Chapter 36

The rest of the school year went quickly. The four friends stayed friendly with Misty, who usually shared the lunch table with them, but she was good as her word and didn’t try to insinuate her way into anything with either Howie or Jared. They didn’t see her outside school anywhere near as much, although she came to a few track meets.

A little to everyone’s relief, at the Albany River meet she happened to meet a guy and hit it off with him, so wound up dating him at least some. As far as any of the four could tell, Misty wasn’t being predatory about it; if she was using him as another practice boyfriend, there wasn’t much to indicate it. It was not a serious relationship, but they got together and had fun on occasion, which was good. If there was any Nintendo involved, there was nothing mentioned about it at the lunchroom table. It gave all of the four a bit of relief to know that Misty was putting things back together – and that the guys weren’t involved.

The Spearfish Lake track teams – boys and girls – did well, if not exactly world class. Once again, Bree gave a strong performance in her events, winning several medals along the way; Jared and Howie contributed more than their share to the boys’ events. Howie’s strongest interest was in the field events, but he wasn’t quite able to compete with two or three others. He and Jared managed to do pretty well in the shorter sprint events. It was a successful season by any standards, but it came to an end for both teams at the regionals.

Summing up everything, it was a good but unusual year for the Marlins; they had the divisional trophy in football, and one state individual champion in wrestling. In recent years the Marlins had been known for their basketball teams, but both the boys’ and girls’ teams had off years – for them, anyway; they made it through the regionals as champions as they had come to expect, but both of them lost in the divisionals.

The end of the school year came as something of a relief to Bree, Jared, Howie, and Autumn. Bree had finished with all A’s again, and Jared only had one A-minus for the year. Howie and Autumn weren’t quite at their level, but were honor roll students, so there was that to be proud of. Their study group had worked well indeed! It was a good record and a good feeling to be carrying into their senior year.

Other things didn’t go quite as well. For much of the winter, Howie and Autumn had been looking forward to Jack and Summer being back for the summer, but even before the incident with Lethbridge it was looking like it wasn’t going to happen.

Jack and Vixen had somehow managed to get internships with a Fish and Wildlife Service project studying cowbirds in southern Indiana. From what Howie could tell, it was not anything either of them was very interested in, other than the fact it was bird studies and they were going to be paid enough to cover their expenses and have a little left over. The two of them were home for a few days in early May, but mostly to just pick up summer clothes and check in with their folks; then they were gone, with not much hope of being home again much before classes were to start again.

Howie couldn’t exactly put his finger on when it had happened, but sometime over the winter the fiction that Jack and Vixen weren’t living together had been abandoned; it was clear they shared a room in Hawthorne, and would be sharing one down in Indiana. That meant, of course, that Summer and Alan were sharing the other room, and no one seemed too upset about that, either.

Summer and Alan would be staying at school over the summer. Alan was planning on taking some summer courses, and Summer had come up with a summer job in a nursing home. Since she had to be at work almost as soon as school was out they didn’t make it home at all, although there was a chance they’d be home for a week or so toward the middle of the summer.

Even Bree was disappointed as she wasn’t going to be seeing Becca. She was home briefly just as school got out, again mostly to drop off her school things and pick up summer clothes. She and Myleen had bigger fish than Spearfish Lake in mind: they were off to California, where they were going to try out the summer beach volleyball circuit, to see how they stacked up against the big names. Neither of them expected to do any winning, but they figured they could use the quality practice.

So the foursome’s last summer of school vacation started out pretty muted, but at least they had each other. Howie and Jared continued intensive training, getting ready for football season not all that far off, although there wasn’t the extremes of kicking practice there had been the year before. They still worked out a lot together, although Autumn wouldn’t be competing in the fall; she’d be a cheerleader again, and while that demanded being in good shape it wasn’t the same thing.

Surprisingly, the incident with Lethbridge had given Autumn a little focus. She’d had an interest in nursing, but for years had disdained it, not wanting to follow in her sister’s footsteps. She still didn’t want to do it, but was now giving some real thought to being a paramedic, or something along that line; she admitted feeling helpless as she watched the bully writhing in convulsions on the pavement, knowing what needed to be done but not how to do it. Her mind wasn’t made up yet, but at least now it had a focus.

