As she spoke, the noise of Sam’s propeller, idling in the distance, turned loud and purposeful. Irene lifted her hand to her brow and stared at Papillon, an unobstructed view, soaked in sunshine. The propeller whirred furiously on its nose. It started forward, bouncing like a spring on the ruts in the grass. Irene could see Sam’s leather cap and his goggles throwing off rays; she thought she could see his expression, but maybe that was only her imagination filling in the details. Either way, the crowd stirred and spoke around her, oohed as if they’d never seen an airplane before.

And yet. Didn’t Irene feel the same way? Yes, you encountered airplanes all the time in that hopeful blue California sky of the 1920s, puttering away, climbing and falling and banking, performing heart-stopping stunts for onlookers, like looping the loop and flying under bridges and wing walking and what have you. Until now, Irene had felt no more than the usual amazement at these antics.

Now it was different. Now Sam’s airplane prepared to meet the sky. Now Sam’s airplane gained speed and thrust downfield. In Irene’s eyes, it seemed to lengthen, to suck power under its skin, to gather all that California sunshine into its wings. Irene felt the lift of its nose in her own body, the flex of its wings; she knew the exact instant its wheels came apart from the grass and the wind drew it upward, as if it had no weight at all. She followed the diagonal line of its ascent until it soared above the boulevard, the trees, and vanished into the sky, and what she wanted to do, in that moment, was not to climb inside an airplane with Sam and soar away into that vanishing sky. Was not to pilot an airplane at all.

She wanted to become. She wanted to become the airplane.

The scene that followed would soon become commonplace to Irene, but on that March afternoon in 1928, everything was new. Each aerobatic maneuver drenched her in wonder, like a river baptism, in which you were plunged several times into the water and came out reborn. The steep dive that pulled out just above the ground into a graceful upward arc. The journey along the tine of an imaginary corkscrew while a trail of red smoke curled behind like a pig’s tail. The climb, steeper and steeper until your heart stopped, until the airplane briefly became vertical, then upside down in contravention of everything you thought you knew about nature and physics, just hanging there upside down, seconds passing into eternity, then a swooping fall while your heart resumed beating and you said to yourself, loop the loop. Irene wouldn’t remember every stunt Sam performed that day—stunts piled on stunts, and which ones she witnessed then and which ones later—but she would remember the grand finale. Everybody would.