You know how it is when you clean out a filing cabinet or a drawer.
You find what you knew you had all along and forgot.
You give yourself credit for remembering.
That’s what I found today, a piece of paper about an airplane.
They called it the Pietenpol.
Back in the 1930s you could buy plans for the Pietenpol. They cost three dollars and fifty cents and came in the mail. Postage would have been about a nickel. The plans told you how to build an airplane in your spare time in a place like your garage or a barn and use a Ford Model A motor for power, “Designed to get the best possible performance…easy to fly, and gets the most flying hours for the money invested.”
The man I once knew had a brother who built one, then without instruction or license his brother flew it around the countryside, taking pictures of farms from the air, selling the pictures to farmers who wanted the novelty of a picture of their farms taken from the air. He also took friends and family on rides, including the man I met at the museum where a Pietenpol is on exhibit suspended from the ceiling.
It’s a wonderful world. The man who built the Pietenpol never crashed. Never injured himself or anyone else flying his crate through the clear blue skies and landed time after time on any sod runway or well mowed pasture, but of course today he’d be arrested. He’d be fined. He’d be considered a fool or a hazard. His plane would be impounded and that’s a shame, because the man’s brother said his Pietenpol, “climbed like a homesick angel” and that’s what everyone wants to do.
Except now its different.
We’re no angels.
We’re not homesick.
We don’t remember and we’re scared.
ƒ