Bree, of course, didn’t have to worry about things to do. She planned on working out and hanging out with her friends, of course, but she had her own agenda, too – and the 1-26 figured into some of it: it could well be this summer would be her last chance for a long time to nail her third diamond.

It seemed like a long shot. Because of forests and Lake Michigan, about the only route open to her involved taking the route south past Camden she’d used successfully the year before, but it was clear that everything was going to have to be dead solid perfect to be able to make the required distance. She’d gone over four hundred kilometers on her gold distance leg the summer before, on a very good day, but still came up nearly a hundred kilometers short of the three hundred and ten miles she needed. Her other big flight, the diamond goal flight, had been shorter, and she’d ended it before the day was done, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to stretch the day to the diamond distance level if she’d been intending to.

About all she could do was to set a goal at Oakland, a hundred and sixty miles to the south and hope for a good day for her goal and return flight. Though she launched a couple times a week for local flights, or even shorter goal and return flights that had the option of extending if things looked good, the right day for the big flight never seemed to come.

Not that Bree didn’t have other things on her mind, too. Not long after school let out her seventeenth birthday came around. She didn’t have a party with cake and ice cream to celebrate; late that afternoon she, Mark and Rocinante flew down to Camden where she had the flight test for her private pilot’s license. Her formal flight instructor, Fred Hammerstrom wasn’t an examiner for that level license, but directed her to the examiner.

Bree had long since passed her written examination for the license, and while the flight test was a little more than a mere formality, she passed it easily. She and Mark got home too late to take her friends flying – there was barely light enough to land in spite of the long day, but the next day she took each of them for a ride in the old Cessna. Perhaps it was a victory only in her own mind, but no one could deny now that she was a pilot. She still had a year to go before she could get her commercial ticket, but there was a chance she’d manage it just before she had to leave for the Air Force Academy – at least if she got her appointment at all. If she did, she still intended on having the most impressive possible credentials.

Shortly after the Fourth of July, Mark came to her saying, “Bree, we’ve got a problem, but it might be an opportunity. We’ve got a new system coming on line at the plywood plant, and I really need to be here in case something goes wrong. You know the soaring regionals aren’t going to be at Mt. Vernon this year, but at a little airport north of Des Moines, a place called Madison Airpark?”

“I knew that,” Bree nodded. “Does that mean you’re not able to go?”

“Pretty much. But I’ve been thinking about it. That doesn’t mean you and your friends couldn’t go and camp out at the airport. I could probably fly Rocinante down and back a day ahead of time to get you signed up, but I don’t see how I dare be gone longer than that.”

“I’m pretty sure everyone would be happy for the chance to get away for a few days,” she smiled. “It would be nice to have you there, though.”

“I just don’t see how it could happen,” he said. “But I did have one idea. When you’re down there, you’d be away from the forest and Lake Michigan. If the weather should come out right, maybe it would be a good place for a downwind dash for your last diamond.”

“Yeaaah,” she smiled, realizing the implications. A trip south out of Spearfish Lake in the Schweizer had two strikes against it before it started. “I could even dump a contest day if the right conditions were to come along.”

“Or you could hang around for a couple days afterwards if a good day seemed to be coming. You’d have to take an aero tow, but that’s a place where you can get one.”

“Sounds like a deal to me. I’ll have to sell it to everyone else and their parents, though.”

“You shouldn’t have much problem with the first part, and I’ll help you out if anyone gives you any problems with the second.”

They had two weeks to get ready, plenty of time, and all of the parents were willing to go along with the deal. After all, they’d raised a bunch of good, responsible kids who had gone far out of their way to stay out of trouble, and this was proof that it was appreciated.

The only problem was that in the past, on the few occasions Bree’s friends had chased her on the ground, they’d used Howie’s old Jeep. It wasn’t all that bad if they had to go a short ways, but Madison Airpark was close to five hundred miles away and no roads ran directly. That was an awful long way to ride in an open Jeep.

