THE FLYER HIKES HOME

I was hanging around Roosevelt Field one afternoon with nothing much on my mind when a couple of friends came up and said they were just taking off for the South. They wanted to catch the Pan-American plane from Miami the next day. They were amateur pilots. The weather was lousy toward the South and they hadn’t had much experience in blind or night flying. I said I would fly with them as far as Washington and maybe by that time the weather would clear. When we got to Washington the weather had pretty well closed down. I didn’t like to see them start off in a fog bank with the sun already setting, so I volunteered to go to Greensborough. The stuff grew thicker. We were flying at two hundred feet and getting lower all the time. So when we landed at Greensborough there was nothing to do but stick with the ship. We took off for Jacksonville after a scanty supper. It was one o’clock in the morning. By that time I could barely make out the beacon lights. I turned to the girl sitting next to me and told her that if we lost the beacon behind us before we saw the one ahead of us we would have to turn back. At that moment both beacons disappeared. I started to bank the ship towards home. And then suddenly the whole sky lightened up. It looked as though a huge broom had gone to work to tidy up the clouds.

We landed at Jacksonville at five in the morning without further mishap. I said good-bye to plane and passengers and then started wondering how I was going to get back to New York. I decided to hitch-hike and save the train fare. It took me three days. When I appeared at the house with a straw behind each ear and a suit full of holes my wife thought I had gone crazy.