It was a Nibelungen yarn ball, this surrealistically neat orb of tangled aluminum tubing. A single spectacle glass, like a comic aristocrat's monocle, leered eerily from the tortured bowels of the metallic jumble. Through the shattered pane hung the wan face of an ancient airspeed indicator, bearing a faint tattoo of the Stearman logo. "Ole Ernie was stove up fer 'bout a month," said my cowhide-faced host, "but mainly he was jest mightily ticked off."
I felt relieved that Ole Ernie was alive, if cranky. I also felt a bit puffed up that I'd been able to plunk a Cessna 140 into this muddy barnyard of an airport when a seasoned crop duster had gotten snared by the spider web of electric cables wagging slackly overhead.
My visit to Harold Perkins' Idle Hour Airport was a graduation present from my flight instructor. John Sparks had nurtured me from wary fledgling to confident airman over the course of
the lush summer, and this was his way of honoring me for the governmental granting of my lofty new title: private pilot (single-engine land).
John hadn't accompanied me, though. As it should be, he was back over the turf at Three Star with a new student. But, on the morning of this, my first certificated day, John had shared the secret of Idle Hour and given me a flight plan to the field using a unique set of navaids. "About 10 miles due south of Bates Field you'll pick up a dirt road that points to a little town. Look for the water tower that says, 'Theodore, Alabama.' Fly down that road...real slow...until you see the big power lines crossing it. Turn west and follow the lines about two miles until you spot a rusty tin-roof building with some cows behind it off to your left. That's one of the hangars. It's the only thing you'll see through the trees this time of year. Circle back right to the south again, point your nose at the hangar, and slip in hard over the lines. Be careful, son. You won't see the runway until you're almost on it, but it's there. Trust me."
I did trust John. His good-ole-boy looks alone inspired confidence. He was a throwback to the lost lads seen grinning from the grainy old pictures of World War II flyboys. John was tall and rangy and sun-baked, with slicked-back red hair. He surveyed his world aloft through a pair of vintage Ray Bans permanently affixed above his laughing mouth and sun-speckled nose.
John's tutorial skills were legendary among the civilian second-class citizen aviators around Pensacola, Florida, the hallowed Cradle of Naval Aviation. John's training curriculum was tougher than the Navy's, it was said. He didn't waste his Airedales' time with Dilbert Dunkers and silly chants at the trot and tedious hours of academic aeronautica. Out of our oak tree-fenced, 1,900-foot sod strip, he taught us to fly, requiring, for instance, presolo mastery of wingovers and spin recovery and crop-height pasture passes and pinpoint precise spot landings. Before a first cross-country he directed the practice of confidence-building chandelles and lazy 8s and loops and rolls. "At least now you ain't gonna be scared of a few little summer bumps or winter breezes, are ya?" John taught us where to sniff out the first morning stirrings of thermals and how to read the storm-shot afternoon sky and where to spot the first warning wisps of the evening fog that inevitably came creeping in from the Gulf. It wasn't just seat-of-the-pants stuff, either. John demanded we match his encyclopedic knowledge of the feds' rules and regs and insisted that we be able to glide down an ILS as if the airplane were a pencil tracing the ink lines on the approach chart. But he emphasized the basics. "Look at the cowling and the horizon, son. Now, in five minutes I want your altitude to be within 50 feet and your heading within three degrees!" At that he'd slap a pair of big black, blinding suction cups on the heading indicator and altimeter. His expectations were high and the challenges he offered great, but his own exuberant, infectious joy in flying made it all a heady game. His methods worked. Sure, the grandly uniformed cadets in their shiny T-34s droning in circles around Whiting Field may have won the bawdy glamour and the bar girls, but we students of John Sparks were real fliers. We knew it.
John had taught me well, and so I didn't give a thought as to how I'd get out of this soggy little patch. Besides, before departure from Idle Hour, a timeless adventure awaited.
When I'd landed a few minutes earlier, Ernie's wreck was the only airplane that I'd seen amid the thick foliage, but there was much more to be discovered. Harold led me away from Ole Ernie's gnarled Stearman toward the landmark tin-roof hangar. "Come on, got sumthin to show ya!"
That "sumthin" was sumthin! Resting deep in the shadows of the old wooden shelter were the remains of a once-regal Stinson Gullwing. Even with its big round engine and prop and much of its once-glossy crimson fabric missing, it was still splendid, easily recalling the halcyon days when flying was the ultimate sport for brown-suited, fedora-topped rich men and their chiffon-swathed, white-gloved ladies. "Gonna fix 'er up come winter," promised Harold. "She needs to fly again."