Mark solved that; he had a trailer hitch put on Bree’s car. Even holding camping gear and clothes to a minimum there wasn’t enough room in the trunk for the stuff the four of them wanted to take. In the end, they had to pack some of the gear in the 1-26’s cockpit, and then only after some agonizing reappraisals of what they were going to take with them.

Early on the morning two days before the contest the four of them hooked the trailer carrying the 1-26 on behind, crammed themselves into the little car and started for Iowa. The car, loaded with kids and gear and dragging the trailer, was heavily loaded and really had to grunt and groan to haul everything; Bree noticed very quickly that the gas mileage was way, way down. After more fuel stops than they’d intended, they pulled into the impromptu camping area at Madison Airpark.

Although it had been clear to both Bree and Jared that Autumn and Howie had occasionally spent some time in bed together, neither of them had actually come out and admitted it; it was their business, after all. But they agreed that things really had to be straight, so they set up a boys’ tent and a girls’ tent.

There was a little problem at registration with Bree only being seventeen, but it was cleared up quickly, partly due to Mark flying in Rocinante later the next morning and signing things off. Most of the other problems were quickly taken care of when Bree discovered that the contest director was none other than Harry Bankston, who’d been her instructor at Deer Park when she’d gotten her second diamond. “Don’t ask me how I got volunteered for this,” he explained. “They decided they needed a contest director who knew what he was doing, and I was available. The rest involves begging and pleading.”

Bree did manage to get in one fairly short local flight later that afternoon, mostly to get the feel for the area. Realistically, flying a 1-26 against fiberglass sailplanes, she had no expectation of doing very much, but the experience and talking with other pilots would be good. Admittedly, some of them didn’t take her quite seriously, but Bree made sure she wore her treasured Gold Badge with its two diamonds, and it opened a lot of doors. But clouds were moving in, and that evening it rained. It wasn’t a total loss; the four of them were invited into a nearby motor home for an evening of talking soaring, most of which went right over the heads of Bree’s friends.

In spite of her high hopes for the weekend, when the four of them got up the next morning they found a sky that was not very inspiring. Bree took one look at it and thought that if she was home she’d have found the easy chair, Perky, and a good book because it wasn’t worth taking the Schweizer out of the hanger. Things didn’t look much better as the four of them gathered around their little camp cook stoves to make some breakfast, where Bankston found them, all with disappointed looks on their faces. “Come on, it’s not that bad,” he told them. “I’ve been watching the weather and it looks like it’s going to clear up some. Pilots’ meeting at ten, and we can at least set a short course.”

When Bree got a detailed look at the weather maps over at the contest headquarters before the pilots’ meeting, she wasn’t very impressed. It still looked like a good day for the chair, Perky, and a book, but there weren’t many chances to fly competitions, and this could be her last one for a while. Plenty of older pilots with much more advanced sailplanes pretty much agreed with her, but in the end everyone decided it might be a little better than expected, and to give it a try.

Bankston set a small triangle, only about forty miles, and the pilots selected launch times. By noon, it appeared to be getting a little better, and launches got under way, with Bree one of the last to leave, and one of the last to go through the starting gate. Needless to say, the fiberglass sailplanes soon left her behind, and she was left to struggle on by herself, with her friends following along behind dragging the trailer for the sailplane. It looked like it was going to be needed.

There really wasn’t much racing going on, as far as Bree was concerned. It reminded her of her struggle a couple years before to stay aloft over the nudist place – maybe not that bad, but not much better. From the gabble over the aviation band radio she managed to figure that most of the field made the first turn point without many problems, but she was way behind. After two and a half hours of very nerve-wracking flying, she was coming up on the second turn point, only about twenty miles out, when she started noticing the white crosses of fiberglass sailplanes in the fields below her. She didn’t think much about it; she had to put too much effort into staying aloft herself.

