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If ere to live in this tirass fields and cowpastures to land in, close to town We had to fly our own aerobatics, take our own chances, find our own paying passengers We knew that five airplanes, a full circus, could bring out crowds of weekend customers; but would anyone move on a weekday to watch just two airplanes, and those unadvertised? Our fuel and oil, our food, our search for yesterday and our way of life depended upon it We weren’t ready to admit that adventure and the self-reliant individual had had their day
We had throay our aeronautical charts, along with the time they cam
e froh cold silver roaring air, I thought we ht be somewhere over Wisconsin or northern Illinois, but that was as far as I could pin it down There was no north, no south, no east, no west Only the wind fro before it, destination unknown, circling here over a town, over a e afternoon without time, without distance, without direction A and free
But at last, low on fuel, we circled a toith a little grass runway near at hand, and a gas puot set to land I had hoped for a hayfield, because old barnstore sparkled with a certain ic lostness RIO, it said, black letters on a silver water tower
Rio was a hill of trees rising out of the low hills of earth, with rooftops down beneath the green and church spires like holy missiles poised pure white in the sun
Main Street stretched two blocks long, then fell back into trees and houses and farmland
A baseball gaed at the school field
Hansen’s tri the airstrip, down to its last few gallons of gas He waited for us, though, to e our mind and fly off somewhere else—for had we separated in that unknown land, we never would have seen each other again
The strip was built on the edge of a sudden hill, and the first quarter of it lay at a fierce angle that , in winter
I turned and landed, watching the green grass cartwheel up in slow as pump and shut down as Paul swished in overhead to land His plane disappeared over the hillcrest as he touched down, but in asoftly, and rolled down the slope to us With both engines silent at last, there was not a sound in the air
“I thought you were never going to see this place,” Paul said, unfolding fro? Some barnstoro?”