On the Wing Read Online Free Page A

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.”
    â€œDo what?”
    â€œGet to New Mexico.”
    â€œâ€˜Eighteen hops’? Why do you say ‘hops’?”
    â€œThat’s the way I see it,” I said. “I take off, fly a hundred miles, and land. It’s just a short hop.”
    â€œI wouldn’t call it a hop.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œâ€˜Hop’ makes it sound too