EAA VOICES

One Paved “Road”

Taking imaginations everywhere

JEFF OSTRANDER, EAA 866844

Icome from a place with one paved road. It is short and seldom traveled, surrounded by a sea of grass, now baking in the summer sun. Here and there a wildflower emerges and opens its hopeful face to the sky. The wind blows over it and, after a few days, it is gone. It is the way of things, I know, to rise and to descend.

I know it better than most, for this sometimes lonely place is a small-town airport, and locked inside the faded barns are machines that long to rise. Even now, it seems to me, they do not sleep, but wait.

They wait in shuttered darkness and silence, longing to hear an opening hangar door, to be bathed in a suddenly widening blaze of light. They wait, with magic in their eager wings.

There is a picture in the airport office, a faded snapshot taken years ago from an airplane passing overhead. The office was in a smaller building then, the runway shorter and unpaved, and dozens of airplanes lined wing-to-wing stood ready beside it. No one is moving, of course, but it somehow seems that the whole scene is alive, waiting for you to look away so it can resume its vibrant activity.

Most days, remembering that picture makes me sad, but not today. The picture has come to life around me. It is a warm Saturday morning in May, the fields of Michigan are brown and ready for seed, and our airport is alive again.

The EAA Young Eagles program has introduced thousands of families to the wonderful world of local airports and hundreds of thousands of children to the magic of flight. Today, it is our turn.

Outside, the small parking lot is full, and cars line both sides of the airport drive. Inside, there is a roar of voices, and faces fill every corner of the fixed-base operator. Loving parents have come to give their kids a memory. Excited children, anxious and maybe a little

On this day, it launched the

imaginations of 150 kids; it gave

them a new way to see the wonder

of creation and, perhaps for the first

time, to recognize how small and

blessed we are.

frightened, work their way through the registration line. On the ramp, a dozen airplanes of all sizes and shapes stand ready: Jack’s Super Cub, the old V-tail, Cherokees and 172s, and an Apache. To the side, in static display, an ambulance helicopter, a big corporate twin, and a graceful Cirrus. And people, everywhere.