Folks setting out on journeys must be certain to plan first. If they don’t, they might end up like my friend Bud and me when we took a plan-less plane trip.
When I farmed, I owned a Piper Cub airplane. Running through the gas tank’s cap, a wire attached to a float measured consumption. As the fuel level dropped, the part of the wire visible to the pilot shortened, and a crook in its end kept it from falling through when the tank ran dry. The aircraft cruised at only eighty miles per hour, and the instrument panel consisted of little more than an airspeed indicator and altimeter.
One April day, Bud suggested we fly the Cub to Dothan, Alabama, for a sales seminar.
“You and I tote enough lard to weigh in at a quarter ton,” I said. “That’s a big load and a long trip for that tiny plane.”
Bud was a born salesman. If slop went to $9 a gallon, he could sell it to hog farmers, and he sold me on participating in the aviation misadventure of a lifetime.
When I mentioned that the compass was unreliable, he chortled, “Dead reckoning will get us there. For us two ace pilots, this’ll be a walk in the park.”
Groaning, the Cub barely cleared the fence at the strip’s end, but with landmarks mapped out, we scudded along peacefully.
Peace didn’t last long. What we thought was a small cloud layer beneath us turned out to be as wide as the Bermuda Triangle. Suddenly we found ourselves imprisoned in little more than a motorized kite a mile above Terra Firma in a featureless void of blue sky over an endless carpet of fluffy white clouds, while the bend in the fuel gauge wire sank lower and lower.
Only one thing to do — go back the way we came. By country-boy reckoning we figured that we must fly away from the sun, since we’d been flying toward it, and hope to see ground before the Cub became a glider. Just as the engine sipped the last slurp, the clouds parted, and we spiraled down toward a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere.
When we rolled to a stop, Bud and I were cadaverous white and speechless, having glimpsed the Grim Reaper eyeball to eyeball. Clinging to each other, we staggered to a house beside the road.
“Ma’am, where are we?” Bud asked an old lady sitting on the porch. Nearly stone deaf, she craned forward and cupped her ears. Bud repeated himself.
“Philadelphia, Mississippi, is ’bout twenty miles yonder ways. Where y’all headed?”
Bud answered, but to her dysfunctional ears, Dothan sounded like Boston. A gold-toothed smile cracked her face, and she slapped her knees.
“Boston!” she guffawed. Y’all tryin’ to go to Boston — and can’t even git to Philadelphia?”
For us, what Yogi Berra once said rang true: You must be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