She wasn’t quite three hours out when she made the second turn point, and started back toward Madison Airpark. It was still very slow, very weak; several times she thought she was going to have to set up for a landing, but always a weak thermal came along that allowed her to struggle on for another couple of miles. Things were actually perking up a little as the day wore on; she was able to get a little higher so her glides between thermals were longer, but there was no thought of actually racing.

She was concentrating on working a thermal when she heard Bankston’s voice come over the air, asking her if she were still flying. “Still going,” she replied. “Slow, but still going, about ten miles out.”

“Roger that,” Bankston replied without further comment.

It still took her a couple more thermals to get close, but then as she was getting close she picked up the best one of the day – only a couple hundred feet per minute, but it went up for a ways. She decided to ride it up so she could run for the finish gate at a good speed. It may not have counted for much of anything, but at least she could make one of those high-speed finishes she’d often dreamed about – not that she was flying a long-winged unlimited ship, just her trusty 1-26. At least she was going to finish when she was aware some others had not; that would count for something.

Finally, she left the thermal and radioed, “Three miles out for the finish gate.”

“Roger that,” Bankston radioed back. “We’re waiting.”

Her finish may not have been as spectacular as she would have liked, but she raced through the gate at as low an altitude as she’d been at the end of her silver badge flight, pulled up, and swung around to enter the pattern. “Good finish,” she heard over the radio.

She landed the sailplane close to the camping area and the tie downs, as tired after a day of flying as she had ever been. It had been hours of intense concentration, about as hard a thing as she’d ever done, but there was a feeling of satisfaction at having done a good job.

She had the cockpit open and was still getting unbuckled when Bankston and a couple other pilots pulled up in a golf cart. “Congratulations, Bree,” he said with a huge smile. “You sure don’t give up easily, do you?”

“It was pretty hard,” she admitted as she stretched sore muscles before climbing out of the cockpit.

“Well, you managed to do something I’ve never seen done with a 1-26 before. You won the day!”

“What?” she frowned. “I’m the first one back? I don’t believe it!”

“You’re the only one to make it back,” Bankston grinned. “That’s why I called you to see if you were still in the air. They wanted to shut the finish gate down, so I thought I better check. Everyone ahead of you got shot down by a big blue hole, but it must have picked up enough by the time you got there.”

“You remember the story of the tortoise and the hare, don’t you,” one of the other men said. “Sometimes the tortoise really does win, after all. I was watching you go overhead as we got the wings off my ship, and for once I wished I’d been back flying a 1-26.”

Bree may have won the first day of the meet by a fluke, although it was something special to get congratulations from the other pilots and see her name on the top of the leader board the next morning. At least, here she was among people who knew what her accomplishment meant, and that counted for a heck of a lot.

The next day was stronger, and she didn’t feel she had much of a chance to do anywhere near as well against the field. Bankston set a triangle of nearly a hundred miles, and almost predictably she was among the last to make it back – but she did, which was more than some of the competitors could say. The result dropped her in the standings, but she was still in the top half.

The last day of the meet, Sunday, the weather again seemed to call for Perky, the chair, and the book, but in hopes of getting another day in Bankston called for another short triangle. However, instead of getting better, the weather worsened, and by the middle of the afternoon people were packing up to go home. Lacking anything better to do, Bree and her friends wandered over to the contest headquarters, where things were being packed up as well. She asked to use the computer, and began studying weather maps. Curious, Bankston came over to see what she was up to. “Too bad the contest isn’t going to go another day,” he said. “Things look like they’ll be better. I mean a lot better.”

“That’s what I’m seeing,” she agreed. “We won’t be able to tell until tomorrow, but I’m thinking that if it turns out as good as it looks, I’ll take a shot at my diamond distance.”

“You’re right, it’s a little early to tell,” he agreed. “But that might not be the dumbest plan I ever heard. Looks like a pretty strong west wind, just about right for a downwind dash. You’d mostly just have to stay well south of Chicago and north of Indianapolis, but that looks like it fits with the predicted winds.”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

“Tell you what. I was going to get going this afternoon, but I can stick around until morning to kibitz on the weather for you. I’ve already watched you take off to win one diamond, and I wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

The four kids didn’t have to cook their dinner that evening; Bankston bought it for them, and enthralled them, especially Bree, with stories of flying and the Air Force. After dinner, they went back to check the weather again, and it looked even more promising than before.

