Dad and I were driving through and around a small town in South Carolina. Or maybe it was Wisconsin. Anyway. It was fall and all the leaves were blowing and all the surroundings were brown/red/orange/etc. We were driving along all these backroads, when we drove up to this little barn-shaped building. An elderly couple were standing outside and we got to talking to them, and the man was a pilot and owned a P-51 Mustang.
He took me to see it and offered me a ride in it. There was a second leather seat behind the pilot's seat. It looked like a seat from a luxery sedan or something. I said I'd love to but those old planes guzzle fuel like you wouldn't believe, and with fuel prices the way they are, I'd hate to do that to the poor guy. But he assured me he was filthy rich and didn't get many opportunities to fly the plane, so I accepted. Dad told me to be careful, then we took off and started flying around. The man was pointing out landmarks and bridges and lakes and stuff. During the course of the flight, we must've taken off and and landed at least 7 times. Not only that, the places we landed/took off were only about 30 feet long, usually dirt roads or something (and covered with trees, so I have no idea how we landed in the first place).
On one of the dirt roads we landed on, we almost hit a large man who was dressed like a lumberjack, had cartoonish facial features, and was riding a moose. We said howdy to him, then took off again. We flew along for a while, when suddenly we were in a black cloud. It was like a regular foggy cloud, but the color of black smoke. Then the pilot started explaining to me that it takes a really good pilot to be able to discern whether he's flying through a normal cloud or about to fly into something. We emerged from the cloud, and suddenly we were ten feet from flying into the bottom of a GIANT black iron bridge (I mean heck, we must've been a few hundred feet in the air).
The pilot put the plane in a steep dive to avoid hitting the bridge, then we landed on the field we originally took off from (we never straightened out and slowed down or did a circle and came around to land - we landed straight after coming out of a dive). Dad and the pilot's elderly wife were there to greet us. Dad hugged me and asked if we'd seen the ceramic moose man while we were gone (ceramic??). I said we'd almost hit him, but he'd been very nice about it. Then I looked up and there was a picture of the same man (with his moose) on a large billboard sign in the trees across the street from the barn-shaped building (with the 400-foot bridge in the distance). Then I woke up.
posted by: aesav23 (reply)
post date: 10.06.05 (5:45 am)
Did you make this picture? It's very, very emu!!!!
Yeah I guess that could work!! I was thinking last night that was part of the bridge's fakeness problem - I forgot to give it a shadow. But that's okay...I'll go with your idea. I don't feel like messin' with it again either!
posted by: Ken (reply)
post date: 03.27.06 (3:28 am)