Folks starting out on a journey must be certain to do one thing: plan. If they don’t, they might end up like these fellows who took a plane trip without a plan.
When I farmed, I owned a Piper Cub airplane named “Freddie.” Its tank held twelve gallons, and a stiff wire with a cork attached to its bottom end measured fuel consumption. The wire poked through the tank’s cap, and its top end was bent to keep it from falling through. The tiny aircraft cruised at 85 miles per hour, and its only instruments were an airspeed indicator, altimeter, and a capricious compass.
One July day, my friend Bud suggested we fly Freddie to a sales seminar in Dothan, Alabama.
“The compass lies, the baggage bin holds twenty pounds, and the two of us tote enough lard to weigh in at a quarter ton,” I said. If slop went to $9 a gallon, Bud could sell it to hog farmers.
“Dead reckoning,” he chortled. “For us two ace pilots, this’ll be a walk in the park.” Done deal.
A groaning Freddie barely cleared the barbed-wire fence at the strip’s end, but airborne we were, and ascending heavenward. With landmarks mapped out, we scudded peacefully through the summer sky.
Peace didn’t last long. What we thought was a thin line of clouds beneath us turned out to be as wide as the Bermuda Triangle. Suddenly we found ourselves imprisoned in little more than a motorized kite 5,000 feet above Terra Firma in a featureless void of blue sky and hot sun over an endless carpet of fluffy white clouds, while the bend in the fuel gauge wire sank closer to the cap.
Only one thing to do … go back the way we came. By country-boy reckoning we deduced that, since we had been flying toward the sun, we now must fly away from it and hope to see ground before Freddie became a glider. Just as the engine sipped the last slurp, the clouds parted, and we spiraled down, praying for a few hundred feet of dirt road.
When Freddie rolled to a stop, Bud and I were cadaverous white and speechless, having glimpsed the Grim Reaper eyeball to eyeball. We staggered to a house where an old lady was shelling peas on the porch.
“Ma’am, where are we?” Bud croaked. The woman was nearly stone deaf and craned forward, cupping her ears. Bud repeated himself.
“Philadelphia, Mississippi, is right down the road. Where y’all goin’?” she asked. Bud answered, but to her dysfunctional old ears, Dothan sounded more like the name of that northern city famous for baked beans.
First her cheek twitched, then a gold-toothed smile cracked her face, and finally she slapped her knees and burst into guffaws.
“Boston!” she howled, “y’all tryin’ to go to Boston — and can’t even git to Philadelphia!”
Yogi Berra was right: You’ve got to 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)).
