It’s Saturday morning in small-town America, circa the early 1990s. My five younger siblings, flannel-clad in pastel jammies, are sprawled across the living room furniture watching Bugs Bunny gleefully thwart Elmer Fudd’s latest wabbit-hunting schemes. Mom is in the kitchen whipping up a batch of pancakes for her hungry brood. Dad and I are on the living room floor, hunched over the yellow pages of a month-old Trade-A-Plane that I purloined from the local airport pilot lounge. “Wow, Dad, look at this one!” I exclaim, pointing to a three-line ad for an early-model 172. “Four thousand total time and under 1,000 on the engine, and they’re only asking $18,000 for it!” Dad agrees that’s quite a bargain and I circle the ad in red ink just as Mom pokes her head around the corner. I can see the disapproval on her face and know that Dad will hear about it later. “Don’t get his hopes up like that, Dave!” she’ll admonish. She needn’t worry; I’m fully aware that we can’t afford an airplane. We never actually call on any of the circled ads. It’s just a nice dream that my dad and I share.
Twenty-some-odd years later, I’m in the left seat of a classic yellow taildragger forging its way deep through the northern Rockies of Montana. The late afternoon sun glints spectacularly off freshly powdered peaks, while ice-sculpted cirques and forested valleys recede into cool shadows. I bank to follow a winding road through the snowbound wilderness and marvel again at the light, smooth control response from this short-winged little bird. I glance across the panel at the oil pressure and temperature gauges — both steady in the green. I just picked up the plane in Kalispell, and everything is new and unfamiliar. Now that the long-awaited day is here and my childhood dream has come true, it seems surreal. This humble, time-worn little airplane is my very own.
