I HAD A THOUGHT THAT MADE ME SHUDDER. WHEN THE LAST JAR OF FUEL GOES AND THE FLAME DIES AND WATER COOLS, THE PROPELLER WILL STOP. WHAT THEN? UNFORTUNATELY, I KNEW THE ANSWER. A LONG, QUICK AND DEADLY FALL.
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SUMMARY: THE STORY SO FAR…
Josiah, a young slave 12 years of age, lives in a cabin in the slave quarters of a Virginia tobacco plantation with Auntie Bee, Mose, the plantation handyman, two young children, Randall and Emily. He notices Mose leaving the cabin in the middle of the night and follows him to his secret workshop in the woods where Mose is building some sort of strange contraption. Mose tells him it is a machine that will fly him to freedom. Now that he knows Mose’s secret, he stays to help build the flier. After mishaps, false starts and setbacks—the flier tumbles down the mountain and is seriously damaged—they are attacked by snakes—mountain lions lurk all around them—they realize someone has been spying on them and they think their escape plan has been discovered. Finally, their time has come. Now they are in the air, riding on the wings of the wind.
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We flew all the next day, always heading north. I kept checking the water level in the boiler. I would stare at the fuel bottle even though I couldn’t see anything in it. This time I wanted to make sure I added water and fuel before we came close to crashing. I did not want to go through that hair-raising experience again.
Everything seemed to be going well. The pig’s artery leading from the jar to the boiler provided a smooth passageway for the gas to flow. I could never tell how much fuel we had left since the gas was invisible and the jar always appeared to be empty.
For now, there was plenty of fuel and water. The boiler was hot and as long as we had enough steam to keep the propeller going we would remain in the air. That was all I had to know about fuel and the water. That and the awful smell.
Mose sent us with three bottles of gas. With one gone already, we were on the second jar. One more left.
I had a thought that made me shudder. When the last jar of fuel goes and the flame dies and the water cools, the propeller will stop. What then? Unfortunately, I knew the answer. A long, quick and deadly fall.
How long was each jar of fuel supposed to last?
I asked Mose one night when we were up on the mountain. “I don’t rightly know,” he said.
So I kept watching the jar even though I could not see a blamed thing in it.
As long as I could hear the whirring propeller, the clanking rods, the scraping gears and steam hissing from a red hot boiler, we would be safe.
Other questions gnawed at me. What happens when all the water boils away? Mose said we could fill it with rainwater. What if it doesn’t rain? We already used all the water we brought with us—there was no more.
And what if it does rain? That could present more problems for us. Rainstorms can be violent. We would be drenched. Can the flier run sopping wet? Will water clog the gears? Douse the flame? If the cloth bed becomes saturated will that make us too heavy to fly?
More questions. Even if everything runs perfectly, how will we know when we arrive in the north? When will it be safe to come down?
I had one more question I wished I could ask Mose. When we do decide to land, how can we bring the flier down softly, without crashing?
Mose never told me.
These were important questions. Our survival depended on whether Mose figured out how to deal with them.
Mose was the smartest man I ever knew. He created a miracle. He did something nobody had ever done before. He made a machine that could fly. So far, it was working exactly as he planned it. But it seemed to me that he neglected key parts of the plan, especially the part where flier has to do the one thing every flying machine must be able to do—return safely to land.
I grew alarmed and frightened. We had no good way to come down.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Tuesday, June 22nd 2010 at 10:22PM
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