WING-WALKING TOWARD CHRISTMAS [Sun, 12-15-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Christmas Stories of An Old Man--WING-WALKING TOWARD CHRISTMAS [Sun, 12-15-24]

Warning: This column is very long, almost 2000 words, because I wrote it originally as a story rather than as a column. It is part of my Years of Christmas collection. I don’t think I have posted it here before.

 

WING-WALKING TOWARD CHRISTMAS--1921

            Some days make you think. That was the kind of day it was, a thinker's kind of day, a philosopher's kind of day.

            Farmers tend to be philosophers, anyway, and Walter Reinhardt was a farmer. Walter understood about philosophy, that farmers were philosophers. Sometimes he philsophized about that. 

            "Maybe it's the daily closeness to life and death, of plants and animals, and sometimes humans," thought Walter.

            Then his special eye clicked into place, as it almost always did when he began to think. He could actually see philosophy, a tall woman with long legs, in a feed-sack dress, striding through his fields, dropping seeds and pushing them in deep.

            That was the kind of early December day it was, a thinking kind of day, a seeing kind of day, as Walter rode on the wagon seat, his wife, Elna, beside him, their children bouncing in the wagon-bed behind, Prince and Fanny calmly clopping ahead on the hard dirt road.

            He didn't know why his thoughts turned to the day itself, but a warm, sunny day in early December is unusual enough to pull all the attention it can get. It seemed to Walter that it was the sort of day pilgrims would use to make their way to a shrine, singing as they went.  

            Walter lifted up his special eye to the low, pleasant hills around him. He could see himself as a pilgrim, on his way to some unique destination.

            "Keep on toiling up that hill, pilgrim," Walter said to himself. "Once in your life you ought to make it into the holy city, regardless of where you live the rest of the time. Soon or late, you need to do something that is out of the ordinary, that you're not going to do every day or every week, that isn't practice or rehearsal for something else, but just needs to be done for its own sake, something for which once is good enough."

             It seemed like that kind of day.

            "Walter, for heaven's sake, wake up. You're gonna run over somebody."

            Elna's voice flipped down the shade on his special eye.

            "You've been day-dreamin' agin, haven't you? I don't know what to do. It's like havin' another child."

            Walter kept looking right where he had been staring, into the middle of the road, but his eyes were different now. The special eye was closed. Instead of seeing his fellow pilgrims toiling up the slopes toward the holy city, he saw his fellow citizens rolling down the streets of Bloomington. It wasn't quite the same.

            "I guess I'm never going to go any place special, not for real," sighed Walter to himself.

            There was a peculiar quality about the day, though, even in Bloomington. It was a Saturday, and everyone came to town on Saturday. It was warm and sunny even though it was early December. The Christmas decorations were on the streets and in the windows of the stores. Any of those by itself would have given the day a quality of expectation.

            Today, though, the barnstormers were coming to town.

            Normally the flying barnstormers ended their Midwest season long before December. The autumn had stayed warm for so long. though, that they were hanging on until the cold weather blew in from the high plains and they were forced to fly south, along with the geese.

            They had flown their little open cockpit bi-planes into Dunn Meadow, and that was where Walter Reinhardt was heading first. How many chances did a person have to see a real airplane, anyway? Even Elna was excited about that.

            The pilots had planned to do some acrobatics, cause the clod-hoppers to pop their eyes, then make some money by taking people up for rides. Their plans hit some snags, though. Actually, their planes hit some trees. The first pilot lost power and crashed into the woods. A second pilot lost a truss and crashed into a corn field.          

Neither one was hurt. They both came walking back to Dunn Meadow. There were more pilots and more planes, but the enthusiasm of the locals for flying wasn't in much better shape than the first two planes. They started back down Kirkwood Avenue to the square, to do some shopping.

            That was when Earl Flynn, one of the foremost barn-stormers of the era, grabbed the megaphone.

            Earl was known as "Fly-Boy Flynn." He didn't barn-storm for the money. He didn't need it. He was the heir to a brewery fortune in Cincinnati. He flew just for the love of flying and for the love of people. He was sure and certain that airplanes would bring peace to earth. That was why he had persuaded the other pilots to do this late-autumn fly-through of the Midwest, to do a Christmas tour to honor "The Prince of Peace."

            "Just think," he used to say to his father, who thought Earl ought to give up this fly-boy nonsense and stick to his kreusening, "think how the flying machine will bring people closer. We'll be able to fly over barriers. We'll get help to people so much more quickly in times of natural disaster. We'll be able to visit people in other lands, and we'll learn that they're just people, too. As we understand one another better, there will no longer be a need for war."

