Keene Equinox

Issue date: 3/22/07 Section: A & E

Media Credit: Josh Bond

It was a sweltering 95-degree day in July when I first met Harvey Sawyer.

I made my way from Kimball Farms, set just off Route 124 in Jaffrey, N.H., to the crest of a steep hill and the terminal of the Silver Ranch Airpark. Behind me at the base of the hill sat the Silver Ranch Saloon, rippling in the heat like a set from an old western. In the other direction, a 3,000-foot strip of asphalt lay broiling in a 100-acre clearing.

A four-passenger Cessna Skyhawk gleamed in what little sun could penetrate the dense haze and rocked slightly with the occasional sizzling gust of wind. Sawyer stood next to the open door of the small craft jotting something down in a tiny, ancient notepad. He turned to greet me and smiled warmly enough to inspire jealousy in the scorching sun.

Sawyer, 62, has the build and effervescence of a man half his age. It seems as though making a living of defying gravity has enabled him to defy other elemental forces as well.

Sawyer's career as a pilot began with lessons from his father, an education begun well before he learned how to drive a car. Since then Sawyer has logged roughly 25,000 hours of flight time.

As Lee Sawyer, Harvey's wife of 40 years, put it, "airplanes have always been in his blood."

Sawyer commuted to college in a Piper Cub in 1967. Flying 60 miles from Jaffrey to the University of New Hampshire's Durham campus, he set his plane down on the athletic fields and strolled to class.

Between classes he found time to resurrect the UNH flying club and become a certified flight instructor. Sawyer would go on to earn a degree in civil engineering, graduating cum laude.

He hadn't always flown to school. He lived on campus for his first three years, but once married he began spending more time in his native Jaffrey with his wife.

The couple met in 1964 as coworkers at what is now the famous Kimball Farms restaurant, then known as The Stand. During the summers between school years, Lee Sawyer regularly traveled from her hometown of Belmont, Mass., just west of Boston, to visit her grandparents in Jaffrey. She got her first job at The Stand where she cooked and her future husband made ice cream. When the two were married she quit school and worked full time to put Sawyer through college.

The Stand became part of an at least 100-acre complex consisting of an airstrip, stable and restaurant collectively known as Silver Ranch.

The stable at Silver Ranch, locally famed for holiday sleigh rides and its classic western facade, is the oldest of the buildings at the ranch, followed by the airpark terminal and hangars, the first of which was installed in 1946.

However, Kimball Farms, the combination restaurant and gift shop, hasn't been family owned since 1978, and it has only held the current name for eight years. The rest of the ranch is a Sawyer family operation that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, although the Sawyers have a much longer history in Jaffrey.

According to Sawyer, every person he has ever met who shares his last name "is a descendant of one of three Sawyer brothers that came to the area in 1636."

As I toured the ranch that blistering day, the buildings radiated a rich history from beneath their silver paint jobs. Sawyer explained that the metallic motif came from his grandfather's term as owner of the ranch.

Long ago, a salesman came through town with a large quantity of inexpensive aluminum paint. He found Grandpa Sawyer with a number of buildings in need of a coat or two and managed to unload the entirety of his stock. The rest, as they say, is silvery.



The Food


The restaurant ultimately became the most successful business on the ranch. Located just a few hundred feet from the airpark terminal, it has become a popular spot for fly-in diners. It has been listed by one reviewer as a premier member of the $100 Hamburger Club.

Meals enjoyed at fly-in restaurants have been nicknamed $100 burgers because of the costs associated with air travel. The special 100 octane unleaded fuel used in most small aircraft goes for $3.80 a gallon, and even a 30 year-old used small airplane could set you back between $50,000 and $200,000.

Still, Sawyer greets a large proportion of incoming aircraft with the question, "Are you here for Kimball's?"



The Business


Other than the restaurant, the entire Silver Ranch is owned and operated by the Sawyers. At a few points in the past they have hired flight instructors, part time or seasonal help, but the nature of the job is too unpredictable to make extra employees practical.

"You never know what's going on. It's different every day," said Lee. "People come in for gas early. People call to get their planes out of the hangar. Sometimes flights go out of here at six, 6:30 in the morning. Harvey's on his flight. I'm here taking care of office work, answering the telephone, booking flights, pumping gas, parking airplanes and driving if somebody needs a ride somewhere."

It's a substantial operation for just two people to operate, and it consumes the majority of their time.

"A 15-hour day is a short one," Sawyer half-kidded.



Recreation


"We took our first vacation in 30 years last February," said Lee. The vacation commemorated their 40th wedding anniversary.

