Then 60 nautical miles west of the river the hills end abruptly. So do the trees. From this point westward as far as the eye can see in this haze every square yard of the land below is devoted to growing crops. Strangely, the land is not set off in the neat north-south, east-west sections of the Midwest and plains. Here the boundary fences seem to run northeast-southwest, northwest-southeast. Odd. Today the Cannibal Queen carries me westward toward Colorado. There she will receive a careful look from Steve Hall, the royal mechanic, before she and I go on to the West Coast. That’s the plan, anyway. And today the sky is clear, the wind out of the southeast, a nice quartering tailwind. Visibility is about twenty miles and I am flying at 4,500 feet to enjoy it. I wish I knew what I did to deserve flying conditions like this so I could do it more often. I am still glowing over the thirty-one rides I gave this past week in West Virginia. Cousins, friends, people I never saw before, I took everyone who wanted to go in the time I had available.
