VOICES OF CENTRAL MAINE
A citizen access resource for residents of central Maine.

Feb

25

The TILBURY CHRONICLES #3 - Sailplaning

Filed Under All, Text, Tilbury Chronicles

by Bob Demers, Gardiner

This past summer, Hubert Hellbender, postmaster and resident understudy at Theatre-on-the-Fritz here in Tilbury, bought his nephew, Horace, a sail plane for his birthday. The plane was hand-crafted by a snowshoe salesman up north in Eagle Lake to help fill in the time between snow seasons. If you set your mind to it you can accomplish a lot in two weeks.

Horace was some surprised when he got the card from his uncle announcing the present, but he had to take delivery at the airport in Augusta, our State Capitol, about six miles up river from Tilbury Island. Early on a bright sunny morning in June, Horace rowed over to Farmingdale on the west side of the river and bummed a ride to the airport with a trucker who was delivering a load of surplus votive candles for use as emergency runway lights.

About mid-morning, following a brief briefing by the sailplane builder on how to fly a sailplane, Horace hitched a tow from a departing Delta flight and cut lose at thirty thousand feet. The sail to Tilbury was uneventful if you discount the effects of oxygen starvation. Several hallucinations later, over Tilbury, Hubert still had twenty thousand feet to burn. Updrafts being what they are along the Kennebec River, it was just about sunset before he could established a glide path to Tilbury’s Little League ball field.

As everybody knows, the Central Maine Power Company’s high tension tower, carrying 300,000 volts of native Maine electricity across the river, straddles the ball field on the north end of the island. It had been a long day for Horace and he was tired. His piloting skills being on the minus side of zip didn’t help much. Horace touched down about eighty feet too high.

If you picture one of those back yard bug zappers and multiply the picture by a factor of say, three hundred thousand, you’ll get the picture. The purple flash was visible in the dusk a good ten miles in all directions. A puff of white smoke, the last earthly remains of Horace and his birthday present, drifted around Tilbury for a week or so, providing friends and neighbors a proper period for mourning.

Moral: Never buy a sailplane from a snowshoe salesman.
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