It's a Bird! It's a Dream! It's Supergull!

(5 of 10)

1½children. He has already busted out of Long Beach State College after one year, trained as an Air Force jet-fighter pilot, but resigned 20 months after getting his wings because junior pilots were suddenly transferred to desk jobs (no chance to fly jets!). He has worked at Douglas Aircraft ("wall-to-wall white shirtsleeves"), done odd jobs for extra cash (delivering phone books, selling jewelry) while trying to scrape a living as a freelance aviation writer. Late one night he is strolling by a canal near the beach and he hears a voice "behind and to the right" say: "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" (John Livingston is the name of a great racing pilot of the 1930s). The hair on Bach's neck rises. He turns his head. Nobody there. He walks home fast, enters his room and sits on the bed. After a few minutes he says aloud just what anyone who knows Dick Bach realizes he would say: "Look, voice. If you think I know what this means, you're absolutely out of your mind. If it means something, tell me." What follows is like a Ken Russell film version of The Messiah with George Frederick Handel composing away as flights of angels swarm over his harpsichord. The voice comes through to Bach like a three-dimensional movie, and as Bach writes it all down with a green ballpoint pen, it shows-and-tells the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Precisely at the moment when Jonathan is cast out by the Flock, it stops. For weeks young Bach tries to figure out ways of ending Jonathan by himself. "It sounds ridiculous," he admits easily, "but I just couldn't think of a way to finish it."

Flying and Flying. Eight years pass. Anyone who knows Bach's life may imagine these years cinematically like the kaleidoscopic scenes of old movie biographies. There are Bach and his tiny, dark-haired wife piling more and more children into a series of secondhand cars and planes as he moves: from Long Beach to Maplewood, N.J., for a job as associate editor of Flying magazine; back to Long Beach to become Flying's West Coast editor; from Long Beach to Ottumwa, Iowa, to become editor of The Antiquer, a magazine about old planes. There is Bach, funny and forbearing with nearly everyone, being oddly short-tempered with his children. Yet the very next image shows him (yes) fondly, unflappably delivering Bette's last child himself in their Iowa house. Sheets of typewritten paper flutter across the screen. They coalesce into the three books that Bach wrote before Jonathan—the first, Stranger to the Ground, fading into a Reader's Digest logo, with "condensed" written under it.

Through the book titles, then, we see Bach flying and flying and flying. But not before he appears in a flashback at age 17 polishing a friend's plane for flight lessons. Then he is off. In an F-84, thundering toward the target on a mock strafing run. In tight formation with the National Air Guard, tensely but proudly crowding in under his flight leader until the rudder of Bach's plane is blackened by the leader's exhaust. The voice of the late John F. Kennedy rises through a dissolve that shows a New Jersey Air Guard unit listening. When the President says he will activate Air Guard squadrons for a year because of the Berlin crisis, the flyers, including Bach, roar approval. Then Bach is strapped into the dark cockpit of a night