This is not my story, this is not my tale. I have wished many times that it was, much in the same way a scholar of the arts would wish that he had painted the chapel ceiling. What this is, is a tribute to one of my favourite authors and someone who has touched me and become a friend in so many ways.

It was toward the middle of the summer that I met Donald Shimoda. In four years’ flying, I had never found another pilot in the line of work I do: flying with the wind from town to town, selling rides in an old biplane, three dollars for ten minutes in the air. But one day just north of Ferris, Illinois, I looked down from the cockpit of my Fleet and there was an old Travel Air 4000, gold and white, landed pretty as you please in the lemon-emerald hay. Mine’s a free life, but it does get lonely, sometimes. I saw the biplane there, thought about it for a few seconds, and decided it would be no harm to drop in.

Throttle back to idle, a full-rudder slip, and the Fleet and I fell sideways toward the ground. Wind in the flying wires, that gentle good sound, the slow pok-pok of the old engine loafing its propeller around. Goggles up to better watch the landing. Cornstalks a green-leaf jungle swishing close below, flicker of a fence and then just-cut hay as far as I could see. Stick and rudder out of the slip, a nice little round-out above the land, hay brushing the tires, then the familiar calm crashing rattle of hard ground under-wheel, slowing, slowing and now a quick burst of noise and power to taxi beside the other plane and stop.

Throttle back, switch off, the soft clack-clack of the propeller spinning down to stop in the total quiet of July. The pilot of the Travel Air sat in the hay, his back against the left wheel of his airplane, and he watched me. For half a minute I watched him, too, looking at the mystery of his calm. I wouldn’t have been so cool just to sit there and watch another plane land in a field with me and park ten yards away. I nodded, liking him without knowing why.

“You looked lonely,” I said across the distance between us.

“So did you.”

“Don’t mean to bother you. If I’m one too many, I’ll be on my way.”

“No. I’ve been waiting for you.”

I smiled at that. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s all right.”

Richard Bach – Illusions