##A RIP IN THE SKY##
#A Journey Into....#

Part 1

Abe Peterson, is a kindly gentlemen in his late nineties, though he appears to be still in his mid fifties. Incredibly, he is as bright of eye and keen of mind as a man in his twenties — and he has a hobby. That it pays a little doesn’t take it out of the casual pastime category. He follows air shows around the country, volunteering his services as a greeter, explainer, and storyteller. He is uniquely qualified for this little task. See, Abe joined what was known as the Army Air Corps back in 1939. He changed uniforms to USAF blue when the new organization was established in 1947 and stayed with it until they were forced to retire him, much against Abe’s will, in 1972. Since then, he’s been a permanent fixture at the shows. Just now he’s working the show in Wichita, Kansas. Come on, let’s join the crowd and see what’s going on.

“Hi there, folks,” he says. “Welcome to the air show. Hope you have a really good time out here today. My name’s Abe Peterson and this beautiful red bird I’m standing next to is a P51-D.” He pats the fuselage lovingly. “Well, let’s say it’s a very modified and special P51-D. It’s powered by a Packard built Rolls-Royce Merlin, sixty degree, V-twelve engine. The same engine that powered it during the Second World War, except it’s got a heck of a lot more horsepower today than it did back then. Just you take a look at the size of that prop. Four blades, too. This baby can scoot.”

He walks with an uncertain, bowlegged gate out to the wingtip and lays a brown spotted hand on it. “The wings on this bird have been clipped so’s the wingspan’s about the same as its length, nose to tail. They shorten the wings to speed up the roll rate…so’s it can duck around the pylons in a flash, like this, you see.” He holds out his palm, snaps it from the horizontal to the vertical and makes a quick left turn with his hand to demonstrate the idea.

A young boy, powdered in freckles by the millions, his tousled red hair dancing in the hot breeze, steps out of the crowd and approaches Abe. “Hey, mister, did you ever fly a plane like this one?” the lad says, his blue eyes flashing reflections of the azure sky.

“I…huh? What’s that, son?”

“Did you ever fly a plane like this?”

“Did I ever fly a plane like this? You bet I did, but that was a long time ago. Now all they let me do is — ”

“Did you wanna fly when you were a kid?”

“What? Did I want to fly when I was a kid? Nope, I can’t rightly say that I ever wanted to fly when I was your age. It’s not because I didn’t want to fly, but rather because I didn’t know that I could not want to fly.”

“Huh?” the boy says, his face contorted with confusion.

“I’m sorry, son. I don’t reckon you could understand what I just tried to tell you. It was simply that I didn’t know I had a choice. That is, not until Mr. Dietrich came along and ripped a big hole in the sky — a hole into which I happily fell. Now that, my boy, was a day, I’ll tell you. A day I most likely will never, ever forget.”

“Who’s Mr. Dietrich?”

“What’s that, son?”

“Who’s Mr. Dietrich, an’ how’d he rip the sky?”

“Aha, you want me to tell you about Mr. Dietrich, do you? Well, son, that’s sort of a long story, but I suppose there’s no harm in me taking the time to tell it.” Abe leans down and whispers in the boy’s ear. “See, I’m so old that the only thing I can do now is stand out here and welcome folks to the show. I don’t mind that, though, because I get to follow the show circuit, stay close to my pets, and get paid a little something for doing it.” Abe looks up from the boy to the crowd milling around.

“If you’ll excuse me folks, I’m going to take a little break and have a chat with my young friend here. Come on, son, let’s go over there where we can sit a spell under the wing of that C-45 while I tell you all-l-l about Mr. Dietrich and that wonderful day.”

Abe lays his microphone down carefully on the wing and unhooks the red velvet covered rope surrounding the P-51. Smiling, he drapes an arm around the boy’s shoulder, hooks the rope back to its post and guides the young man toward a couple of plastic lawn chairs shaded by the wing of a twin-engined, silver bird.

“What’s your name, son?” Abe asks as he ducks under the wing.

“Um…Chuck, sir,” the boy responds.

“Chuck, is it? Well, all right, Chuck, you take that chair right there — grab a soda out of the ice chest, if you want — and we’ll get started on our tale about Mr. Dietrich and his hole in the sky.”

Abe hauls the other chair a little farther into the shadow and sits down with some effort.

“Okay, now, where to begin? I guess I’ll start with the sky. You see, time was for me when the sky was just there. During the day it was a bright blue blanket that covered over everything and, when night settled in for its turn, why, all that blue turned to black, penetrated by needle-sharp points of light…so bright that they sort of stabbed at your eyes. Those points of light change their arrangement as time passes, but they always come back to the same place at the same time every year. I guess just like I do with the airshows. If you watch ’em long enough you can tell what time of year it is, right down to the month, and some folks can even tell you the week — sometimes even the day — just by looking up.

“They always do that, the stars do. Even today, you just can’t see it happen as well as I could when I was a lad of your years. Too many people scared of the dark and other folk are putting up all kinds of lights these days so’s you can’t see the night like we could — especially here in the city.

“Anyways, about the sky. Once in a while, clouds would drift by and sometimes they’d take over for a while, not letting any of the blue through, but they were always temporary — just puffy, wet visitors passing through on their way to the east, usually. And there were times when the clouds were tinged sort of a dark, greenish-gray and their bottoms looked like a thick, boiling soup. They’d start turning and twisting around in a big circle and that was a signal to find a good place — a solid place — to hide yourself because you could bet an angry funnel would drop out of that churning, unsettled ceiling and scour the ground clean wherever it touched. Short of a twister, you could bet that there would be more lightning than what was safe to be wandering around in. But, through it all, there was the sky…biggest thing around, it was.

“There was simply nothing that could compete with the sky, Chuck. Oh, sure, a tree or a windmill could poke up into it. Birds, mainly crows where I lived, would fly through it, and buzzards would soar around in long, lazy circles in it, but they certainly weren’t any kind of competition. Yep, the sky was always there to fill your eyes, lest you were lying ‘neath a big oak stuffed full of summer leaves that would hide most of it from you, but there weren’t many of those around.

“We had two big oaks out in our front yard. There was another tree, a scrawny little thing, out back of the house, but none of us could say what it was. All we could say about it was that it sure was no oak. Dad kept saying he was going to cut it down and stack its remains to dry so’s we could use it for fuel the following year, but he never did — but I’m getting away from my story, huh?

Click here for Part 2 [agnostic.com]