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Dave Higdon |
The
800,000 plus pilgrims who journey to Oshkosh, Wis., each year for aviation's
largest fling should be happy that life isn't a musical. Otherwise, the
sleeping village that is EAA AirVenture might only appear once every century
and for only 24 hours, like the mythical Scottish villager of Brigadoon —
instead of emerging from the mist every 51 weeks for its seven-day run. But
it's always a little hard to believe the annual metamorphosis is about to
occur when coming in range of Wittman Regional Airport in the final few dark
hours before that still-invisible village begins to emerge from the mist along
the marshy western shore of Lake Winnebago.
There is no sense of its impending awakening while cruising toward the
airport beacon, a light like thousands of others that guide wayward aviators
homeward through the night sky. It's quiet: No recognition lights streak the
dark, no radio chatter breaks the silence. And on the ground, only the usual
signs of humanity confirm your arrival in a familiar world.
A vast piece of real estate, hundreds of vacant acres with empty buildings
scattered about, sit dark in their hiding places tucked into the shadows.
Within a few dozen hours, the village begins to stir from a lengthy sleep,
swelling quickly to life into a teeming city of several hundred thousand
citizens. Their unique status in the world stems from their shared migrations
from the four corners of the globe in order to reside together for a hand full
of days in a place unknown to the vast billions who live back in the
hundred-plus countries the residents call home.
Looking down on the black void of Wittman's empty spaces Saturday night
made it seem like nothing extraordinary could explode within the next 72
hours. If aviation has a village of legend like Scotland's Brigadoon, it is
Oshkosh, where the residents of aviation's disparate neighborhood come
together to reflect on the year past and look ahead to the future of their
community. It's hard to escape the comparison even with the advantage of
knowing the phenomenon continues year in, year out — but each year with
enough subtle changes in the familiar to know that the Oshkosh fly-in is a
living, breathing community as much reflective of the people who come as the
organization that governs this peculiar village.
Thanks to "Pappa Paul" Poberezny and his co-founders of EAA,
every year aviation's revelers get about 10 days to live in a magical world of
their own, gathering to play and pay homage to a common love: Nothing less
than all things flying. And then those days draw to an end, the village
returns to slumber even more quickly than the awakening. Almost before you
cover all the ground, the village vanishes back through the sky and the fields
of Wittman go back to sleep.
And so it is in 2000, the last EAA AirVenture of the century during which
man invented flight and almost immediately began to search for every
conceivable variation on aviation. As the third week of July drew to a close
and the village staff finished their wake-up rounds across the show grounds,
the relative handful of AirVenture citizens still found quick-and-easy service
in local restaurants and the fly-in ignorant vagabond could still pull off the
highway and find a room — for the night, maybe two but no more.
By Tuesday, with the village alert, awaken and fully populated, hotel rooms
not perpetually wait-listed cease to exist, as do short waits for a seat in a
dining room — in Oshkosh and most dining rooms between Fond du Lac and Green
Bay. Come Tuesday, a fly-in bound pilot's best shot at a tiedown space most
likely exists at airports in the perimeter towns of Appleton and Fond du Lac
and Green Bay.
Does it seem more crowded? Less? The question is wholly relative and
"overpopulation" doesn't exist as a concept with any connection to
reality, no matter how large the world grows. AirVenture always has room for
every visitor dedicated enough to make the journey. It's that journey that
marks citizenship.
They make that journey from as close as a brief cross-county hop and as
distant as the far side of the globe. The most extreme eschew convenience for
experience and no better example can be found than inveterate globe-girdler
Jon Johanson and his RV-4. Jon arrived Sunday from New Zealand — this time by
way of "the normal Pacific route" to western North America: Over the
pole to Norway, and back across the Atlantic "by the usual island-hopping
route" — Greenland, Iceland, Labrador, and on to Wisconsin.
Thousands of others return by car and tour bus and motorhome, including
thousands of repeat volunteers and hundreds of first-timers following some
deeply felt, almost clinical urge to get home to a place called OSH.
Passing Along The Experience To The Newly Initiated
Returning is an instinct Toto could explain to Auntie Em better than
Dorothy could to the Scarecrow. If making the journey marks the passage of
citizenship, extending the community confirms the believer, as in when veteran
vols like Orlo Ellis instruct fresh arrivals on the basic code of conduct for
their roles in the village community — parking planes in Vintage Aircraft's
teeming campground.
It's the purest, least judgmental generational "thing" one can
find: The older and experienced attendees revel not in that experience but in
the newcomer's awakening of the culture and tradition that is AirVenture. Some
examples:
-
Deep within the Vintage subdivision, the inveterate residents of the
Cajon Condo work on their menu for a week's feasts of the bayou's best
recipes simmered and stirred in the best of swampers' traditions — even
though many of the Condo's regular residents hail from far away from the
Bayou State.
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On a runway not far away, a flock of female fliers gave birth to a
bouncy baby tradition when they arrived Sunday afternoon en mass as the
Chick Flight. The delivery was tougher than expected — less than half
the anticipated number managed to participate.
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The third-annual Mooney mass migration, which drew its largest crowd
ever, and the granddaddy Bonanza en-mass arrival looked as strong in
numbers as ever.
More to come in the coming days Among the most-buoyant among the
pre-opening crowd was Tom Poberezny, Red Three on the radio but top gun where
EAA's AirVenture homecoming is concerned. "It's shaping up to be a great
year, you can sense it," the EAA president offered Sunday evening,
already engaged in a steady streams of meet-and-greet stops around the
airfield that only ends when the village vanishes again.
Returning crowd-pleasures like the British Airways Concorde (hopefully...),
a series of spotlight flights by unlimited-class air racers, and new
appearances by some rare birds — NASA's behemoth 377-SGT Super Guppy;
Margaritaville mayor Jimmie Buffet's Grumman Albatross — serves merely to
complement the experience of living, playing and working among the those
visiting the world's largest popular-flying event and the globe's largest
annual assembly of private planes.
Throw in the opportunity to see new products first, watch world-class
aerobats at their best, and to embrace the experience of feeling home and it's
not hard to understand why the invention of a few airplane nuts has evolved so
far in 48 years, nearly half of the history of aviation itself.
The residents of Brigadoon could barely squeeze into a day all the living
built up during a century of sleep; the residents of AirVenture barely squeeze
into a week all their passion for aviation built up over only a year. We who
come here may never catch up on all we come to see and hear, and that fact
alone would be enough to keep us coming back.
But just needing to be a part of it all is at the root of the AirVenture
appeal and will keep out village growing for another half-century.
And that's why we're here.
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