Of their time together she said, "like everything else, you know, there's times that are good and,"-she seemed to consider for a moment how best to proceed-"and times that are better!" she finally said with a flush.

Forty years ago the Sawyers celebrated their honeymoon by buying and flying an open cockpit biplane to Rochester, NY, "for something to do," as Lee put it. Last February, they took another flight, this time to the southern tip of Texas.

"We had to fly over Mexico to line up for approach," she said.

They didn't use the biplane because as of right now it isn't airworthy. The 1929 Fleet biplane was sent away for a restoration a few years back, and was returned in pieces after the project dramatically exceeded its budget. Though disassembled, the biplane is the capstone of Sawyer's collection.

"Model 1, serial 5, as far as we know, it's the oldest one in existence," beamed Sawyer, who refers to his airplanes as though they are loved ones. "I have an interest in the history of aviation and I have one of the oldest planes."

It is an interest that has compelled him to become a lifetime member of the Antique Airplane Association and the NH Aviation Historical Society based in Manchester.

"I'm not a big club person, but organizations are good for keeping airports open and passing good laws," said Sawyer.

Preserving small airports is an important goal, and having survived the closure of over 1700 of them from the 60s to the 90s, the Sawyers are certainly doing something right.

"When you run into another pilot who flies professionally, you've got a lot in common," said Sawyer. "We're a minority."



Clarifying misconceptions


In the last decade there have been three plane crashes at Silver Ranch. In each case all passengers survived. When asked about these seemingly lucky instances Sawyer became agitated and attempted to clarify a popular misconception.

"Airplanes don't just fall out of the sky because one little thing goes wrong," Sawyer assured. "It usually starts with one bad decision, and then an inexperienced pilot will make another bad decision, and then before you know it-" Sawyer shook his head and took a breath. "I hate it when reporters say, 'miraculously, they escaped uninjured.' If you understand airplanes you can deal with it."

Even Sawyer, 35 years a pilot, was once an inexperienced one. He shared one of his bad decisions, one that was followed by better decisions and thus kept from blossoming into a disaster.

"I turned the fuel off accidentally and had to do a forced landing in a field. I was 17, it was my uncle's plane, and there was some damage to the landing gear," Sawyer reflected.

He was quick to emphasize the difference between a teenager in the sky and one on the ground.

"Teenagers, you get a few together in a car and they go 100 miles an hour and crash and die. But flying is enough of a challenge that you don't have to show off in an airplane," he smiled and wagged his finger. "It can build confidence in those that don't have it and it works the other way too. If you take someone cocky and put them in there you can take 'em down a notch. They get humble real fast."

Statistically speaking, flying is far safer than driving. That doesn't stop it from presenting a substantial hurdle to the primal instinct that ground is good and height is bad, especially in such a small machine.



The Experience


The rush of flying a small aircraft is like no other. Commercial airliner flying is an experience characterized by in-flight movies, reclining seats, and flight smooth enough for an attendant to deliver mixed drinks with confidence. The view from the small, many-layered, soundproof windows is an idyllic dreamscape of placid clouds and, if you're lucky, circular rainbows. Or, if you like, you can simply shut the window.

The windows in Harvey's Cessna Skyhawk open like small doors, outward and upward, and admit the robust slipstream. Mere hundreds of feet below, tree-covered hills roll by at about 130 miles per hour. There is no escaping the raw sense of flight.

I asked Lee Sawyer if she viewed flying as a high-risk job. I wondered if it ever made her uncomfortable to think of her husband flying around all day.

"No, absolutely not," she said with conviction. She informed me that as a commercial pilot Sawyer must pass a comprehensive exam every six months. "And I know he's very careful," she added.

As the sun sautéed the ranch that day I got my first lesson in what it means to be a knowledgeable and cautious pilot. Sawyer explained to me, in the crisp and effective prose of a caring instructor, that extremely hot weather affects the very physics of flight. Heat lowers air density. This impairs the propellers ability to propel, and the wings don't have as much material to sit upon, so to speak. In addition, the nature of combustion within the engine is radically different, and can result in reduced power.

Toss in blustery wind conditions and things become hazardous fast. Of course, for an experienced pilot, such conditions are reasonably negotiable. For my first lesson, however, it was the equivalent of weapons training with live ammunition.

We agreed to postpone my lesson to later that evening, perhaps an hour before nightfall. Sawyer hoped that by then the heat and wind would subside, and there would be the added bonus of an aerial view of the sun plunging lazily into the earth.

