At the far end of the hall lived a guy whose name I no longer remember, perhaps because I’m repressing it. I’ll call him Moe. Moe was suicidal over a girl who had broken up with him. He had his pilot’s license, occasionally renting a Piper Cub at a local airport to barnstorm about Iowa, and one day he invited me to go along.
“I’m practicing stalls,” he said.
“A stall?”
“You take the plane straight up as far as it can go, and when it can climb no further, the engine quits and the plane plummets.”
“And then?”
“You restart the engine.”
From the way he said that, I knew something was wrong with Moe. And what exactly was wrong with Moe became evident a while later, when he convinced me to drive him over to Davenport so he could visit his fiancée. Why he didn’t take rent a Piper Cub I don’t know, but there must have been a good reason, because I found myself driving him to Davenport, and spending the afternoon in the local park while he visited his fiancée. When I returned to get him at the appointed hour, I could hear them yelling inside even before I got out of the car.
Moe hardly spoke on the return to campus and dropped out of school soon after. I could imagine him renting a Piper Cub, climbing into a stall, and not bothering to restart the engine.
Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, Claude Clayton Smith is the author of seven books and co-editor/translator of an eighth. His most recent book is Ohio Outback: Learning to Love the Great Black Swamp (Kent State University Press, 2010).