Just got back from walking Lexi and Samantha to the river at the end of the street. Walking two exhuberant puppies on 16-foot retractable leashes is quite similar to flying two model airplanes on control lines.
That's a guess. I never did fly two model airplanes on control lines simultaneously. In fact, I think the only time I ever got my hands on a set of control lines, I put the model airplane in a magnificent arc that ended in a nose dive and a wreckage in a cow pasture.
The similarity is limited to the challenge of controlling two objects -- dogs or model planes -- without geting their lines entangled.
Were our just-completed walk actually model plane flight, there would have been several wrecks. Not a few neighbors have asked, when encountering the three of us on an outing, who was walking whom.
My childhood friend, Johnny, was a model airplane enthusiast. (I don't think we said people were "into" a thing back then.) He made model after model, but he seemed to be more interested in flight than in actual model making. I once saw him put an engine on a two-by-four and fly it.
Johnny's father was an engineer who had worked, in the 1950s, on the earliest nuclear generating plants. Johnny had the makings of an aeronautical engineer, although I don't know what path his life took after high school because our courses diverged in adolescence.
Beforethat, we'd go out behind Johnny's house with one of his models, a tiny internal combustion engine screwed into a block of wood at the front. He would pump some fuel into a miniature tank. I can recall the smell of the fuel -- intoxicating stuff, but we weren't sniffers. I suppose I was relegated to holding the model while Johnny took the handle joining the two control lines over to the place between the cow flaps which would become the center of his plane's circular flight pattern. Then (although I don't recall if this is true) I probably would release the plane and it would climb into the sky.
Johnny and I did any number of things together. We shot frogs in the woodland ponds with our .22 rifles. We made watercraft, some of which floated.
One in particular that did float was called a coracle and consisted of a tarp, a large wreath made of sticks and grass, and some twine. You placed the wreath on the tarp, tied the tarp edges up over the wreath and laid some sticks or boards across this doughnut-shaped thing to make a seat. Then you tried to paddle it.
The coracles always floated, but getting them to advance in one direction was tricky. They wanted to spin in place.
The highlight of our boating career came when Johnny bought a kayak that his classmate, Skippy, had made with firring strips and Larro feed bags. Skippy had done a remarkably good job. The kayak was pointed at both ends, it was light, its frame was sturdy and he had painted the feed bags white and blue, as I recall. The paint made the bags waterproof.
I say Johnny bought the kayak. He may have traded something for it. But I coveted it and so I asked him what he wanted.
"Your pup tent," he said.
My Uncle Donald had given me a little, two-man Air Force pup tent that seemed like it was state of the art. It had a built-in mosquito screen and windows at either end. I was willing to give up the tent because I had secret knowledge about its shortcomings, and the trade was made in the cluttered garage at the rear of Johnny's home.
We had, a few days earlier, taken the kayak to one of the woodland ponds some distance away from Johnny's house, and he had paddled it successfully. The pond was nothing more than rainwater captured in a depression in the granite outcroppings at the top of a hill. It was filled with rotting leaves and sticks, but it was good for watersports in the warm months and skating in the winter.
So I knew I could navigate the kayak successfully when I handed the tent over to Johnny.
We were about to take the kayak to a small water hole behind his house where the cattle drank when Johnny's mother came around the corner. She had an axe in her hands.
"You boys take this and chop that thing to pieces," she commanded.
The scowl on her face left no room for argument, and we did as instructed. Satisfied that she was not going to have to attend our funerals, she went back in the house.
It might seem like I got the bad end of my deal with Johnny, but I didn't.
I didn't have a kayak.
But the tent leaked.