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world that was rushing at me much too quickly, and without any adult to shield me from it as if I, and not my father behind me, were the pilot.
    Suddenly then, and sickeningly, the quaking little plane was in the air—rising above a row of trees, and above open fields.
    Like any ten-year-old I trusted my father, absolutely. As I trusted my mother. (And now I wonder what my young mother must have been thinking, watching us from the runway. Did she, too, have complete trust in my father? Was she frightened when he took her up into the air, and did she really want to accompany him?—or was she,perhaps subtly, coerced? Should my father, with his newly acquired pilot’s license, have taken up a ten-year-old child?) There was a daredevil recklessness to life in those days which seems in our more cautious era, in which children are likely to be over-protected by their parents, very remote indeed. Recall that this was a time when seat belts in vehicles were unknown and virtually everyone (including my parents) smoked.
    Through his life my father would always say, “Flying is safer than driving a car.” Statistically, this is (evidently) true, yet not quite a consolation for some of us.
    My most vivid memories of that first trip are the fields opening beneath the plane, the blur of the spinning propeller close in front of me, the buffeting rush of the wind, and the quaking of the plane. In small aircraft you are very conscious of the wind. You are very conscious of the sky. Below, every detail seems heightened. You have suddenly an entirely new, unexpected perspective—you are looking down, bizarrely, from above. It is something of a miracle to see the roofs of houses and barns not so very far below as you pass over.
    Pilots of small planes invariably head for home to fly over their houses and property. My father never failed to do this, a quick trip of only a few minutes, since our farmhouse was no more than three miles away. What is more pleasurable than to “buzz” the houses of friends and relatives?
    Such playfulness suggests the youth of my father at this time, as it suggests the youth of the era. “Buzzing” low over houses and property was viewed as a sort of practical joke and not a dangerous annoyance as we would be inclined to see it today.
    In the Piper Cub my father was likely to fly us to Lockport, where we could see the Erie Barge Canal stretching out below; he was likely to fly us in the direction of Niagara Falls, and the Niagara River; we would never fail to see the Tonawanda Creek, thatstretched past our house on Transit Road and would enter my dreams for a lifetime. All these waterways were fascinating to me like the wind-buffeted airborne perspective itself. Safety is a small price to pay for such a perspective! —so my father might have said.
    To be in the air—airborne! There was nothing like it for my father and his pilot-friends.
    Returning to the airfield: that thrill in the pit of the stomach as the Piper Cub circles the runway and begins to dip down. (Sometimes, if the plane isn’t in the ideal position, the pilot decides not to land. And so you sweep up again, rapidly up into the air again, the nose of the plane lifting into the sky so that for an unnerving moment there is nothing to see but sky.) Then, circling back, and trying again as the nose of the plane is lowered by a movement of the pilot’s stick.
    Landing is the most dangerous maneuver. A mistake at that time can be fatal . . .
    A reassuring jolt as the plane’s wheels strike the runway and within an instant the plane is on the ground, bouncing and bumping along the runway.
    Returning to the hangar in a kind of triumph. And my mother hurrying forward to greet us with a tight embrace and a little sob of relief as if to say Thank God! You are returned to me safely.
    IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS MY father would take me up in some of the larger and more intimidating airplanes at Lee’s