been people to help us pick up the wreck.
Here there wasn't even a lookout tower in the forest. We'd
crash unseen.

"What do you know," he said, rolling the glider hard to
the right.

"What's up? What are you doing?"

"Look. A sailplane."

It was a pure white 1-26, circling in a thermal not half a
mile away. I thought we had been alone, when we left the
hill, but there had been somebody out here ahead of us all
the time, and now he marked a thermal.

"Thanks, fella, whoever you are." Maybe we both said
that.

We slipped in beneath the other Schweizer, and at once
the variometer showed two hundred feet per minute climb.
It doesn't look like much, on paper, but two hundred feet
per minute over a horizon-wide pine forest is a lovely sight.
We worked that lift all patient and careful, and by the time
we left it, we had had another four thousand feet in the
bank. The other sailplane had long since departed on
course.

"That was kind of him, to mark that thermal for us," I
said.

"What do you mean?" He sounded annoyed. "He didn't
mark it for us. He found the thermal for himself and used
it for his own climb. You think he made that climb for our
sake? He couldn't have helped us an inch unless we were
ready to be helped. If we didn't see him, back there, or if
we saw him and didn't believe we could use the lift he
found, we'd probably be sitting on some pine branch by
now."

Just as we left the thermal, we looked down and saw an-

other sailplane gliding down low into the base of it, finding
the lift, turning to climb in it.

"See?" he said. "That fellow there is probably thanking
us for marking the lift, but we didn't even know he was \
there till now. Funny, isn't it? We make our own climb, and
it turns out that we've done somebody else a favor."

The mountains gave way to flatland toward the end of
the day. I was riding along, not thinking much, when he
said, "Look there."

There was a wide green field, by the road, and in the
center of the field was a sailplane, landed.

"Too bad," he said, with an odd sorrow in his voice.

It startled me to hear him say that.

"Too bad? What do you mean?"

"The poor guy came all this way, and now he's out of
the contest, sitting down there in that field."

"You must be tired," I said. "He's not out. The distance
he made counts for score, and those points add on to the
points he'll make tomorrow and the next day. Anyway,
that's not a bad feeling, once in a while, to be down at last
and out of the competition for a time, just lying on the
grass, resting, knowing you'll fly again."

As we watched, a blue station wagon drove carefully
from the road into the field, towing a long narrow sail-
plane-trailer. It would be a good time. The ground crew
would chide the pilot for not doing better, till he lived the
flight again for them and proved that he had done his best,
every minute. Some things he probably learned, so he might
fly a little more skillfully next time. Tomorrow the same pi-
lot would be born again to the competition, at the end of a
different towline.

"You're right," he said. "I'm sorry. It's not bad at all. It's
exactly right. Forgive me for being so blind."

"That's OK." I couldn't tell if he had been testing me or
not. He does that, sometimes.

We tried to stretch our long final glide to the goal, but
the sink was worse at dusk and we didn't make it. We
touched down in the evening on a lonely pasture, a mile
short of goal, but we had done our best and there were no
regrets. Even I had no regrets, at the end.

It was still as death when our bright sailplane finally
stopped in the green, when the breath of wind about its
wings sighed away and was gone.

We opened the canopy, then, I the practical and he the
romantic, both in our one pilot-body, stepping free of the
body of the sailplane that had taken us through the adven-
ture of the afternoon.

The air tasted light and fresh. We could hear birds in the
meadow.

We'd fly again tomorrow, of course, but for the time it
was kind of fun to lie down and stretch out in the grass and
know that we were alive.