It blew hard that night – a front was racing through, carrying thunderstorms with it, none of which hit them directly but gave them a spectacular display of lightning and thunder, which was still booming in the distance when they turned in for the evening. The next morning, though, dawned cool and crisp and clear as the proverbial bell. Even as Bree took her first look around, she realized that if she’d seen this at home, Perky wouldn’t be sleeping in her lap today. “Let’s have breakfast,” she told her yawning friends. “Then let’s pack up. I don’t think we’re going to be camping here tonight. I’m thinking Indiana, maybe even Ohio.”

They were pretty well packed up to go and the sky was starting to show signs of life when Bankston showed up. “Everything looks like a super go to me,” he said. “But let’s go over and check weather one more time.”

The weather did look good, and what’s more, it looked like it would stay good as she headed to the east. The squall line that had blown through the night before was well ahead of her, and she’d have to fly hard in Rocinante in a straight line to catch up with it.

By the time they got done checking weather, things were looking even better. “You might want to think about getting going,” Bankston counseled her. “It might be weak to start, but it looks like it’s going to perk up a lot.”

“Just what I’m thinking,” she agreed. “I might as well be there when it comes to me.”

Half an hour later she was on tow behind the hopped-up Cessna 150 that had done a lot of the towing for the contest. Somewhat to the west of the airport, flying in lift that was not strong but showed signs of getting better, she released the tow and was on her way.

The first half hour was slow, although the lift was strengthening. She angled a little to the south, mostly because she wanted to stay near Interstate 80 to allow her friends to chase her a little more easily. Since they had to go straight south initially, they fell behind her but got ahead of her after they turned east to where they actually stopped at a rest stop for a few minutes. Soon things perked up a lot, and Bree started pushing east as hard as she could fly. The thermals were strong enough that she was flying sixty and seventy miles an hour between them, and didn’t have to stop to ride a thermal much. Several times she came on cloud streets that allowed her to go straight ahead in porpoise mode at that speed, and very soon she was leaving them behind. By noon she was twenty miles ahead and looking to go even faster.

She did. She raced across the Mississippi, broad and brown below her, and hardly slowed in the rough country to either side of it. Soon she was out on the Illinois plain, still flying fast, and her friends were getting further behind her.

Two o’clock came, and she had put in over two hundred miles since her release and was still going strong. By now she was getting close to Chicago, so she angled south to give the city a miss and kept pressing ahead. She was still in contact with the chase car, although it was spotty, and she knew they’d lose ground going through Chicago. “I’m going to keep going,” she told them. “If we get out of radio contact, there’s always the cell phone.”

By three, the day was slowing down a little, and things were merely strong – but the three hundred and ten miles was all but in her grasp! She could see Chicago in the distance as she slipped by south of it. The weakening conditions caused her to have to slow down a little, but she kept going, still pressing on. Before long, the aviation sectional she was using to navigate by told her she was crossing into Indiana, which was roughly three hundred miles out! Not much farther now, she thought, looking at the sky, watching the cumulus flatten out as the day started to wind down.

The next two hours slowly got weaker as she crossed a hundred miles of Indiana countryside. The day was getting spotty now, and weak, but she’d more than gotten her third diamond! It was time to start thinking about finding a good place to set it down. She was back in contact with her friends in the chase car now; her slower progress gave them a chance to catch up along the Indiana turnpike, but as the day got weaker she directed them to get off it to get closer to her.

There were a few last final miles, but it looked like she could make the next airport. “Going to be landing at Auburn,” she radioed her friends. There was one final, weak thermal to keep her aloft, but she had plenty of altitude in hand when she turned into the pattern for the airport, got down to the runway, opened the spoilers, and floated in for a landing with diamonds in her eyes.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.