That afternoon I climbed up on the wing in my church shoes, slid the logbook out of the cockpit pocket, and inside the back cover was the 1976 FAA letter Dale told me about, and folded into it a second letter from the county itself, signed by a commissioner with the same last name as the man who had just kicked Dales tire.
The commissioner had looked down my grass runway and told me the airstrip was in the way of the new industrial park road, that theyd take the land for public use, that Dales permit died with him, that the hangar was a tax liability and the plane would never fly again.
He did not know what his own family signed in the seventies.
The 1976 FAA letter registered our strip as a public-use airport, which is federally recognized and cannot simply be graded for a road, and the county letter folded with it, signed by the current commissioners own father, granted a permanent access and avigation easement protecting the airstrip forever, a promise the county made and recorded decades ago.
Dale flew crop dusters out of this grass strip for forty-four years and built the steel hangar himself in 1974, and every farmer in Hall County called him when the bugs came. He registered the strip with the FAA as a public-use field, and back then the county, glad to have him, signed a permanent easement protecting it, and the man who signed it for the county shared a last name and a bloodline with the commissioner now trying to grade it under.
A federally registered public-use airport with a permanent recorded county easement is not a strip a commissioner grades by fall. And it was his own fathers signature on the promise.
I drove to the county building and asked the clerk for the recorded 1976 easement, got a certified copy, and when the commissioner came around again, I did not argue. I handed him the FAA registration and the easement with his fathers signature on it and I said, your daddy signed this, promising the county would protect Dales airstrip forever. Its a registered public-use airport and a recorded easement. You cannot grade it, and Id think twice about explaining to this county why you tried to break your own fathers word.
He looked at his fathers signature a long time. The road was rerouted. The strip stayed.
That plane nobodys gonna fly again, he had said. Maybe not, but it is staying in Dales hangar, polished, on a runway his own county promised to protect and his neighbors will not let a commissioner pave, not even to build his industrial park.