            "Earl," his father replied, "the only way to prevent wars is to keep people drunk enough that they can't shoot straight. That's the mission of this brewery. Just think of the rent riots five years ago. Why, those squatters were gonna kill the land-lords, and the police, too. If I hadn't sent those three wagons of free beer down there and gotten them all soused, the streets would have run red with blood. As it was, they just frothed a little around the gutters."

            Fly-Boy Flynn never knew how to answer his father's reasoning, because it was so reasonable and so unreasonable at the same time. He had no trouble talking about flying when he had a megaphone in his hand, though.

            "Ladies and gentlemen," he shouted. "Don't go now! The pilots were just demonstrating how safe flying is even when you crash. But I realize you might have misunderstood their intentions. Consequently, I am prepared to put up $100 of my own money to anyone who will stand on the top wing of my plane, hold onto this wing-walker's bar, and go up with me for just five minutes. Why, you'll see there's nothing to it."

            One hundred dollars! One hundred dollars was a lot of money. You could work three months for that much cash.

            Nobody ran forward to grab those greenbacks Fly-Boy Flynn was holding high above his leather helmet, though. They knew malarky when they heard it. Those other pilots were not demonstrating safety; they were demonstrating stupidity.

            It looked like no one was going to take up Flynn's offer, not until Walter Reinhardt muttered, "I always wanted ta ride on one of them wings."

            Mrs. Reinhardt could not believe what she heard.

            "Walter," she cried, "You can't do that. You'll git killed. That Fly-Boy fella is crazy. He don't haff ta worry. His father owns a big brewery. No one depends on him. But you, Walter, you got responsibilities. Who'd work the fields? What would become of me and the children? And Christmas almost here. I always knew that silly day-dreaming of yours would get us in trouble sooner or later. That hundred dollars ain't worth it!"

            "The Lord knows we could use a hundred dollars, especially with Christmas comin' on," said Walter, "but that ain't why I'm gonna do it. I just gotta stand up and ride on one of them things."

            His children looked at him in amazement. They had never seen their father any higher than the seat of the farm wagon. It never occurred to them that he could get any higher than that. Now he was the only man in the whole crowd who would even think about going up in the air with Fly-Boy Flynn.

            The people nearby overheard Mrs. Reinhardt. They began to pass the word through the crowd.

            "Reinhardt's gonna do it. Crazy Reinhardt's gonna go up on that wing with that fella wearin' a white scarf 'round his neck."

            No one had ever referred to Walter Reinhardt as "Crazy" Reinhardt before. His neighbors knew nothing of Walter's special eye. From what they could see of him, he was as sober and plodding as Prince and Fanny, his one-horse, one-mule team. But even the thought of doing something like going up on that wing was enough to give him a nickname that you can still see today on a gravestone in the Methodist cemetery.

            Mrs. Reinhardt wrung her hands and jumped from one foot to the other.

            "I know you always wanted ta be a balloon man when you was growin' up, Walter, but this is crazy. You're too old ta be changin' jobs and doin' somethin' different. You can't become a pilot or some crazy wing-walker now."

            "I ain't figurin' on doin' this but once, Elna," said the man now known forever as "Crazy." "Sometimes, though, a person's gotta do somethin' even if it's the only time in his whole life he does it."

            With that, Walter Reinhardt walked up to Fly-Boy Flynn and said, "Show me how ta hang onta this thing."

            As they mounted up into the bright December sky, Walter sang a little song, a song for pilgrims who are going up the slopes to a special place. No one heard it, not even Fly-Boy, because of the sounds of the wind and the plane's motor.

            "The Lord is your guardian. As you mount up toward the sun, it is God who is your shade on your right hand. You can soar up into the sky and God won't let the sun get you. You can fly by night and the moon won't get you. The Lord will guard your goings out and your comings in, your take-offs and your landings, from this time forth and for evermore," he sang.

            Walter wasn't getting the words exactly, the way he'd heard them in church. As he sang, though, it seemed that he was getting the words right for the first time in his life.

            They flew over the square and around the court house, over the university and clear out to the edge of town. Walter could see it all, and he loved it, even in the sun-bright bleakness of the leafless winter.

            "So this is why You did it!" the philosopher shouted, where no one below could hear.

            Walter looked down. With his special eye, he could see God striding up the hill toward the city, cradling the baby in the everlasting arms, going to meet Mary and Joseph at the barn on the edge of town. In the wind on the wing, Walter had a special ear, too. He heard God singing, the same song Walter himself had just sung.

            "Keep on toiling up that hill, pilgrim," Walter shouted. "Once in your life you ought to make it into the holy city, regardless of where you live the rest of the time. Soon or late, you need to do something that's out of the ordinary, that you're not going to do every day or every week, that isn't practice or rehearsal for something else but just needs to be done for its own sake, something for which once is good enough."

            God looked up at Walter and winked.

            Walter threw back his head and laughed.

            "That crazy God," he muttered.

John Robert McFarland