A friend of Jasper’s let us use one of the battered school machines, which was parked in a hangar behind the shop awaiting some updated skids. Adrien, amazingly patient, went over the machine with me: upper plane, lower plane, forward elevating and deflecting planes, left and right stabilizing planes, rear rudder, bamboo frame. He taught me to check the wires running through the fairleads and over the pulleys; check the engine and all of the controls; check and double-check. With the lever between my legs and my shoulders in the yoke, we drilled for hours. Turn the wheel attached to the lever and feel the rudder move, pull the wheel and watch the elevating planes tilt up, push it away and see them tilt down. Lean right and left to feel the wires controlled by the yoke pull at the stabilizing planes. I’d prepared for this while my legs were healing, reading the same books the young men studied at the flying school. Now we were training my body to grasp what my mind had learned. The motions were more natural than I’d expected.

Jasper came by twice to watch, delighted that I was learning so quickly, but also, he admitted, jealous. A few days after his second visit, Adrien and three companions wheeled the machine down to Kingsley Flats. One man spun the propeller, the other two removed the blocks and let go of the frame. I rattled across the mud, kept on the ground by the wired-down throttle as Adrien called out instructions. Again and again, with the engine racketing behind me, I plowed across the bumpy field. My cheeks froze, my hands stiffened, but soon I got used to the noise and steady vibration behind me, the frame sticking out in front, the rattling all around. Adrien unwired the throttle and put on a different, smaller propeller, so I had full power but still couldn’t take off. Then I did two more days of what, although the grass was still matted and just beginning to green, the men called grass-cutting. A little dance, training my feet on the throttle and brake; a new dance, easy to learn.

While I worked, the men from the shop tidied the shore, repairing the damage caused by the winter’s ice and setting out ramps and turntables for the school. The thing, Adrien told me, was to hold the wheel lightly, surprisingly lightly, the way I’d hold my little sisters’ hands. I needed to sense the movements of the front planes and the rudder, and if I gripped too hard, Adrien said, I wouldn’t feel anything. His friends replaced my practice propeller with another, which let the wheels lift off when I was at full throttle but didn’t have enough thrust to let me rise more than a few feet before I glided down.