Bill Winter

SNOOPY SITS on his dog house. I sit inside mine. It has been a summer of discontent. Whoever said that cabin fever is a wintertime malaise must have been talking to the penguins. Cabin fever is a summertime torture. For two months the temperature bubbled in the 90s, and all along the eastern seaboard was a wet sauna. Fantasy and reality blur. Carl Goldberg was tugging on the back of my pants. We were standing on the high ground at Shangri-la. My Electric was fading in distant lift. Occasionally, a screwball foam 1/2A RC delta whizzed by like a berserk Concorde, piloted by the famed rubber-powered Scale flier, Allan Schanzle. Srull's Electric Sparky was whining faintly, speck-high behind us. Off to the side, a small group of Maxecuters were launching Rubber Scale jobs into dreamy circles. I said to Carl: I must get back to that narrow road behind us to land. Puzzled, he asked why not land it here on the grass. If I tip up, the shaft will bend, I responded. I am forever twisting that shaft like a Rubber model shaft, tweaking it this way and that to check tracking. Let me guide you, offered the great Goldberg. With that, he started to pull me backwards down the slope, while I positioned the circling crate, overhead now, to slide between trees and over cars at the end of the one-lane tarmac, walled 15 ft. away by woods. Dizzy, stumbling backwards, now and then digging in my heels, Carl kept pulling. One supposes that the spectacle of Goldberg facing north while pulling Winter facing south with a crate gliding overhead in circles, was a sublime vision of advanced technique.