A pilot, I realized, must be proficient not only with the controls of the airplane, but with meteorology, mathematics and mechanics. A misstep in any of these categories can be life threatening.

"The flying itself is easy," Sawyer advised. "it's the judgment and skill that goes into it that gives people trouble."



The Romance



So I went to Kimball's and enjoyed a large serving of their famous fried clams. It was perhaps not the most sensible choice of food before my first flight lesson, but I'll blame my lapse of judgment on the heat. I returned to the airstrip a few hours later, ready to join the ranks of pilots. I had spent some time at Kimball's mulling over a romantic notion endorsed by Sawyer.

"Once a pilot, always a pilot," he had said with gravity.

Romance plays a large part in Sawyer's piloting philosophy. He speaks not of loving his six planes, but of being in love with them. He gave me a tour of his hangars, and I could tell which of the 27 planes belonged to him by his body language. He spoke of the planes in their company with measured speech, as though careful to not offend. And he made certain that no matter where I was standing one of his planes was in his line of sight. His eyes frequently glanced over my shoulder at them. The gaze was one of paternal love sprinkled with the hungry eyes of a young lover.

Only when we left the hangars and were not in earshot of the planes did Sawyer confide in me that, "Pilots are not rich, the truth is they're poor." The implication was that a pilot's love of planes drives one to poverty in the pursuit of aviation.

Flying is Sawyer's life, and he has romanticized his history with the ranch to a certain point.

"I know I was here the day the first airplane landed because there's a picture of me on horseback with my father," Sawyer said proudly. Later he showed me his photo album and pointed to the picture. In it a man was indeed riding horseback, but the horse was at full gallop alongside a landing plane.

There was no two year-old in the saddle.

In addition, the photo was dated the same year that Sawyer was born. It is certainly likely that he was at the airpark when the first plane touched down, but the story had perhaps been embellished.

Another of his treasured mementos was a postcard of baseball Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams, with whom Sawyer has shared the cockpit. Sawyer proudly showed me the signature on the postcard, but he added "To Harvey" and traced his finger where that heading would be. There was nothing there.

Sawyer sees these items as proof of his claims. His dreamy nostalgia is an altogether endearing trait. He has lived an extraordinary life and somewhere along the way some of his tales have grown a bit tall.

In the cockpit, however, Sawyer was all business. For the most part. After performing a thorough flight check where I determined that the 35 year-old plane was in superb condition (even after 1 million miles), we buckled in and taxied to the end of the runway.

I pulled a small muscle in my face on takeoff, and my contorted expression prompted Sawyer to tell me, for the first time of many, to relax. Easy for him to say. He has flown over 100 different types of planes. When asked for a favorite, Harvey immediately answered, "No such thing. Whatever I'm flying is my favorite."

During our tour of the ranch, Sawyer had never stopped moving. "I don't sit still well," he said. But in the cockpit he was as relaxed a man as I have ever seen. He gave me full control of the plane and leaned back, flopping his left arm over my headrest.

He perked up when I mentioned a desire to ride the Vomit Comet, the informal name for an astronaut-training plane that simulates zero gravity.

"You want to feel zero gravity?" he whispered like a kid planning to steal a cookie.

I had a brief consultation with the clams in my stomach and gave Sawyer the go-ahead. He climbed at a 45 degree angle at full speed then moved briskly into a downward trajectory. At the apex of the curve I goggled at my hovering sunglasses for just less than five seconds before whooping and thanking Sawyer, who became suddenly serious.

"You know, I don't want to give the impression that I'm the crazy guy, or that I do reckless things," he said with a defensive air. "I'm very careful and I only do things when I know it's safe."

When I came for my next lesson I made the mistake of mentioning our zero gravity experiments in front of Lee. Though her face betrayed no dismay of any kind Sawyer visibly cringed, shot a nervous look at his wife from behind his aviator shades, then cast me an admonitory wink.

In a later conversation with Lee I asked her to share any spectacular moments or interesting stories about her husband. "I don't know, maybe I won't," she said with a brief chuckle and deep flush.

Soaring around Mount Monadnock, Sawyer and I alternated control of the plane to snap photos of the setting sun. The dense humidity of the day still lingered and a soft, misty fire spread outward from the horizon.

We were quiet for a time until he spoke with calm sincerity.

"There's a lot of places in the world where it's not nearly so easy to fly. There are places where you and I could never do this," He paused and frowned slightly, disturbed by the thought. "I just thank my lucky stars every day. I just love being able to do this."

I do too. After all, once a pilot, always a pilot.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools