MRS. JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FROST—a petite, rosy-cheeked young woman with a tomboy’s pert manner, a farm girl’s strong hands, and lively hazel eyes—flew her Celere Twin Pusher biplane eight hundred feet above the dark forested hills of her husband’s Adirondack estate. Driving in the open air, in a low wicker chair in front, she was bundled against the cold headwind in padded coat and jodhpurs, a leather helmet and wool scarf, gloves, goggles, and boots. Her motor drummed a steady tune behind her, syncopated by the ragtime clatter of the drive chains spinning her propellers.

Her flying machine was a light framework of wood and bamboo braced with wire and covered with fabric. The entire contraption weighed less than a thousand pounds and was stronger than it looked. But it was not as strong as the violent updrafts that cliffs and ravines bounced into the atmosphere. Rushing columns of air would roll her over if she let them. Holes in the sky would swallow her whole.

A gust of wind snuck up behind and snatched the air that held her wings.

The biplane dropped like an anvil.

Josephine’s exuberant grin leaped ear to ear.

She dipped her elevator. The machine pitched downward, which made it go faster, and Josephine felt the air lift her back onto an even keel.

“Good girl, Elsie!”

Flying machines stayed up by pushing air down. She had figured that out the first time she left the ground. Air was strong. Speed made it stronger. And the better the machine, the more it wanted to fly. This “Elsie” was her third, but definitely not her last.

People called her brave for flying, but she didn’t think of herself that way. She just felt completely at home in the air, more at home than on the ground where things didn’t always work out the way she hoped. Up here, she always knew what to do. Even better, she knew what would happen when she did it.

Her eyes were everywhere: glinting ahead at the blue mountains on the horizon, glancing up repeatedly at the aneroid barometer that she had hung from the upper wing to tell her her altitude, down at the motor’s oil pressure gauge between her legs, and searching the ground for breaks in the forest big enough to alight on if her motor suddenly quit. She had sewn a ladies’ pendant watch to her sleeve to time how much gasoline she had left. The map case, and compass ordinarily strapped to her knee, were back at the house. Born in these mountains, she steered by lakes, railroad tracks, and the North River.