It was a ranch about fifty miles southwest of Austin. That’s where Buck Wynn lived with his cattle and small four-seater Cessna, a plane that sawed like a gnat through the infinite sky above the prairie as we entered the gate off the main highway. The promise of the visit, we were told, was to view the sandy, tufted hills of Texas from high up and maybe even glimpse the towers of the city from a distance. There was not a single cloud, no cumulonimbus for hundreds of miles like a slow explosion of cotton in white and gray gradations as there usually are during the summer. No, it was clear so we would all be able to fly with my father’s friend that day and witness with aeronautic bliss the diminution of the world below.

     While driving the dusty, tree-lined road that led to the main house of the ranch, we heard the plane buzz fortissimo directly overhead just above the trees --which meant he had seen us too-- and we watched as the wings, like the outstretched arms of a tightrope walker, balanced and descended in landing mode on the long stretch of dirt used as a makeshift runway a thousand yards beyond the house. Buck Wynn, with a cowboy name, looked the part --tall, robust, sunburned, cowboy hat, boots, and jeans, like Clark Gable-- and even talked with the Texas twang. In some respects he was a cowboy, a rancher with livestock and quite a few acres of crops, but that was not all. A colleague of my father, he taught architecture at the University of Texas in Austin where he would fly his plane three times a week, park it right there on the campus lawn, and go teach his class. The plane he also used for dusting the crops with insecticide, so it proved a necessity for him way out there where he lived alone, a bachelor, in near isolation.

     By the time he had climbed out and jumped from the wing we were already halfway across the field. After the handshakes, it was decided that my father and oldest brother would be the first to fly with him while we had to return to sit in the shade and relative cool of the green Ford station wagon. We bit our lips in disappointment because we had to wait our turn.

     As they were taking off we felt the engine’s low vibrating rumble in the pit of our stomachs and watched as the propeller savagely cut the wind and agitated the loose dust in all directions. From behind we could see the back tail flap wriggle like the fin of a fish as the three of them sailed off into space. Quickly diminished to near nothing, the soft, falling drone of the engine that never seemed to catch up to them added to the drowsiness of that long Texas afternoon…until suddenly the humming stopped. There in the middle of the sky the miniscule speck went silent, the engine stilled, and the craft seemed to float for a moment suspended by the natural density of the air. We imagined the worst…out of fuel…engine failure…they would fall to their death!

     Terrified, we began racing across the field, dodging cactus and logs as best we could, in the direction of the landing strip, awkwardly looking up all the way as we ran, trying not to stumble. Then, after several eternal moments we heard a hesitant cough or two, and the engine miraculously sputtered back to life. The speck resumed its course across the infinite blue. Later, we learned that the pilot had turned off the motor purposely in mid-flight, donned the most desperate expression he could muster, and alerted his passengers that there was nothing he could do to re-engage it. Satisfied with the result, of course he re-engaged it. Buck Wynn’s sense of humor.

     That was it. A brief interlude of inappropriate silence was enough; the silent motor dowsed the last embers of ardent desire that we had had to tour the heavens with this death-wishing flying cowboy…now we were more than happy to have missed the opportunity. And it was to him and his crude joke that we owed a modest epiphany. That is, during the drive back home to Austin we experienced a kind of ecstasy, felt it a privilege even, to be able to watch from the car window the yucca racing by at eye level between the evenly placed fence posts and the hypnotic grasshoper oil wells, to hear the highway whistling under the car’s wheels, to take special notice of the earth-rooted cattle pinning down their own long shadows on the violet darkening hillsides, to witness from here down below heaven painting the evening with the colors of a dying sun.

©Vincent Montenegro

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