I have visited a certain old house on the south coast of Massachusetts almost every summer for the past 20 years, and have known Sam, its owner, for almost half a century now. He is an excellent fellow — thoughtful, erudite, articulate, earthily funny, worldly wise, impatient of pretension, as apt to quote Cummings as Milton and to discourse on shorebirds as on the Law. He first put me up — I was a college classmate of his stepdaughter then — in Manhattan, where he was a corporate lawyer; later in the hills and woods of the Hudson River Valley, where he owned a farm for a long time; and finally on the shore of Buzzards Bay, where his grandfather had built the big house late in the 19th century. Since it was through him that I came to know those places, he is for me not just a good friend but also a minor deity of forest and seashore.
Perhaps only if one imagines this gabled and shingled old shrine, nestled in woods through whose gaps the sea sparkles, as an object of pilgrimage can one understand why I had for a long time wished to connect it, in a physical way, with the airplane that I had designed and built, and in whose company I spend a good deal of my time in Los Angeles. I wanted to introduce them to one another, so to speak: to bring them together, to take them in with a single glance, and thereby to unite, if only momentarily, two poles of my life that pull at me from opposite sides of the country.
