While managing Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm, I kept a Piper Cub at a crop duster’s airstrip. Poking through a hole in the airplane’s gas tank cap, a wire attached to a cork measured fuel consumption. As the level dropped, the part of the wire visible to the pilot shortened, and its bent end prevented it from falling through when the tank ran dry. The aircraft cruised at only eighty miles per hour, and its instrument panel consisted of little more than an airspeed indicator and altimeter.
One day, my friend Bud suggested we fly to Dothan, Alabama, where he was due to attend a sales seminar. I reminded him that the Cub wasn’t designed for long trips, especially when carrying a lot of luggage and two large men whose aging, obese bodies were encumbered with layers of lard.
“No worries, Ace,” he chortled, “she’ll make it just fine, and dead reckoning will get us there. This’ll be a walk in the park.” If slop soared to $10 a gallon Bud could sell it to hog farmers, and he sold me on what turned out to be the aviation misadventure of a lifetime.
Groaning, the overloaded Cub barely cleared a fence at the airstrip’s end, but finally reached a descent cruising altitude. 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 skies above and clouds below, obscuring all landmarks, while the bend in the fuel wire sank precipitously.
Only one thing to do — go back the way we came. By country-boy reckoning we figured that flying away from the sun was our best bet, since we’d been flying toward it, with hopes that we’d see ground instead of clouds before the Cub became a glider. Finally, the clouds parted, and we spiraled down to a 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 for support, we staggered toward the nearest house.
“Ma’am, where are we?” Bud asked an old lady sitting on her porch. The woman, deaf as a fencepost, craned forward and cupped her ears. Bud repeated himself.
“Philadelphia, Mississippi is ’bout twenty miles down the road. Where y’all headed?”
Bud answered, but to her dysfunctional ears, Dothan sounded like Boston. Nodding her head in disbelief, a gold-toothed smile cracked her face, and slapping her knees, she guffawed, “Boston!” Y’all tryin’ to git to Boston — and can’t even git to Philadelphia?”
Her cackling laughter sent us on our way. For us, truer words were never spoken than those by Yogi Berra when he said, “Be careful if you don’t know where you’re going. Otherwise: 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)).
