For the last fifty hears, since I resolved to trust my own perceptions, flying, I’ve known that airplanes have spirits.  The startlingest example then, I wrote in a story called Steel, Aluminum, Nuts and Bolts, now chapter something in A Gift of Wings.  It’s still a wonder to me, true story.

Enter Puff the SeaRey, half a century later.  My touch with her is the first time I’ve had a long-term ongoing conversation with a flying machine, a relationship expressed in feeling-pictures, which then I translate to words.  By now, though, I’m not surprised or wondering when I feel her comments in my mind.  Technically, what follows are not her words, but my words to describe the way of talking that’s grown between us.

That had grown between us, that is, until yesterday, when she returned from two nights storm refuge at the Aero Club, a hangar filled mostly with warplanes.

She came away unspeaking from her shelter in that giant place.  Had I asked her what was wrong, I think she would have said, “Oh, nothing…”  But I didn’t ask and got the same feeling, that a chasm had opened wide between us.  It lasted all day and night, nothing could close it but a shift in our earth.

Hoping as always for the best, wishing it had blown away with yesterday’s Wind from the Dark Places, I untied the little seaplane, made my preflight inspection, rolled her to the water and started the engine.

“Good morning, Puff.”

She crept into the lake without her usual happy splash.  ”You are who you are now,” she said, instead of good morning.

“You mean we’re not who we used to be, any more,” I said, then understood what she meant.

“You were a fighter pilot,” she said.  ”With guns.  With bombs and rockets.  You were a destroyer.”

“I flew between wars, Puff.  I didn’t kill anybody.”

“You would have.”

“Back then, I don’t know.  I probably would have.”  I wanted to believe the I don’t know was truer than the probably would have.

“You wouldn’t do that now.”

“No, I wouldn’t.  There’s a reason why fighter pilots are kids.”

“You are who you are now.  You’re not who you were then.”

“Oh,” I said.  ”In the night, in the hangar with the warplanes, you found out your pilot whom you trusted every minute till now, he’s a destroyer.”

“You’re not who you were.”

“Puff, I was a kid.  I wanted to fly!  I believed what they told me to believe.  Defend your country, be a fighter pilot!”

“You were there.  Would you have…  If they said… would you have…?”

“Puff, you’re right.  I’m not who I was then.  If I could talk with that kid…do you know how many times I’ve tried getting through to him, in his flight suit and his G-suit and dumb pride, his trust in the word of a senior officer who now I realize was just another kid?”

“Did you?  Did you get through?”

“Some versions of him I got through to.  One of them, later on, is me.”  This was not a comfortable conversation, the blue water turning to snowdrops splashing at her bow, taxiing while her engine warmed for flight.  Can we talk about something else, Puff?

“One of them is you.”

“Those warplanes with you in the hangar, they weren’t jets, were they?”

“You know that,” she said.  ”It went round and round the hangar, all night long.  Mustang about ‘Double-ya double-wa Two.’  Raids and strikes and battles.  Spitfire called it ‘The Big Show.’  But it wasn’t a show.  They were killing airplanes.  Other things, and people, but they were killing airplanes!”

“They believed it had to be done, Puff.  It was war as the world had never lived, their back was to the wall, the airplanes and the humans who loved them.  They believed they were fighting for a future.  And that future included little seaplanes flying free in the sun, touching down on hidden lakes.”

“‘They believed.’  Was it true?”

“That time, best I can tell, they were right.  They had to.  If they hadn’t…  ”  I thought about that time.  I know I’m a product of my culture, my memories, the history I was told and the one I lived.  Yet, “…things would be different.”

“Those warplanes,” she said, “Every night, they’re still talking about what happened, a whole history ago, and it’s all destroying!”

“Do you know how many warplanes were built, Spitfires and Mustangs and Thunderbolts?”

“Hundreds,” she guessed.

“Tens of thousands, Puff, tens of thousands were built, and flew into air battles, year after year.  Do you know how many are left?”

“No.”

“Maybe ten Spitfires. Maybe three Messerschmitts.  Maybe ten Hurricanes.  Maybe four Focke-Wulfes.  Two Thunderbolts.  Maybe fifty Mustangs.  All the rest are gone.  Crashed.  Lost at sea.  Shot down.  Blown up in midair.”

“So you’re saying let them talk.”

“Let them grieve.”

“You don’t believe in grieving.”

“I’m not the last remaining Spitfire, Puff.  They’re gone, all those fighter planes and their pilots, because they believed in you.  In a future with you, taxiing right now, on this lake the color of their old sky.”

Puff, same as us, is not who she was, day before yesterday.  The world intrudes, our friendship changes.

It does not disappear.

“Where are we off to now?”  She, heir of a family of destroyers, me the same.

“North,” I said.  ”Let’s try North, to see what we shall find.”

North we flew.