We are rolling down the runway, increasing speed. At 70 knots, my husband lifts the nose of our small plane and we are suddenly airborne. Looking down, I can see the treetops, then the diagram of the town, and soon a panorama of hills and highways. We are heading south and west, toward Mississippi.
I grew up seeing America by taking classic journeys, along interstates riding in the back seat of the family station wagon and later on Route 66 in the front seat of a VW Beetle. I rode the train, watching the scenery of the upper Midwest from the glassy Vista-Dome cars. Now, many of my travels are in the air, in a small propeller plane that offers an intimate experience that bears little resemblance to that of flying in a big commercial airliner.
My pilot-husband and I have been meandering around the country for many months now in our single-engine four-seater propeller plane. We land at small town airports, where the airlines never land, and where even occasional private jets are easily outnumbered by crop dusters. There are more than 150,000 small piston planes flying in the United States, offering a view of America and life that is otherwise rare to find.
We like to fly just a few thousand feet above ground level, higher than the flight path of many birds, but low enough to watch the currents that beat against barges maneuvering down the Mississippi or the heavy semis jockeying for position on long stretches of Interstate 80. We spot yellow school buses easing to a stop in front of the white picket fences of corn-belt farmhouses. We track horse-and-buggies inching along the back roads of Pennsylvania’s Amish country. In the course of an hour or two, we’ll see the marked geometry of neat, green farms that are “East River” in South Dakota fade slowly into stark brown expanses of “West River,” on the other side of the Missouri, too hostile for anyone to try to tend. We have stopped counting the number of quarries and prisons we fly over, which are everywhere and often, oddly, near each other. And we marvel at the rows and rows of massive, white windmills, steely and elegant, churning slowly with languor yet still making power.
I might have seen it coming, that we would get to this way of travel. Over the years, our family has lived in a lot of places around the world (My husband, Jim, is a journalist). We took to exploring the edges and corners of Ghana and England, of Japan, China, Australia and Southeast Asia. Also, Jim is a passionate pilot. I think pilots are born, like musicians or artists. There is no place they would rather be than in the air.
It seemed a natural step, then, that we should set out to explore our own country in our little plane. Our mission, or excuse, was to spend more time in some of the many towns where we had put down over the years, searching for small airstrips with cheap fuel. There are almost 5,000 small airports to choose from, each maybe a mile or five from a town we had never heard of and had never planned to be. In fact, I’m sure that William Least Heat-Moon’s blue highways wouldn’t even get you to many of these towns.
As our list of towns grew, so did a humble sense that America is full of places with stories to tell, where generations had spent their lives building, losing and rebuilding, or where newcomers migrate, like pioneers, to strive toward their dreams. Their stories are compelling, especially now with steep economic challenges. Just one flight over rusted-out abandoned factories and new groundbreakings up the road tells you that.
But first, getting there, as they say, should be half the adventure. In this plane, we can go anywhere — anywhere — with no permission, no ticket, no plans. The skies are free, with a few reasonable caveats: even-numbered thousands-of-feet altitudes when flying west and odd-numbered when flying east to keep planes away from each other; avoiding military flight-training zones, if they are “hot”; staying outside the perimeter of wherever Air Force One might be; and post-2001, securing permission to land within the “Special Flight Rules” zone around Washington. In good, clear weather where we can fly under “visual flight rules,” we don’t even have to talk to air traffic controllers, although we usually do, to request “flight following” for a layer of safety, so they can track us and we can hear them.
We set just one hard-and-fast rule for ourselves: safe, benign flying conditions trump everything. There is nowhere we ever have to be, no wedding or appointment or holiday gathering, ever — and if there is, we can get there another way. Jim is a cautious pilot; he never took passengers until he earned his instrument rating. And our plane, a Cirrus, has a parachute built into the body of the plane. In extreme emergency, you can yank down a lever that is nestled just above the two front seats, and a parachute with rip cords will rocket out of the top of the plane, settling the plane safely to the ground.
Of course nothing is foolproof. I am often surprised at how quickly conditions change, despite predictions. Out of nowhere come clouds, haze, fronts, isolated storms, downdrafts, updrafts and smoke, not to mention birds, other planes, sky divers, balloons and gliders. The skies are rarely dull. No trip ever goes exactly as foreseen.
Once, long ago, when we were flying east over upstate New York, a front materialized between us and Boston, where we were heading. We were suddenly surrounded, our lightning scope lit up with countless little yellow X’s, indicating the location of the strikes. The controller (God bless them all) suggested that the best way to thread through this was to head north over Canada. He asked us for the number of “souls on board” before he wished us good luck (the one and only time I’ve heard that), and handed us off to a military controller, through whose space we secured permission to fly.
A few weeks ago, we set out again. Our destination was Columbus, Miss., a small town along the border with Alabama. We had heard tales of how it is recovering from the loss of its low-wage, low-tech textile, plastics and food-processing factories and how new industries like tire-making, steel, drones and engines, to name a few, are bringing new life to the area.
It was Easter Sunday, a gorgeous day along the East Coast. The skies were busy after months of endless winter that marooned all of us. Jumpers were out over South Carolina. When the controller in the Atlanta center slipped a “y’all” into just about every strictly, formulaic transmission, we knew we had crossed some invisible Southern border.
Jim located a small airport, a fixed-base operator (F.B.O.) where we could stop for gas. For humans, the effects of three or four hours in a small plane accumulate: too hot, too cold, noisy, cramped, hungry, where’s the bathroom. As we approached for landing, I wished for good luck with the F.B.O. The worst ones will have a small shack, a bathroom, a few phone numbers to call for emergency, a vending machine with cheese crackers, yet always a working self-serve gas pump. One F.B.O. in Maine was so remote that we had to circle around twice for landing when a local farmer was using the runway as a shortcut for his tractor. On the other hand, you might find an F.B.O. with a nice comfy lounge, homemade cookies, popcorn and a restroom full of amenities.
On that Sunday, we stopped for gas at Toccoa, Ga., near the South Carolina border, as I was working up a little bit of self-pity over our Easter lunch of beef jerky. When I pulled open the door to the F.B.O., the most delicious aromas wafted out, followed by a warm invitation from the manager to take a plate and join his extended family for a potluck buffet: ham, salads, biscuits, casseroles and enough Southern hospitality to fill the state. You never know.
Well-fortified, we flew on a few more hours west to Mississippi. The approach to the tiny county airport goes right over the skeletons of textile factories of Columbus. We spent several days in and around the town. Jim visited the new Russian-owned steel mill, Severstal, as well as the PACCAR truck-engine plant and an Airbus facility that makes helicopters for the military. I visited the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, which is a public residential high school that sends its graduates to colleges as close as Mississippi State University or as far as M.I.T. or Harvey Mudd in California. I prowled the archives of the town library, with its stacks of war journals of Confederate and Union soldiers, and the segregated cemeteries and antebellum homes.
Heading out, we decided to fly west a few miles, over the heart of nearly $5 billion of new factories and industry. We spotted the new small regional airport right across the road from the new steel mill. This was our evocative view from the skies: as we traveled from one small airport to the next, separated by just a few moments in flying time, we moved across a space of decades in economic evolution, a journey symbolic of a changing America.