Fault Lines - John Knoop

and graders all drawn up in orderly array. Rows of barracks, workshops and a huge cook shack.
A long dining hall which feeds 125 men three times a day in lumberjack quantities. The men get
50 cents an hour, room and board; they work six days a week and are transported to their homes
for a three-day break every second week. They are a happy bunch.
At a gas stop in Honduras we have a brief encounter with a pimple-faced teenager from
New Orleans who reminds me of an America I don’t miss. This kid is traveling with his father in
a new Cadillac, moving to Tegucigalpa to join an uncle in the lumber business. The sad part, he
told me, was leaving behind his ’57 Chevy with a Corvette engine. But the consulate in New
Orleans told him there wasn’t a drag strip in all of Honduras. “Jesus man,” he says. “I don’t
know what I’m going to do down here. I don’t know about where you come from, but in
N’Orleans the cats are purely car crazy. That’s all they think about. I mean not even girls. A girl
is just another accessory you put in your car, like a four-barrel carb.” I don’t bother to tell him
that I’ve been more plane crazy than car crazy.
In the early 50's my father graded an l800 foot landing strip into one of the ridge-top
fields and put up a windsock. It was a moment he was proud of and one I had dreamed of. Before
long there was a four-place Cessna l70 tied down by the side of the strip. I learned to fly in that
plane and soloed on my sixteenth birthday after one hour of flight time with a licensed instructor
in an Aeronca Champ. First time I ever flew one of those, but no problem. The instructor laughed
and said he was turning me loose to solo after taking a little ride with me. In the afternoon I took
my driving test, a formality that seemed ludicrous, since I had been driving on and near the farm
for years.
A week later I found a Piper Vagabond in Trade-a-Plane at the nearby Blue Ash Airport.
It cost me 800 dollars, money I had made working on the
farm over the years. My father dropped me at Blue Ash
and I flew out to circle the farmstead, calling down to my
waving brothers, “come out and see it”, then I did a long
swoop over the river, ending in a chandelle, after which I
landed and parked next to the windsock. They came out on
their bikes, Kit in the lead, then Rick and Roddy. My
mother drove out with two year old Tony. I could see pride
and a little awe in their faces. They crowded around the plane and I put Roddy and Tony in the
cockpit and showed them how to move the joystick and watch the ailerons go up and down. I was
glad I hadn’t bought a car, which some of my classmates were doing as they turned sixteen,
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