IT IS LIKE OPENING NIGHT on a new way of living, only it is opening day, and instead of velvet curtains drawing majestically aside there are hangar doors of corrugated tin, rumbling and scraping in concrete tracks and being more stubborn than majestic. Inside the hangar, wet still with darkness and with two wide pools of dark underwing and evaporating as the tall doors slide, the new way of living. An antique biplane.
I have arrived to do business, to trade. As simple as that. A simple old airplane trade, done every day. No slightest need to feel unsure.
Still, a crowd of misgivings rush toward me from the hangar. This is an old airplane. No matter how you look at it, this airplane was built in 1929 and this is today and if you’re going to get the thing home to California you’ve got to fly it over twenty-seven hundred miles of America.