Field of Dreams

“If you build it, he will come.”

Thus spoke the disembodied voice to Kevin Costner’s character in the 1989 film Field of Dreams. Twelve years ago, that voice also spoke to me one summer’s afternoon, as we came in over a ripe green cornfield and settled down over hot asphalt in Luverne, MN (KLYV).

The tires of my father’s Piper Cherokee 235 met the pavement with a gentle but distinctive chirp. It was a familiar sound in an entirely new environment—the spitting image of the landscape of that film. As soon as we taxied off the runway and shut down the engine, it became completely quiet until two young boys came stumbling out of a lone hangar. Under a blazing blue sky, they chocked the wheels, waved a cheerful hello, and bombarded us with a million questions about where we had come from and how the flight went.

We followed them back to a table inside the hangar which was laid out with the most delicious spread of barbecue pork, homemade baked beans, and corn on the cob I could have asked for. And we didn’t even ask for it. This feast was offered to us, as free as the wind or the clouds in the sky. We made small talk with the operators of this hidden gem of an FBO while we ate.

We sat together on folding chairs, tucked under the shade of the open hangar door, just outside the wrath of July’s direct heat but still appreciating its radiant warmth. I don’t remember everything that we talked about, and being thirteen years old at the time, I couldn’t pretend to understand more than half of it.

I do remember asking dozens of questions that day — about pressure (why did that bag of chips inflate like a balloon once we got up to altitude?), about corrosion (why is that warbird, half-disassembled, coated in green?)

On and on, from the color of Avgas to the smell of the smoke we had seen over Montana, its plume rising fourteen thousand feet or higher, higher still my questions rose, every answer leading to more thorny terrain unexplored.

My father did not seek to placate me with simplicity, but rather let me revel with him in the complex world: not only sharing the wisdom of those experts in the airliners but also of the everyman, the piston pilots and glider jockeys who chase lift without the help of engines.

When we were done eating, we borrowed one of their cars and stayed at a motel just near the intersection of Interstate 90. Crickets and a window-unit air conditioner lulled me to sleep. We awoke the next day and shared continental breakfast with a couple aviators of the light-sport variety who were on their way to Oshkosh, WI for the airshow.

To me, that flight was the spirit of general aviation. We had just as much an excuse to go flying as we did a reason. It was one leg of a multi-day trip to to get the Cherokee repainted and reupholstered at Air Mod at Clermont County Airport (I69), in Batavia, OH (who did a fantastic job, by the way). Naturally, we visited Sporty’s Pilot Shop, too. The entire trip was fun, but not in a Disneyland, built-to-entertain-you way.

The thrill of flying is not an artificial good that you can package up, consume, and throw away. And neither is it just a profession, with milestones along a single linear career track. It is a delicate, fleeting sensation, built up by the kindness of strangers who want nothing more than for you to carry on to your next destination, unharmed and well-fed.