I turned to survey the rest of the little aerodrome. At nearly a dozen tiedowns hidden beneath the trees, Harold's field was resplendent with beautiful old airplanes that had also needed to fly again. Forest-filtered sunrays glinted off a mirror-polished Ryan, a Fairchild trainer gaily dressed in wartime yellow and blue, a canary-colored Fleet, and a Ferrari-red Swift, all lined up like eager thoroughbreds at the starting gate. These exotic treasures made Harold's other airplanes — the Aeronca, Luscombe, Ercoupe, and the pair of taildragging Cessnas like mine — seem yawningly ordinary.
"We got more, too!" At least two decades melted off of Harold's weathered face as he hustled me toward a Quonset hut opposite the old hangar. "Come in, I'll introduce you to my boy," he said, and pushed open a corrugated door. Inside the almost unbearably hot, unventilated building were two skeletal airframes, a labyrinth of sawhorses, and a large, red, middle-age man. "Bobby," Harold announced, "this here fella come over from Pensacola to see us." In his own good time Bobby looked up, displaying the reflexes of a sunbathing alligator. Through half-closed, red-rimmed eyes Bobby lazily considered me and grunted. It was meant as a greeting, I thought, but it seemed that Bobby had neither the energy nor the lung capacity to force out one, let alone both syllables of "hello."
"Bobby's been dopin' the wings I built for them planes o'er there," said Harold. "He'll have 'em done in no time." I wondered if time, or Bobby, had been warped in this stifling microclimate whose atmosphere was 80-percent butyrate. "No time," it appeared, would be a long time coming.
It didn't matter, though. Harold and Bobby had nothing but time. It was their dearest possession and their greatest gift. They used it in luxurious measure to recapture ages lost. They took their own time and gave it back to the airplanes that needed to fly again.
Outside again, I spent the afternoon climbing joyfully over and under and into the old airplanes. I wiggled the sticks and yokes and made loud, guttural airplane noises and time-traveled. I became a blithe 1930s' airborne dilettante, a righteously inspired 1940s' naval air cadet, and a carefree 1950s' patch plodder. I played like a boy until the fog threatened to creep in from the Gulf. Time rocked me to and fro until it was time to go.
Harold issued the departure clearance. "Tuck yer tail into the corner of the fence," he instructed, "and jes ease in the throttle. Don't stand on the brakes! If ya do, she'll dig in an' it'll take ya twice as long t'git out and you ain't got twice as long." As I regarded the upwind tree line seemingly scant yards away, my childish demeanor sobered. "An' go around that puddle there. Last fella that went through it picked up 'bout twenty pounds of mud on his gear. He plopped right into them trees o'er by Ole Ernie's Stearman. Ain't seen him since, but that's his Champ Bobby's workin' on."
I squirmed uneasily into the 140's left seat, wondering if Harold's museum collection was actually the castoff remnants of visitors' lacerated landings and tattered takeoffs. I bolstered my now-anemic courage by chanting the mantra of John's short- and soft-field takeoff drill, but still questioned whether anyone had ever gotten out of here whole. I twisted the magneto key and pushed the starter button. Sixty-five tubercular, hacking horses began spinning the tiny prop.
"Glad you come!" shouted Harold. "Y'all come back now, hear?" Too nervous to respond, I yanked the yoke into my gut, clenched the eight-ball throttle knob in my fist, pushed it firmly — but gently — toward the firewall, and prayed that Bernoulli's Theorem hadn't been disproved lately. Not even a half-minute later, though, as the Cessna's little Continental achingly levitated me over Ernie's crumpled crop duster, I was sharing Harold's gratitude that I'd come. And I vowed to accept his invitation to return.
Twenty years later on a lush summer morning, I flew down the dirt road due south of Bates Field and turned at the water tower to follow the wires, hoping that Harold and Bobby were still there. But they weren't. Nor was there any trace of the tin-roof hangar or the little field on which the old airplanes rested. I circled and circled and grew very sad.
I've told this story to maybe a dozen pilots up here in New England, but Yankees are natural-born skeptics. Each uttered a rude sobriquet in disbelief or just shook his head, convinced that I made the whole thing up. Yet, there was an Idle Hour Airport and I found it once. I swear it. Find a faded old New Orleans Sectional chart from about 1965 and you'll find it, too. It's just south of Mobile. And somewhere in time.
Craig Roberts is an 8,500-hour commercial pilot, former naval aviator, and CFII who still flies little old airplanes out of North Andover, Massachusetts.
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