Aeronca Girl

Today I’m breaking from the normal motherly musings of everyday life to share a piece of writing from my creative writing workshop. Here’s a day in the life of the 22 year old gypsy …

Day Two. Keokuk Iowa Municipal Airport. Liquid condensation trickles silently down the sheer nylon walls that offer me little protection from the morning’s chill. I should have known better than to buy a Walmart edition of a child’s backyard tent. I know and love names like North Face and Mountain Hardware but let’s face it – my pocketbook can afford neither. In the half-darkness of the previous evening I had made camp outside the airport’s only FBO (fixed base operator) on a miniature patch of grass just feet from where my 1947 Aeronca Champ rested her reciprocating engine from the day’s labors. We had slept the peaceful sleep of the wanderer; dreams heavy with the weight of the good, wide earth and the lightness of the endless blue sky.

Dawn has come early. I bury my face under the warmth of my sleeping bag for a few more minutes, fearing the nip of this unseasonable cold snap and dreading the imminent struggle with my sleeping-bag-hair-syndrome. I can be grateful that for the most part the airport is still deserted. A solitary fuel attendant sees me slip into the sparsely supplied ladies’ room to freshen up as best I can.

Despite the cold and the lack of shower facilities, I love the building’s old carpet, the artistic stack of carelessly strewn flying magazines on a side table and the strange but familiar way that everything smells like 100 low lead fuel. “But then,” I think, “maybe that smell is just me.”  Regardless, small town airports like this have forever captured my heart. O’Hare and JFK, please keep your long term parking lots, Hudson News, rolling luggage and moving sidewalks. My soul longs for the snug little building smelling of exhaust fumes and adventure. The signs on the restroom doors won’t read Ladies or Gentlemen, but instead “Amelia” and “Lindy”. There will be a popcorn stand in the corner and one wall half covered by fragments of t-shirts and shirt tails inked with the names and dates of proud first solo flights.

Airports like this bespeak summer morning pancake feeds to support the local Civil Air Patrol Squadron, student flyers buzzing low overhead and wrinkled WWII pilots weaving aerial tales of conquest and danger over styrofoam cups half-full of forgotten coffee long ago turned cold. I’d learned to fly at an airport like this. I’d heard my share of stories from Navy tail gunners with noses grown much larger than what I saw depicted in their once-handsome wartime photos that now hung in stark black and white on the wainscoted wall. They seemed to always have a quip or innuendo for the one young girl they’d ever met with flying aspirations. I loved them anyway in spite of myself. Places like this are filled with memories and the ghosts of aviators gone west. I feel lucky to have their company.

Anxious to get back in the air, I grab a few last minute supplies from the offerings in the glass display case filled with Sic Sacs and aeronautical charts, and give my fuel order to man behind the counter. A couple of local flyers, newly arrived for their morning brew and airplane fix, stop me for a few minutes of conversation. From their vantage point at large front window, they admire my fabric-winged Aeronca and ask my age in stunned curiosity. “A girl that flies a plane like that across the country solo can do just about anything she sets her mind to!” one says. I smile my thanks in the same shy way I always have, but I walk a little taller out the door.

Our way today lies southward in an almost perfectly parallel path to the banks of the muddy Mississippi. I expect landfall tonight will be a tiny airfield on the northern end of Kentucky Lake, a massive reservoir created by the damming of another life-bearing waterway: the Tennessee River. The Aeronca’s engine throbs to life, beating the silence away with an undeviating cadence as the propwash through the cockpit’s open door relentlessly whips my ponytail into long blond tangles. With a quick tug I pull the chocks away from the tires like I’m opening the door for a caged bird. The fuselage seems to vibrate with the anticipation of our impending freedom.