“It would be better to learn in a biplane to get the basics,” Trout shouted over the noise, “but I don’t have one at the moment. Anyway, the idea’s the same.”
He had her operate the rudder as they taxied, feel the awkward yaw of the plane on the ground.
At the end of the field, Trout paused to check the gauges and stick a wad of tobacco in his lip before he pushed the throttle forward. They jolted and rolled, picked up speed. Marian sensed the buoyancy in the plane, the way the tires dug less and less deeply into the grass. The fuselage tipped level as the tail wheel lifted. Trout pulled back on the yoke, and the plane parted from the ground.
“All right, now I’m easing off,” he said. He pushed his wheel slowly forward. “She can get off steeper than that, but there’s no need here. In the mountains you’ve got to be sharper, but here we’ve got nothing but room.” Below on the valley floor were the hangars, the cruciform shapes of a few biplanes moored on the grass, the fairgrounds’ long barns and oval racetrack.
Trout adjusted the throttle, cranked the stabilizer.
A new fear struck her: What if she had no aptitude for flying? Her vision of herself as a pilot had been so convincing, she’d forgotten she didn’t actually know how to fly, that she would have to learn. For the first time, the magnitude of her decision to leave school worried her.
“Okay,” Trout said. “Take over.”
“What do I do?”
“Just try to stay straight and level.”
This proved more difficult than it sounded, and she had to keep adjusting the controls according to Trout’s instructions. There was a pervasive strangeness to being in the air, worked upon by invisible forces, struggling always for levelness. The plane was alive, the air was alive. Below, her city was alive, too, but in the incomprehensible way an anthill is alive: full of minuscule, pointless activity.
“Want to try a turn?” Trout said. “You take the wheel, and I’ll manage the rudder.”
“I can do both.”
“It’s tricky.”
“I know what a coordinated turn is.”
“Knowing and doing are two different things, but if you say so. Go right ahead.”
Her fear was gone. There was no room for it. She pressed with her right foot, turned the wheel slowly to the right, felt for balance. The plane banked and turned. Of course it did—it was made to be flown; the controls controlled—but still the fact that she had told an airplane what to do and it had obeyed seemed momentous. Her side window filled with the dark coils of the Bitterroot, the tops of trees. From the ground, the pattern of it all was invisible: how the river fell along the valley in casual bends like a tossed fishing line, how the water always fused back together after being split and spliced by sandbars. Vantage brought obscurity, too, though. Detail was lost, the world reduced to patchwork. All trees were the same. Fields looked uniformly flat and green.
“A little more rudder,” Trout said. “You feel it slipping?” He spat tobacco juice into a coffee can.
As soon as she had the plane zipping along level, mountains would loom up, and she would have to turn again, flying around the valley like a marble riding the inner surface of a bowl.
When they were back on the ground, engine off and propeller stopped, just shy of the hangar, Trout said, “You’re a natural.”
Joy. Only joy. He could not have known he was saying the words she most wished to hear.
“I am?” she said, hoping he would elaborate.
“I’ve taught worse.” He motioned her out.
Now that she had flown it, the Travel Air looked different. She knew the feel of the wheel and the pedals, the rhythmic kick of the engine as the sparks fired, the look of an orange wingtip pointing down at the river as she pivoted around it. She’d been concentrating too hard to fully absorb the miraculous fact that she—she, Marian Graves—was piloting a plane, but now, remembering, she got light-headed.
“The thing about flying,” Trout said, “is that it’s unnatural. You’ve got to train yourself not to follow your instincts but to build up new instincts instead. For example—the simplest example—say the plane stalls and you’re losing altitude, what do you do?”
“Push the stick forward, dive to get speed back.”
He nodded. “You’ve read about it in a book, but it’s different up there. When it happens, the last place you want to go is down, but you’ve got to do it. You have to aim the nose just where you don’t want to go and go there. Getting a pilot’s mind takes a long time. You’ve got to be patient. And you’ve got to have nerve. When you’re up there, you can’t get flustered and stop flying.”