Crossing western Indiana Friday I flew over the top of a church spire and then dipped down to read the water tower. It said Elwood. My GPS was locked in the baggage compartment, something I didn’t notice until my right hand went to turn it on a half-an-hour after I left. I knew I was going west and had just followed the roads that divide the farms into giant Triscuit’s with no specific course in-mind. Playing ‘turn left – turn right’ with my plane I suppose. Elwood looked like all the towns I had grown up near, one long main street flanked with brick store fronts connecting the farms and small ranch homes to its center. These towns are the same ones I was dying to escape in my teens but this afternoon I didn’t want to leave so we circled homes, the church, the school, and dropped down into the fields; skimming the corn and lower still into the wheat and the beans. The smells in an open-cockpit are more earth than sky. Grass, exhaust, dust, and smoke are indicators of altitude and I rarely get to smell the chalky wetness of clouds or the dry, cold, crisp air above 5000 ft. Rising just to clear the wires on the edge of town I waved to a farmer as we crossed the small highway guarding the flanks of Elwood and I saw a faded runway. Then two appeared out of a bean field and they were covered in clover. Climbing to get a better look, it is or it was definitely an airport, complete with tattered windsock. Next to this perfect little strip was a small white Inn, pick-ups’ lining its parking lot. I circled to land and the touch-down was as I would have imagine it to be landing in a field of clover, soft and thick under the wheels, no momentum in the high grass.
I had lunch in the company of farmers and truckers, curious enough to watch me but not to ask who I was and where I was going. If they had asked I wouldn’t have had an answer anyway. The waitress finally questioned who’s plane that was, and if I had flown it by myself? I could answer those types of questions. Calling the cook out to talk, they explained that theirs’ was the oldest Fly-in Drive-in restaurant, but they don’t get many airplanes anymore. Apologetically adding that they are about to plow the field over to plant corn, a more lucrative crop then pilots. I finished my lunch and they followed me out, curious for photos by my clownish looking biplane.
I took off wondering if we would be the last vintage plane to land there, and how many other small airfields were plowing or paving their runways over this year? If I had my GPS, I surely would have punched in some three letter destination and I would have never found this place and had the best landing of my life. You see hiding between the tires and a runway of clover were a thousand butterflies laying in wait and when I touched down we forced them up, all those lemony yellow wings fluttered around ours like confetti. They were caught in the air between Blu’s wings for minutes and I pulled the power off so I could stay with them. Such a perfect surprise I can’t begin to describe it. No pictures to share and no one to witness it, but I promise it was magic. It was the best landing I ever made and I had nothing to do with it.
