|
OF SAILPLANING
AND BUG ZAPPERS
by Robert Demers
This past summer, Hubert Hellbender,
postmaster and resident understudy at Theatre-on-the-Fritz here in
Tilbury, bought his nephew, Horace, a sailplane for his birthday.
The glider was hand-crafted by a snowshoe
salesman up north in Eagle Lake to help fill in the time between snow
seasons. If you set your mind to it you can accomplish a lot in two
weeks.
Horace was some
surprised when he got the birthday card from his uncle announcing
the gift. He had to take delivery at the
airport in Augusta, our State Capitol, about
six miles up river from Tilbury Island. So
early on a bright sunny morning in June,
Horace rowed over to Farmingdale on the west side of the river and
bummed a ride to the airport with a trucker who was delivering a load
of surplus votive candles for use as emergency runway lights.
|
About mid-morning, following a brief briefing by the sailplane builder
on how to fly a sailplane, Horace hitched a tow from
a departing Delta flight and cut loose at thirty thousand feet.
The sail to Tilbury was uneventful if you discount the effects of
oxygen starvation.
Several hallucinations
later, over Tilbury, Hubert still had twenty thousand feet to burn.
Updrafts being what they are along the Kennebec River, it was forty
attempts later and just about sunset before he could established a
glide path to Tilbury’s Little League ball field.
As everybody knows,
the Central Maine Power Company’s eighty foot tall high tension tower,
carrying 300,000 volts of native Maine electricity across the river,
straddles the ball field on the north end of the island. It had been
a long day for Horace and he was tired. His piloting skills being
on the minus side of zip didn’t help much. Horace touched down about
eighty feet too high.
If you picture
one of those back yard bug zappers and multiply the picture by a factor
of say, three
|
hundred thousand, you’ll get the picture. The purple flash was visible
in the dusk a good ten miles in all directions.
A puff of white smoke, the last earthly
remains of Horace and his birthday present, drifted around Tilbury
for a week or so, providing friends and neighbors a proper period
for mourning and something to talk about.
Moral: Never buy a sail
plane from a snowshoe salesman.
COMING IN THE NEAR FUTURE
UFO's, Tilbury's Encounter
with alien lifeforms;
Anti Intellectualism; Yes, it's
a problem even in our town; A Bad Time to Visit, a warning, sort
of.
|
