Bernie Pietenpol, the great democratizer of aviation, lived in Cherry Grove, MN, fifty miles from my hometown. He designed the Sky Scout, which was powered by an engine from a Model T.
My uncle Mike, a life-long Pietenpol fanboy, moved to Cherry Grove in 2004, set up a machine shop in a pole barn and began designing time machines powered by salvaged Camry engines. He posted the plans on his website under a Creative Commons license and lived off Spam and fiber supplements, as far as I could tell. I’d drive over there once in a while with a salad or a blueberry pie, and he’d wipe the grease off his hands and eat with me in silence for a few minutes.
It used to bug me a little bit. I’d google around—curious to see who was building his designs, wondering whether they ended up satisfied or unsatisfied—and I never found a single person who claimed to be interested or building or even curious. All that work was leading to purest obscurity. Which was weird, right? Because something that messed up ought to have had a hypnotic kook factor. But always: nothing.
On the other hand, Preston, Wykoff, Ostrander… those are not big places, right? Not a lot of population; not a lot of turnover. But slowly and surely they were filling up with very happy, very wealthy families. Why there? You’d expect a little bit of slopover from Rochester, especially during a housing boom full of land-hungry people, but you wouldn’t expect all the men to have male pattern baldness and dirty fingernails and half the women to have singed eyebrows and missing digits. These folks were obviously shade-tree mechanics, they were thriving, and they were setting up housekeeping in a Poisson distribution with Cherry Grove at its center.
Basically what happened is, I got jealous.
I showed up at Mike’s with a couple sacks of U-Pick-Em raspberries, sat around in silence for forty-five minutes and finally got up to leave. I tilted my head toward the latest prototype and said, “When can I take that out for a spin?”
Mike said what he always said. “You already have, man. You already have.” He didn’t expect a laugh, but he always said it anyway. Jokes like that are just part of the Uncle Code, I guess.
But this time I said, “I’m not kidding. Is that thing ready to go?”
Mike just said, “See for yourself.”
I had yesterday’s winning Powerball numbers in my back-pocket. I climbed into the cockpit, which was not built for someone of my bulk. I looked at Mike. He nodded. I turned the key and threw the thing into reverse.
Around midnight I flushed a wild turkey. It squawked and sucked right into the intake manifold. It was at this point that I began to spot a few defects in Mike’s design. Meat, feathers and bone fragments were flying into my hair and clenched eyelids. I heard the engine rev. I tried to wipe my eyes clear. Drizzle began to fall and mix with the ground turkey. Raindrops. Downpour. Sleet. Hail. I mashed the brake pedal and listened to the warped rotors thump. Thunder crashed and Saint Elmo’s Fire lit the gizzard hanging from the mirror.
When the fuel ran out I fell unconscious for a while and woke up with my ribs aching and all my limbs numb. I climbed out into the tall grass and did a dozen half-hearted jumping jacks, then walked around front and assessed the damage. I wrestled a wishbone out of the accelerator linkage and closed my eyes. A mastodon tapped me on the shoulder.
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by toastforbrekkie
