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Now comes Bach in goggles and scarf at the controls of a 1929 Parks P-2A biplane. His voice rises (from the superimposed title of his second book, Biplane), dulling the roar of the faithful old Wright Whirlwind. "Listen to that! The wind in the wires! And now it's here all around me. It isn't lost in dusty yellow books with dusty, browning photographs.
It's here for me now just as it was here for the first pilots, the same wind that carried their megaphoned words across the pastures of Illinois and the meadows of Iowa and the picnic grounds of Pennsylvania."
Far below him are farmhouses, and fields, distant, slow, idyllic, with one tiny new car the size of an ant winding along a highway. "That modern car," Bach thinks aloud. "That's the only way I can tell the passing of time. It isn't the calendar makers who give us our time and our modern days, but the designers of automobiles and dishwashers and television sets." Dissolve to Bach standing on the wing of the old Parks, shouting a barnstormer's pitch to a skeptical 1966 Kansas crowd: "Five dollars, folks, for five minutes! Five minutes in the land of the angels! See your town from the air!" Then Bach is bedding down beneath the wing of the biplane as a light rain starts to fall, and darkness. His sleepy words close the scene: "We found an America that some people believe is gone, but it isn't gone at all. We saw it brought alive and real and it was a good sight."
Except for a brief period due to the success of Stranger to the Ground, Bach's finances were calamitous. His job on The Antiquer folded. Barnstorming summers were full of learning and nostalgia, but brought in little more than gas and hamburger money. The family's secondhand car was repossessed by the bank. (To establish Bach's priorities a friend points out that at the time Bach still owned an airplane.) He freelanced more than a hundred aviation articles and was constantly trying to stir up larger writing projects, but his rhapsodic style made it hard to get reportorial assignments.
Dream of Gulls. Bach had not looked at the original Jonathan fragment for years. But one of his freelance articles was an attack on seagulls. (These birds, he wrote, were uniquely equipped for aerobatics—strong wings, low stall speed, extreme maneuverability. The only trouble, Bach concluded, was that gulls just are not aggressive enough at improving their flight skills.) Now, in the winter of 1967, Bach awoke in Ottumwa at 5 a.m. from a strange dream of seagulls. Another vision was in his mind. He leaped out of bed and recorded it. "This time on an electric typewriter," he says, with a grin mocking that symbol of professional progress. He added the new fragment to the first half and shot it off to Flying magazine in New York. Instant rejection. Then came acceptance in Private Pilot magazine. Before Jonathan was finally hatched between hard covers, a couple of years passed in negotiating and Bach received a further blizzard of rejection slips from book publishers who couldn't decide whether Jonathan was for adults or children.
Like a Rat. "I don't write like that," Bach says of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. His normal