Later, lots of people would tell me how the accident had looked to them. None of them would be Link, who came to the hospital along with Elly and Palmer to see my broken body but then fainted next to the bed where I lay unconscious. They dropped him off at the train station the following week, when they had to return to their base at Annapolis, and I never did get to talk to him. Eighteen months later he was dead, first the right and then the left wing of another machine snapping off as he came around the top of a loop and crashed into San Francisco Bay—but on the afternoon we shared, the air was still, the lake serene, and the field initially empty, but for him. Quiet and calm, Kingsley Flats dry, the hangar tent free of Navy officers. On this day, October 7, 1913, I wanted, before flying at the Aeronautical Society’s celebration of a decade of mechanical flight, to try out this new machine privately and quietly, he’d tell the newspapermen while my eyes were still bandaged. I was not attempting to loop the loop nor to do any other extraordinary feat at the time.

Someone brought me that clipping, but I wouldn’t have blamed him even if I hadn’t seen it. He’d meant to have a simple flying day: start the engine with the help of a workman, roll over the ground, rise into the air. Everything the same as always. Below him our village square—he’d dip a wing over his boardinghouse—and also the Depot, the steamboat docks, the sailboats, the vineyards climbing the hills. Then the aeroplane factory and the half-built machines, the train headed down the valley to Bath—and the place where he’d tested the new dirigible engine, and the places where he’d crashed his first machine and then the others, and the tavern where—